Page 126 of Under Story

There’s no one to hold her rope now. Laurel feeds the downline through the hole. She takes the entropy device, waterproofed with shrink-wrap, from her backpack. Before she puts on her gloves, she clips its cord to her waist.

Delaying will only make her more fearful. In she jumps, through a glitter of bubbles.

—

She finds herself in murky turquoise water near the surface. The briny ceiling breaks apart, in places, like clouds, and the water is so cold it feels gelatinous.

To descend, Laurel exhales deeply. Her task is to repeat the path she took the first time: to the center of the basin, and then back to the hole. She keeps one hand on Eli’s device, paranoid that the cord might detach. Her progress is cumbersome, but she has to move quickly. If the portal works, she’ll have to dive a second time, and she must rejoin the Astralis group by evening.

Lake Monona is emptiest in winter, but the Southern Ocean streams with life. Laurel passes fields of bottlebrush coral and peach sea stars, their points peeling up. A jellyfish floats by, saucer-like; kelp twists and flickers. She sees no seals but hears their calls, which are so resonant that they seem to leave a trail.

Not far ahead is the edge of the basin. Laurel inhales to curb her descent. The shape is familiar; she reaches out to touch the sea floor, relieved to have made it this far. But something is different this time. As she travels deeper, plants and animals become scarce. Even so, nothing prepares her for what she sees at the bottom. There is no cloud of octopus ink. The base of the basin is empty, abandoned, and spiked with crystal plates.

She’s heard of this: anchor ice. Instead of freezing at the surface, colder water hardens and attaches to the bottom. The atmosphere is funereal. This, Laurel thinks, is the portal’s afterlife. For several dreadful seconds, she stops breathing.

Kyla, the ice-diving instructor, liked to use rhyming reminders. The most important one was this: Hold your breath too long and everything goes wrong.

“As you descend,” she explained, “the pressure on your lungs increases. If you don’t exhale, air can move into the blood, blocking vessels in the brain. The consequences range from paralysis to death. So make sure you’re breathing, okay?”

Laurel’s dry suit stiffens with excess air. Helplessly she rises toward the surface. Her arms begin to straighten, and she struggles to hold the device. If the suit becomes fully inflated, she could lodge under the ceiling, plastered there until her oxygen runs out.

She exhales for as long as she can. To let air out of her suit, she must release the valve on her left shoulder, but the arms are still too rigid. She inhales—just a sip—before breathing out again. As the suit deflates, she passes Eli’s device from her right hand to her left.

She fumbles with the valve on her left shoulder. Air rushes out, and she drops.

Laurel has no time to acknowledge the depth of her terror, nor to steep in relief. Though she is almost certain that the portal is gone, she still needs to confirm it.

As she travels, the hole appears larger, brighter, as if to urge her to continue. Laurel pauses in its moonlike shaft of light. Breathing evenly, to maintain her depth, she unwinds the rope. Eli’s device rises like a balloon. Laurel struggles to guide it into the channel; at first, it bounces off the rim, as if in some upside-down game of basketball. Finally, the box bobs into the dive hole and snakes toward the surface.

Eli told her to wait for five minutes. Laurel begins to count. If heat spreads to the cold side, the device has made it to her world. She could come up and breathe its air, if only for a moment: her universe, where neutrinos spin left and clock hands tick right, where bodies break down and people get old and disorder wins out every time. Perhaps she loves it irrationally. Once, she pined for the antiuniverse, land of second chances. But more and more she doesn’t know where she wants to live.

After she counts three hundred seconds, Laurel pulls the device down. Midway, it snags on the ladder, and she nearly stops breathing again. She maneuvers the rope, pulling at an angle, until the box floats free. At last, she loops the rope around her waist. She scans the screen.

U2, it reads.

At first, her reaction is matter-of-fact.

Yes, she thinks. That’s what I thought.

Laurel clips the device to her dry suit. Then she climbs the ladder as if it were a tree, and when she pulls herself into the hut, she sees the future from that vista. She knows that Eli will keep looking for a portal. And she will encourage him, all the while knowing the ending. Eli will need to feel he has a choice.

Laurel places the device on the ground, removes her gloves, and walks to the stove to get warm. Only there does she hang her head forward and sob—both for Silas Two and for Silas One again.

And her heart, while fast, does not skip a beat. For the first time in weeks, it is constant.

—

The dive locker is empty. As she returns her equipment, her legs nearly buckle from exhaustion.

Laurel has fifteen minutes to get to the ice pier. She wraps her shawl around her mouth, so that only her eyes are visible, and pulls her hat down low.

Outside the locker, she stops. Several yards away is Pippa Cooke. She might have been there for minutes. She might, Laurel thinks, have seen everything.

“What are you doing?” Pippa asks.

“What are you doing?” asks Laurel.

“Taking a walk. I got bored.”