Page 63 of Under Story

When they finish, Eli waits for her direction. She is the captain of this expedition.

“Remember,” she says, “we’ll split up. You’ll swim to the far side of the Arc, and I’ll start at the nearer one. We’ll trace our way down and meet in the middle.”

They sit on the rim of the dive hole, feet dangling over the water. The weight of the equipment—fifty pounds or more—hangs from Laurel’s shoulders. So, too, does the fact of Eli’s trust, extended again. He looks down but does not move; fear seems to have paralyzed him.

Laurel thinks of what he told her before they dove in Michigan: that NASA uses dives as training for EVAs. She finds his eyes through the tinted mask.

“It’s like going into space,” she says, “remember? You’re an astronaut now.”

Eli’s eyes soften around the edges. He takes one deep breath before lowering into the hole. In up to his waist, he stops to look back at her.

“You never told me how you knew about the basin,” he says.

She can’t lie to him, not now.

“I dreamed it,” says Laurel.

Eli pauses there on the threshold, alien-headed in his hood and goggles, his expression unreadable. Then he drops into the water.

—

A plunge through the canal, disorienting, close.

Laurel emerges in an infinite chamber of astonishing blue. Below her is a bed of rock; above is a rumpled lid of ice. Only a fraction of sunlight penetrates the ceiling, as if strained through cloth.

After months of dreaming and planning—after everything she gave up—she is here, in the Southern Ocean. Stunned, she stops moving. Then she sees Eli, kicking into the distance, and she remembers to swim.

Above water, the ice is silent, but here it cracks and groans, squeaks and pops. Four hundred feet is the length of a short city block. Laurel maneuvers slowly at first, stretching her breath. Every so often, a seal floats by, as graceful as she feels ungainly. But the equipment is no longer heavy: she can’t feel the scuba tank, nor the weight of her own body.

The water, clear as air, obscures nothing. Ahead is a circle of light: the pink of the Arc and its reflection into the basin. The sea floor there is craggy, but like she expected, it curves down.

Just as Nita described, life concentrates in the basin. Laurel swims through fluttering burgundy algae and past blue-black clams clasped shut. Sea spiders tiptoe on long, jointed legs, and sea stars splay by the dozen. In the Arc’s coral spotlight, the scene looks surreal, like Oz in Technicolor.

The deeper she travels, the more she has a sense of being watched. She turns in a circle, spooked, but she sees no other divers—just a puffy, cream-colored crab, which scuttles out of sight. Laurel swims forward again, faster now. She is perhaps halfway to the bottom, though her view is blocked: thick icicles hang from the ceiling, like trunks in an inverted forest.

Several feet ahead, a depression in the basin brims with shells. The feeling of surveillance seems to emanate from that spot. Heart thumping, Laurel draws closer. From inside the acropolis, a single eye stares back: observant, intent, a large, dark pupil with a white star of reflection.

Below the head is a nest of arms. They curl and uncurl as the creature watches her. When Laurel floats forward, the arms retract, and she sees herself from its perspective: looming, unfamiliar, encased in strange equipment. But what fear the octopus feels must be equal to its curiosity, for it unfurls a single arm.

Shells expel from the den. Laurel holds herself still. The arm coils backward, hesitant; then it floods forward to meet her. One by one, the suckers pluck her dry suit. The mantle, which houses three hearts, comes to rest in her hand. The contact is so deliberate, the creature’s pupils so familiar, that the boundary between species dissolves. For a moment, life recognizes itself.

When the octopus begins to swim, the arm maintains its grip on her glove. Laurel trails behind, moving in tandem. The animal’s skin is a screen of color, a language she wishes she could read: aqua, jade, the Arc’s very shade of pink. Laurel thinks of Nita, how all she wanted in return for her help was to know what happened. If Laurel can’t find a portal, this will be the only balm: she’ll burst into the room and tell Nita about the octopus. She reminds herself to breathe steadily so that her excitement doesn’t take over; she feels electric, every sense switched on, each sight burning into her memory.

As they near the bottom, Laurel sees something that she cannot explain. In the center of the basin is a dark, hazy mass.

It’s happening, she thinks. There is something unusual here—something charged, just like she thought. At the brink, Laurel understands: the mass is a cloud of octopus ink the size of a small room. The animal pulls her inside. Charcoal eclipses pink, as though someone has turned out the light. Laurel is not afraid. She wants to see. She thinks of Ed White outside the spaceship, saying, Let me just find a few pictures.

The octopus releases her glove. A force not unlike the one in the Arc urges her upward. She uses her breath to stay in the cloud, where black tendrils twist like smoke. Other shapes hover, too: rippling hoops, spurted blooms. When she thinks about this moment later, Laurel will come back to the ink; she’ll think of the Polaroids of her youth, the picture in shadow, then slowly clearing.

The police officer in Cedar told Laurel not to abandon herself. At the time, she had no idea what he meant, but now she sees that this is exactly what happened. She left herself in Lake Michigan: she went in to find Silas, and abandoned herself when she could not. She has since been a ghost. Here she reaches for what she can only describe as her soul.

The octopus streams through a curtain of kelp. And then Eli is before her—Eli closing the distance between them, his path a mirror of hers. Relief flows through her body. She wants to grab him and hold on: he is safe, and they’ve both made good time. But half of the dive remains, and Laurel knows that she must remain focused.

They let the pressure in the basin lift them partway toward the surface, out of the cloud; then they exhale, to stop their ascent before they reach the ceiling. The cloud still lingers, filmy, in the pink of the Arc’s reflection, though their passage has disturbed it, and the ink is diffusing.

Eli turns to swim back the way they came, and Laurel follows. In her exhaustion, the distance to the hut seems to have doubled. She thanks Nita in her mind for preparing them so well. The cold showers, training in the gym: all of that has borne her this far, though she is now nearing her limit. Her hands feel even colder, and the left begins to ache. She fights to keep going—past the edge of the Arc, and into the bright blue water between the basin and the dive hole.

At last, the hole comes into view. But a seal hovers inside.