Page 64 of Under Story

Laurel remembers what Nita said: Usually, they leave when they see our bubbles. If they don’t, that means they really need air. She tries to signal for Eli to wait, but her left hand barely moves. It feels anesthetized.

Laurel veers downward. Her mind grows slow and foggy. But she needs to be strong—for Silas, for herself, and for Eli, whose arm appears around her waist. With his free hand, Eli points to the seal. Laurel can’t see its upper body, but she hears its deep, resonant breaths. She understands: she must breathe like the seal, stretched out, pacing herself.

At last, the seal flushes out of the dive hole. Eli hoists her up. She grabs the rope with her right hand and pulls. Her feet scrabble for the ladder, but the flippers are unwieldy, and she scrapes the ice instead. Laurel feels Eli take her ankle and place it on a rung. Now she has leverage, but the tank is leaden above water. She uses her right elbow to heave herself onto the floor of the dive hut.

Heat wafts from the stove. Laurel wrenches off her mask and crawls toward it. Eli arrives behind her, the ladder swinging in his wake.

“Are you okay?” he asks, lunging.

It is easier to nod than speak. Eli removes Laurel’s gloves and ushers her toward the fire. When his own hands are dry, he takes her left in his and rubs.

Sensation returns to her pinkie, then spreads. They lean against the wall, panting.

“Well, it was worth a try,” Eli says. “The most important thing is that we’re safe.”

Laurel waits for her breath to return. The sound of the water drifts up from below.

“ ‘A mirror universe,’ ” she whispers, “ ‘should look and feel like ours.’ ”

Eli’s words. He smiles. And then he sees what she does: the sky becoming darker. Laurel looks at him, and he looks back, each seeking confirmation in the verdict of the other.

Eli helps her to a stand. They walk outside as fast as their legs will allow. The Arc is turning green again, and the sun is falling down.

Part Two

The first sound Laurel and Eli hear in the antiuniverse, after they leave the hut, is their own laughter. It’s the laughter of near misses and second chances, of windfall after calamity, a white-knuckled cliff’s-edge laughter—the heart starting, after the heart stopped.

They climb into the PistenBully as day returns to night. Eli drives back the way they came, saying, “You were right, you were right, you were right.”

9

Elsewhere

Eli parks next to the dive locker. Neither one is laughing anymore. They climb out, onto the ice, as they might another planet.

The station looks exactly like the one they left, though the sky is brighter. After the dive, they moved more slowly, hindered by exhaustion. Now people walk between buildings in their rubber boots and Big Reds. Laurel begins to doubt herself, unsure of what she saw with Eli, or whether they came to the right conclusion.

At the door to the dive locker, she looks at him with dread. What will they do if they find someone inside? Eli exhales decisively, and then he opens the door. Laurel’s shoulders release when she sees that the light is off.

They hurry as much as they can, rehanging their suits, carting gear in from the PistenBully. When Laurel returns from her last trip, she finds Eli crouched by the dive tanks. There’s a gap in the bottom row, clear as a lost tooth.

“Two tanks are missing,” Eli says.

Laurel doesn’t understand. “Ours.”

“How can they be?” asks Eli. “If we’re…”

In another universe. It still feels too absurd to speak aloud.

In Laurel’s mind is a flash, a schism, and then a forceful pushing-back. Later she’ll experience other moments like this, when overwhelm triggers some sort of hardware malfunction in the brain—a power outage, as it were. Protecting her.

“Anyone could have gone for a dive,” she says.

“At night?” he asks.

Eli slides their tanks into place. Before they leave the dive locker, he dons his blue-and-yellow backpack, and Laurel ties her shawl. Fearsome cold streaks through her hair.

“Have you seen my fur hat?” she asks.