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Swimming to the galley, I felt ten years old again, with the Esmeralda threatening to go down. Hovering in the water above the counter in the utilitarian kitchen, I was in another world. And as I stared at the deep freeze, I was definitely in another time. The past waited, still fully intact and locked, just as I’d left it. But in my mind the door to all my secrets was wide open.
“Come, Mira.” Jadd motioned me closer.
His body language reminded me of the men who supposedly had rescued me. How they’d tried too hard to seem safe, even after what they’d done to me. I knew better. I knew he was luring me to a trap. Looking in his cold eyes, I knew he’d already buried me in that freezer with my father.
“I’m not coming in there,” I asserted, as much to myself as to him. “I’ve got your gun.”
I didn’t hold it out for him to take. I held it the way Am’maty Z had taught me, warning him I wasn’t a child who had to do as told ever again.
“Put that down, Mira. You don’t know how to use it,” he said, still standing behind my father’s slumped body. “It’s not safe for you, child. You could get hurt.”
I gave him one more chance. “The captain said we have to go now.”
“Then you must stop wasting time, Mira. Come kiss your father and tell him goodbye. You don’t want to live with having never told him you’re sorry.”
I didn’t expect the deep freeze door to open, but I clasped the handle and tried to lift it anyway. Stuck. It had been sealed all these years, meaning the pressure was too great to open it. It also meant that desiccation and no marine life to slowly consume the bodies would’ve preserved them, much like mummifying. Just as I’d feared. I braced the crowbar I’d brought into the jamb and pried the door.
The bar budged just enough for me to be able wedge the width of the steel in the crack. Water started to seep in, but it would take a while for the deep freeze to fill and the pressure to equalize enough for me to get the door open.
As I waited, the ocean flowed, shifting and changing against me. But it wasn’t coming from the deep freeze sucking in water. The motion had come from something higher up. Something swimming.
I wasn’t alone.
