The Shell Collector

28

I wake in the middle of the night to the soft bump of landing gear hitting some unknown tarmac. Ness has moved to another seat, one that faces forward, and is peering outside. My only sense of how long we’ve been in the air is the two meals we were served. It felt like an eight-hour flight, but it could’ve been four or it could’ve been twelve.

The air outside is humid. I imagine we’re in the Caribbean, where I know Ness owns several islands. It occurs to me that I don’t have my passport, which might get interesting. The mystery of our destination will soon be solved by the nationality of the jail I end up in. But we don’t head for a customs building or the small airport when we deplane. Our bags are moved directly from the jet to an idling helicopter, and our trip has now taken on the air of the absurd.

It only gets crazier.

The helicopter takes us up and out to sea. I’ve ridden on a lot of helicopters in my line of work, and the mix of exhilaration and terror never lessens. I gaze down at the airport and then the wider land for hints about our location. The sporadic dots of lights from homes and a few moving cars reveal the outline of a small island. Tiny, in fact. I’m not great with distances, and our altitude and the dark make it even trickier, but the entire island looks to be no bigger across than Manhattan is long.

“Bermuda?” I ask. I have to raise my voice over the noisy rotor. This helicopter isn’t as sturdy and well insulated as the one we took from Ness’s house.

“Tristan da Cunha,” Ness says, which doesn’t solve the mystery of where in the hell we are.

“Never heard of it,” I confess.

“It’s about as far from anywhere as you can get.” He leans close so we don’t have to shout. “About twelve hundred miles from Saint Helena and fifteen hundred from South Africa.”

“You brought me to the Southern Hemisphere?” I ask incredulously.

“You wanted to see what led me to those shells, right?”

I settle back in my seat. The scope of this story has shifted yet again, and not for the first time, I wonder why Ness is even taking me on this journey. He confessed as to the veracity of the shells on the plane. With the verdict no longer in doubt, that leaves only his justification. But why care what I think?

Suddenly, an answer to this last question falls into place.

The last time Ness made me keep something off the record, he gave me a glimpse of the truth in his grandfather’s journal, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to write my piece afterward. Perhaps he hopes he can do the same here, that he can show me some validation that would make the highly illegal seem perfectly okay. Maybe I was right to suspect that he’s working on an eco-education program, some way of raising awareness of species that have gone extinct. He said he wanted redemption. This fits. It all fits, but I don’t see how it will keep me from writing a piece about it. Unless he wants me to write that story. Unless I’m a tool for his ultimate redemption.

I hate that my mind goes to places like this, but it does, like filings to a magnet. When Ness takes an interest in something out the window, I lean across to check for myself, to get my thoughts elsewhere. Below, I see the lights of a ship. My stomach sinks as I realize we’re going to land on it.

Rain beads on the window—the stars and the moon are obscured as we drop through the clouds—and I wonder what the chances are that we left a rainstorm, flew however many thousands of miles to the other side of the globe, and are landing in yet another shower.

Red and white flashing lights illuminate the aft deck of the large ship. I can see a giant ‘H’ marked out on the deck. The helicopter touches down with a jarring double-bounce and a thump. Ness steadies me as I lurch into him. Men with glowing orange cones signal one last thing to the pilot, and then the door opens, and a man in a jumpsuit holding a large umbrella helps me out of the helicopter.

“Welcome to the Keldysh,” the man says to me. He shakes Ness’s hand. “Hello, boss.”

“Lieutenant Jameson, Maya Walsh of the Times. Maya, this is Lieutenant Jameson. First mate on this vessel.”

“You can call me Jimbo, ma’am.”

“Would you mind showing her to her room?” Ness asks. “I’m going to speak with the captain and check the Mir.”

“Yessir.”

Ness guides me away from the helicopter, which is spinning down its rotors and being strapped to the deck by a crew in rain slicks. It appears it will be staying with the ship. Perhaps belongs to it. Rain pops against the umbrella, and the deck is shiny and wet; it gleams from all the bright lights scattered across the ship. I can feel the world moving and swirling beneath my feet and am thankful that a childhood on boats has made me resistant to seasickness.

“Get a good night’s sleep,” Ness tells me. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Before I can complain, or ask where he’ll be staying, or realize that it shouldn’t matter, my mind is adjusting itself to the distance between us. Staying in his guest house and knowing he is right up there on that dune was one thing; sleeping in the plane with him across from me was another; but neither of those were by any circumstance other than necessity. And once again, my summer-camp brain leaves me unprepared for this intense closeness followed by a sudden absence. As he walks away, something inside me is stretched like taffy. I look away before I feel it break.

Beside me, a stranger in a gray jumpsuit with the name “Jameson” on his chest indicates the way. I follow him numbly into the riveted hull, through cramped steel corridors, and to a bunkroom that makes my college dorm seem like some palatial resort in retrospect.

The lodgings do not matter. I’m exhausted and discombobulated. I still don’t know where I am or what the hell I think I’m doing. I unpack my bag, change into sleep shorts, and fall asleep with Moby Dick in my hands. I don’t open the book. Don’t need to. It just feels good to have something solid there, to not be chasing after a great big nothing. This white whale has a name, at least.

29

I wake to the smell of coffee brewing and the clang of boots on steel decking outside. It takes several minutes of lying in the dark to realize where I am, to make sense of which direction the door is in relation to my bed. I’m not in my apartment in New York. I’m not in Ness’s guest house. Not on a plane. I’m on a ship.

I stretch as much as the small bunk will allow, get up, and refresh myself in the tight confines of the pantry-sized bathroom. I brush my teeth and then figure out the shower, which is basically the bathroom itself. A nozzle in the wall and a drain on the floor suggest the rest of the room is just meant to get soaked. I close the door, lower the toilet lid, and take a steaming hot shower. I get dressed and then braid my hair into something utilitarian. It’s the military-feeling surroundings, I think. And the fact that my hair will never fully dry in this humidity.

Donning the shorts and t-shirt Ness suggested I bring, I grab my book and follow the wafting promise of coffee down the corridor, up one deck, and to a small mess hall or break room. Conversations continue after a brief pause and curious stares. Heads track me. I’m an alien in the midst of these jumpsuited, tight-knit oil roughnecks, or shell miners, or whatever they are.

“Ms. Walsh?”

A woman my age, but more muscular and with short-cropped hair, approaches. Her accent sounds vaguely Russian. We shake hands. “Maya,” I say.

“Petrona. Welcome aboard. Coffee’s over there. Eggs and ham? Or do you prefer porridge?”

“Eggs and ham,” I say. I make myself a cup of coffee. A heavyset man watches me and puffs on his vape. The cloud smells of mint and strawberries. “What is this ship?” I ask Petrona.

“The Keldysh? She’s an old research vessel. Decommissioned years ago until Ocean Oil got her fit again. A floating four-star hotel and world-class laboratory.” She says laboratory the way a Brit might, pronouncing the bore in the middle. “But mostly it’s home to the Mirs five and six. Finest shellers on the seven seas—”

“That’s enough,” a voice behind us says. I turn to see Ness entering the mess hall. He smiles at Petrona and wags a finger. He has something in his other hand. “Ms. Walsh is a reporter. The less you say the better.”

Someone seated at one of the tables laughs.

“How come you get coveralls, but you told me to wear shorts and a t-shirt?” I ask, studying Ness’s getup.

“Because shorts are what you wear under your coveralls.” He presents me with a neatly folded pair of coveralls of my own. I unfold them and see my name embroidered on the chest. “I was bringing them to you so you wouldn’t look ridiculous around here in your skivvies. Which you do.”

There’s a pause.

“So stop looking ridiculous,” he says.

More laughter from the peanut gallery. I go with it and put the coveralls on right there. They’re a perfect fit. I don’t ask how he procured them in such short order. Must’ve set this up days ago when I accepted his invitation. So whatever he has planned, everything is going according to it. Thus far, at least.

“Eat up,” he says. “You’re going to get hungry today, trust me. But go easy on the coffee.”

Too often, a thing stares me in the face long before I recognize it. I should have known what we were doing. Something the rain won’t affect, but no swimsuit needed. A sort of diving. The next progression of shelling. But it isn’t until a deckhand is cracking the hatch on the bright yellow submersible that I see what Ness is up to. It’s almost too late to complain.

“How safe is this?” I ask.

“Perfectly safe,” he says. “The Mir Mark Five is rated for depths this planet doesn’t even possess. You could sit at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in this puppy.” He slaps the hull with his hand, which rings like an empty oil barrel. A perfectly normal empty oil barrel. The kind I imagine the ocean deep would crush in its fist.

“How deep are we going, exactly?”

“A little less than twenty thousand feet.”

“That sounds like a lot.”

Ness laughs. “It is. We’re at one of the deepest points in the South Atlantic.” He gestures toward the sub. “Ladies first.”

“Always with the ‘Ladies first,’” I say. “Why do I expect things to go really poorly when you say that?”

“Because you think I’m inviting you to your doom. And maybe I am. Now watch your head when you get in. There are pipes and sharp corners everywhere. Russians are fond of such things. And don’t touch any buttons or levers.”

I find myself crawling inside the oblong craft. The passenger compartment is a rough sphere right behind and above the sub’s twin folded arms. There are wide portholes everywhere. I settle into the far seat despite my trepidations and watch the deck crew scramble around in the rain coiling cables, signaling to one another, and checking out various parts of the sub. There’s a scraping noise above me. Through a porthole in the roof, I can see the treads of someone’s boot. I watch as a thick cable is attached to a stout bar. Ness crawls in beside me.

“I take it you want to drive,” he says.

“No, I don’t. Switch.” I make to get up and let him slide under me, but he places a hand on my arm.

“I’m just kidding. There are controls on both sides. But I will let you take the wheel for a bit. It’s easy. Like playing a video game.”

“Awesome. So it’s exactly like something I never do.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“I swear to God, Ness, if our lives depend upon me operating this contraption, I want the hell out right now.”

“Okay. You don’t have to do anything. Sorry. Just trying to lighten the—”

“You aren’t lightening the mood!” I say. And I realize I’m panting. Just like the first time with the dive gear. Someone swings the hatch shut by Ness’s side, but he braces it and pushes it back open.

“Just one second,” he tells someone. And then he turns to me. “We don’t have to go if you don’t want to go. But I assure you, it’s perfectly safe. People have been going this deep for nearly a century. The equipment has gotten nothing but better. You are safer in this than you were in the helicopter.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

Ness shrugs.

“Why didn’t you just tell me yesterday that this was what we were coming here to do?”

“Because you would’ve worried all night. You wouldn’t have slept. And you’d be even more panicked now after getting yourself worked up for hours over this.”

He’s right. But I don’t like decisions made for me, even if they are in my best interest. Especially when they’re in my best interest. It assumes someone else knows me better than I know myself. And so I hate that he’s right.

“I just need a minute,” I say.

“Take your time.”

I get my breathing under control. After a moment, I nod my assent, even though I’m not quite ready, because I want to show him that I’m braver than he gives me credit for being. I am brave. I know this about myself. I have kicked ass in a man’s world because I embrace being doubted. I embrace being underestimated.

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s do this.”

Ness gives a thumbs-up to someone outside. The hatch swings shut with a clang.

“That’s my girl,” he says.

And I almost don’t hate him for saying it.

30

My stomach turns as the submersible is hauled into the air. As soon as we leave the deck, the sub twists on its cable, and the world beyond the circular portholes of glass goes spinning.

We go up and out. I can see the rail at the edge of the ship pass beneath us, hear metal creaking, and then we begin to drop—and I find myself clutching Ness’s arm, fearful of grabbing any part of the sub, any of the levers and buttons, and prematurely detaching us from the crane.

Ness has a headset on, is talking to someone, probably the crane operator. A second headset hangs from a rack on my side of the sub. I pull it on and listen to a woman’s voice counting down numbers. When she gets to zero, the swell of the stormy sea thwaps the bottom of the sub, sending a rattle through it and into my bones. I hear Ness’s voice in my headset and also beside me: “Touchdown.”

But we aren’t through descending. We’ve only begun. Another wave shakes the craft, foam and salt sloshing up the porthole beside me, and now I have Ness’s arm wrapped in both of mine. The water rises up the portholes in front of us, bubbling and frothing, the gray overcast sky replaced with the deep blue sea. And then we’re below the water. The Atlantic closes up around us. And the world is silent, peaceful, and still.

“Ready to detach,” Ness says.

“Detaching.”

There’s a mild clank above our heads. Otherwise, nothing seems different. But I sense that we’re free of the ship.

“Unless you want to drive, I’ll need that arm,” Ness tells me.

I realize I’m still clutching him for balance. “Oh, right.”

I let go, and Ness grabs the joysticks on either side of his seat. He pushes them to one side, and I feel a sense of acceleration as we move away from the mothership. The fat hull of the research vessel recedes until it’s swallowed by the black. Just before it disappears, the view reminds me of looking up at Ness’s boat while diving, but on a completely different scale.

“What does that do?” I ask Ness as he adjusts some knobs.

“It controls our rate of descent. We drop at about fifty meters per minute. We should touch down in a little less than two hours.”

“TWO HOURS?”

I immediately regret shouting. Every sound is amplified in the small metal sphere and the headsets. Ness raises an eyebrow.

“What happened to sixty feet, ten minutes?” I ask. “Sixty feet. Ten minutes. What happened to that?”

“We’re going a lot deeper for a lot longer,” Ness explains. “I promise you it’s safe. I’ve done a hundred deep dives in this baby, and she’s done thousands more without me.”

“But two hours just to get there?” I now understand why Ness insisted I use the bathroom after breakfast and why he told me to go easy on the coffee.

“Yeah, and we run on battery power, which we need to conserve. I’m going to dim the lights for now. The heater has to stay on, or we’ll freeze in here. But let me know if it gets too cold for you.” He flips switches, and the banks of internal lights go off. There is enough left from the dials and indicators to see around us. Ness seems to study one readout after another, checking things. All I see is the inscrutable cockpit of a jumbo jet wrapped around us.

“There’s a bag on the shelf behind you,” Ness says. “A couple of apples, granola bars, some juice. Go easy on the juice, but if you have to relieve yourself, there are ways.”

“Do I even want to know?”

“Probably not. Oh, and I packed your book and borrowed a reading light from one of the bosuns. It’s in there as well.”

“I can read about the hunt for Moby Dick at the bottom of the sea,” I say in perfect monotone, so he knows just how enthused I am.

“Spoiler alert,” Ness warns. “Down here is where the Pequod ends up.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Yeah, well, it’s how it gets there that’s interesting. You should read it anyway. Great book, even if no one recognized it at the time.”

“Is that what you’re up to?” I ask. “Is that what this is all about? Being remembered as someone great, even if it’s only after you’re gone?”

Ness laughs. He turns and looks at me in the dim light of the indicators. “Really? We’re going to do this here? At…” He checks something. “Two hundred meters and falling?”

“Why not? I’ve got you here for the next two hours. Interview on.”

“Five hours, if we spend an hour at the bottom.”

My bladder clenches. “Five hours,” I say, mostly to myself. “So tell me, what did you mean by redemption on the plane last night—”

“That was off the record,” Ness warns.

“Okay.” I try to think of how to rephrase what I want to ask. “How about this? Why do you want to show me whatever led you to the creation of these shells? Do you expect me to rewrite my story so that it’s mostly about this? Are you trying to be remembered differently than your father?”

Ness doesn’t reply immediately, which makes me think he takes the question seriously, is at least introspective enough to consider this as a possibility.

“I don’t care how most people remember me,” he finally says.

“Most people?”

“That’s right. But I do care what Holly thinks. And she sees me the way you do.” He turns to me. Is back to his serious self. And from what Victoria told me, this is the Ness that I believe. Not the smiling and laughing man—not that he isn’t capable of joy—but there’s meat inside that shell; it’s not all rainbows and sunshine in there. “Holly won’t care about any of this now, maybe not for years, but I want her to know the truth someday. I don’t care if you write that truth. In fact… you want to know what I think this is about for me?”

“Yes,” I say. “Are you just realizing it right now?”

“Yeah,” Ness says. “I am. I think this is a test—”

“You’re testing me? Why do you care what I think?”

“I don’t. I mean, I do. What I mean is that I’m not testing you. I’m testing myself. Seeing what would happen if I told people the truth.”

I laugh at this.

“I’m serious. Because I could get into a lot of trouble. I could spend the rest of my life in jail. But I want to tell Holly someday. I want to explain myself, tell her why I wasn’t around as much as I should’ve been, why I drove her mother away, why I—”

He turns to the porthole on his side of the submersible and is quiet for a while. When he speaks again, his voice breaks. “Why I tore the family apart. Because it’s gonna take a lot to make that worth it. And if she thinks it was frivolous, that none of it mattered—all the hours I was gone—then she’ll hate me for the rest of my life and then keep on hating me for the rest of hers. And I’ve felt that hate in my own heart. Felt it toward my dad. And my granddad. Which is why when my granddad passed, and his journal fell into my possession, and I saw how wrong I was… that’s when I knew I had to leave something behind for Holly. That I couldn’t do everything in secret. Not forever.”

“Do what in secret?” I ask.

“Soon,” Ness says. “Soon.”

“Look—”

“You’ll know everything in a few days,” he says, cutting me off. “And then you can decide what to write, if you write anything at all.”

He turns to face me. Even in the dim light, I can see that his eyes are filmed over with tears. “I was familiar with your shelling pieces back in the day, and I read some of your more recent stuff before you came over that first night. I trust you. And it’s even better to see that Holly trusts you. That means the world to me. She might be angry with us for a few days for not being in love, but when she reads what you have to say—if you have anything to say—and sees the truth instead of all the lies out there about me, that’ll go a long way with the healing.”

“That’s too much to put on me, Ness. I have to be objective. You can’t use her like that to make me write what you want to see. And you can’t use me like this hoping I’ll write something nice about you. I hate to break it to you, but I’m a resistant cuss. If I like you, I’m just as likely to rip you apart to prove I’m capable of being fair.”

“No, you’re right. It’s too much to ask. And I don’t mean any of it like that. It’s just… I can see how this all plays out, how it has to play out, and I guess I’m thanking you in advance. I shouldn’t do that, I know. Now I’m the one skipping to the end.”

“Yeah. And you should be prepared for me to disappoint you, Ness. Because I probably will.”

Ness adjusts one of the levers on his side of the sub and settles back into his seat. “I don’t think that’s possible,” he says. “I don’t think you can.”

31

Flying commercial as often as I do, I feel trained for this journey to the bottom of the sea. The sub is far more comfortable than coach in a 797. More leg room, better snacks, and no one behind me coughing and sneezing. I read for an hour, wondering when these people are going to get to sea already and get to whaling, and I take occasional breaks to gaze out at the pitch black beyond the glass.

The only thing I see out there is the small bubbles forming on the portholes; it looks like we’re in outer space but with stars that can’t sit still. As we plunge down and down, the sub makes creaking sounds, which Ness tells me at least a hundred times is perfectly normal. He says the military subs do the same thing, that it’s just the metal settling against the phenomenal pressure outside, that at this depth, a watermelon would instantly become the size of a grape.

From what I can tell, Ness is good at a lot of things—but reassuring people is not one of them.

“Probably a good idea to kill the book light,” he tells me. He turns on an interior light, which bathes the interior of the sub in a red glow.

“Is that a bad thing?” I ask. Red is always bad. This is a bad thing. Something is wrong.

“The red light? No, that’s to save our vision. We’re almost to the bottom.”

There seems to be a red glow outside the submersible as well, some kind of dim light beneath us. Ness steers the craft to the side and rotates us. I can hear the motors whirring elsewhere in the capsule.

“That’s the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,” Ness says, pointing through one of the portholes. “I’d guess a hundred people have laid eyes on it in person like this. Far fewer than have been in space.”

This factoid gives me goose bumps. The previously surreal in my life now feels banal in comparison to where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m seeing.

“Do you want to steer?”

“Sure,” I say, even though I don’t really.

“I’m slowing the rate of descent.” Ness adjusts a knob. “If you think of the sub as having four wheels, the stick on the left controls the driver’s side wheels, and the stick on the right controls the passenger side. If you want to rotate, move them opposite each other. Try it.”

I do. Hesitantly at first, but then with more force as I feel how slowly the craft responds to input. The light beneath us rotates. It’s also getting brighter outside, the dull red now beating crimson.

“You can control the depth by pushing the controls toward or away from each other. And adjust your pitch by rotating them.”

“I just like spinning in circles,” I say, and Ness laughs.

“The cool thing is you can flip this switch, and then you’re controlling the sampling arms. Usually, one person drives, and the other person operates the floodlights, the arms, and the research tools.”

“Do I need to know how to do all that?” I ask.

“No. This is mostly a sightseeing tour. I just want to show you something, an idea I had one day when I was down here, so you can see where it led me. So the rift here, this is from the sea floor being torn apart. You remember from grade school how Africa and South America fit together—?”

“Plate tectonics,” I say.

“Right. Well, this is the wound from those plates moving apart. That’s magma down there, flowing up through the wound. It cools when it hits the water and throws off a ton of steam. There’re all kinds of temperature gradients down here. It’s one of the ways our oil platforms generate power. But there’s something even more interesting about these vents.”

Ness takes over the controls and brings us down through a cloud of black smoke. He turns the interior lights off again. The sea floor rises up. It looks like a flat expanse of sand and rock, just like the ocean floor I’ve seen while snorkeling in twenty feet of water. But now we’re a thousand times deeper.

“Watch,” Ness says. He flicks a switch, and floodlights bathe the area in front of us. One of the vents is just a hundred or so feet away. The water and smoke swirl there. The crust throbs red. I’m seeing inside the Earth. To me, this is as wild and inhospitable a place as the surface of Mars—

And then there’s a different sort of movement. An erratic, zigzagging shadow. “There,” Ness says, but I already see it. A fish. Or squid. An oblong creature with a fin and a snout, but it’s gone before I make out any more detail.

“What the hell was that?” I ask.

“A fish. And there are tubeworms and shrimp and crab down here. And slugs. Also, it’s currently sixty degrees Celsius out there. It’s even warmer closer to the vent.”

“Sixty Celsius—” I try to remember formulas I haven’t had to use since college. “About one-forty Fahrenheit?”

“Not about,” Ness says. “Exactly one-forty. Nice.” He seems impressed. “That’s why I had to switch from the heater to the cooler when we crossed the thermal barrier. Otherwise we’d cook in here. As it is, we can’t stay long or the battery will go dead.”

“What if that happens?”

“They’d have to send the other sub down with a cable to retrieve us. It’s happened before. We’d be fine for a couple of hours, but it does get uncomfortable. Anyway, this is just a sideshow, one of those really cool things you have to see while you’re in the neighborhood. The real magic is over here.”

Ness grips the controls, and we lift from the sea floor. I watch the floodlit sand for more signs of life. I see what look to be shrimp running. “I think we had all of two days in class about these lifeforms,” I say, marveling at the sight. “Exo-something organisms?”

“Two days, huh? What’s amazing is that the biodiversity down here is almost as great as in a rainforest. They discovered these ecosystems back in the 1970s. It defied everything we thought we knew about life, where it could live, what it could adapt to. Now we know that life can live practically anywhere, that it even grows like lichen on the surface of the space station. I was thinking about this one day, down here, getting some samples. And it struck me both how robust and how fragile nature can be. It seems as though life can adapt to anything, but then a small change wipes out an entire species.”

He’s quiet for a moment. Then picks up where he left off.

“The crazy thing about these vents is that the chemistry of the sea is completely different here. There’s no sunlight to get everything going. The base unit of energy is hydrogen sulfide, which is toxic to the creatures we know up top. Resemblance between these animals and the non-vent kind can fool you. But they do share ancestors.

“Here. Check out this gauge. That’s our current sea temp. You can see how quickly the temp falls away as we leave the vent. If we keep going, it falls below zero. The pressure and salinity are the only reasons the water doesn’t freeze.”

The readout shows nineteen degrees Celsius. I think that’s about seventy degrees Fahrenheit, but I’m rounding. “Right now we have something like surface sea temp,” I say.

“Right. But go either direction, and you get something warmer or something cooler. The temperature gradients form rings around the vents. It got me wondering: If life exists in these extreme ranges, why did it get hammered by a few degrees rise in the rest of the ocean? Look.”

He sees something I don’t. Ness bursts into activity, driving the sub down to the bottom and then controlling the arms, scooping something up. A fountain of sand erupts where the arm attachment hits the sea floor.

“Gotcha,” he says. It’s the most excited I’ve seen him. He works the arms back toward the sub, then throws more switches. “Won’t be sure until we get back to the surface, but that looked like a good sample.”

“Of what?” I ask.

“I’ll show you when we get back to the estate—”

“Jesus, Ness, enough of this. What the hell are we doing here? And yes, I’m skipping to the end of the story. I don’t care anymore. None of this makes sense—”

“Breathe,” Ness says. And I realize I’m panting. Hyperventilating.

“I need out of here,” I say. My heart is racing. I feel trapped, first by Ness and his meaningless clues, and now by the thought of twenty thousand feet of water above us, the creaks and groans of solid steel as the sea is trying to crush us, and the realization that there’s nowhere to go, not for hours, and I swear the air in that tin can is growing stale, is getting thin, is running out—

“Look at me,” Ness says.

“I—can’t—see—” I labor between pants for air.

Ness floods the submarine with that red light. I only see a spot of it; the rest of my vision has closed in around the edges, irising shut. I feel Ness’s hands on either side of my face, supporting me. Making me look at him. He has arranged himself sideways in his seat. He is asking me to breathe in, to hold it. I try.

“Let it out,” he says. “Slowly.”

Puh puh puh. The best I can do is three short and rapid exhalations. And then I’m gasping for air again.

“Listen to me,” Ness says. I concentrate on his voice. Part of me believes I will die here, at the bottom of the sea, and that there’s something romantic about that. A good death for a rubbish life. As a staff writer, I’ll get a killer obit in the Times.

The other part of me is certain that Ness will save me. That he won’t let me die. And the resistance I feel around him, that I protect myself with—I let it go. I want him to save me. I don’t want this rubbish life to end so soon.

“That’s it. A deep breath. Hold it. Concentrate on me. Just look at me. Listen to my voice. Good. Now let it out.”

I don’t know how they got there, but my hands are on his cheeks. I feel two days of stubble rough against my palms. I see his lips moving, his eyes locked on mine, all in that red glow of lights meant to guard our vision.

I can breathe again, barely, but I don’t want to let go of him. And I don’t want him to let go of me. I can breathe like this. To release him would be to drown. I feel like I should warn Ness that he’ll have to hold me like this, and I’ll have to hold him, at least until we get to the surface. I feel like I should warn him to get away from me, warn him of what I’m about to do.

And it’s hard to say who moves first. There is a lightning bolt of awareness, an electrical shock as my mind rewires itself to cope with this looming fact: We are about to kiss. And then I’m pulling him into me, and I swear I feel him pulling me as well, and lips that I have damned crash into the lips that damned them. Holding his face, like one might cup a chalice, I realize how thirsty I was for this. How badly I want him right then, in that moment. I don’t care who he is, who I am, or about any story. We are at the edge of the world, in the depths of space, where the laws of biology and the rules of physics do not seem to apply.

His lips feel warm and full against mine. Through closed eyes, I see hot magma and the cool, deep blue. I feel the rush of the Atlantic as it fills the space around us, swirling, lifting us into weightlessness. Breaking free from the kiss for a moment, I manage a deep breath. A heavy sigh. Then I moan and collapse into his lips once more.

His hands feel strong on my back, on my waist. I run my hands up his arms, to his shoulders, through his hair, pulling him into me, our kiss turning into something as crushing as the depths.

“Maya—” Ness mumbles around my lips. He’s about to talk sense into us both.

“Shut up,” I whisper. I grab one side of my coveralls and pull the snaps apart, which go like cracked knuckles, popping staccato from neck to navel. I start to wiggle my arms out, and Ness says, “Are you sure?” And I say, “I’m hot. I need out of this.”

Ness pulls away from me and reaches for a knob. “I can make it cooler,” he says.

“Just help me out of this.” I wiggle and contort my back, but one of my arms is stuck. Ness laughs and helps me. Kicking off my shoes, I wiggle the coveralls down my legs until I’m free of them. The air in the submersible is blessedly cool on my feverish skin. Adjusting myself on my seat, sitting on my knees, I lean over Ness and tear the chest of his coveralls apart. He gets his arms free. I pull his white t-shirt over his head and toss that aside. Kiss him again. Our tongues touch, soft and warm. Gentle. I bite his lower lip to let him know gentle is nice, but it’s not everything.

“Mmm,” he murmurs, pulling away. Again, I fear he’s about to talk sense into the both of us. Mention Holly. Or professional codes of ethics. And I’m going to have to explain to him how what happens at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge stays at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. But he says, “Gotta save the battery,” and reaches around me, embracing me, and I laugh as he fumbles for switches behind me, a pump running somewhere for a moment, Ness cursing, the pump switching off, and then the red lights around us and the harsh white floodlights outside all going dark.

He leans back into his seat, and now it’s just the constellation of indicators and dials around us, the distant red glow of lava leaking from the Earth, the shadows of animals that should not exist, and this, between us, which should not be possible.

I run my hands over his chest, that swimmer’s chest. I touch the black pearl on that thin leather strap, study him for a moment, then lean in for another kiss. Ness cups my breasts through my shirt, and I arch my back with pleasure. I press myself into his hands and grab a fistful of his hair. Arching my back further, I bang my head on a pipe. We both laugh. “This thing was not built for this,” I say.

“The arms go down,” Ness tells me. He fumbles between the chairs, and the armrests slide down level with the seats. It makes a short bench. “I’ve never done this before,” Ness says, seeming to read my mind. “I promise. But I have considered the various complexities.”

“Show me what you’ve considered,” I say, kissing him. In this moment, I don’t care if I’m a one-night stand. I don’t care if this is the last time we touch. I don’t care if being in the same room together is awkward later. I want this, whatever the costs. Something about being so close to death, about this inhospitable place, makes me want to feel alive. And something about being trapped with Ness, about the last three days spent in each other’s company, has me craving what I know I’ll soon regret.

Ness places a hand on the top of my head, an odd gesture, but when he lifts me up, I realize it’s to keep me from banging into anything. I hold his arms, can feel his muscles flex. To be lifted and moved so easily feels exhilarating. My desire to be in control of every situation is gone. I am floating. Bobbing on the sea. Ness lays me down on my back. He pushes my shirt up, slowly, as if asking permission. I lift my arms up over my head in assent. Starting at my neck, he kisses his way across the smooth hollow of my collarbone, sending trills of electricity through me, then works down to my breasts, kissing them, cupping them with his hands, and I place mine on top of his and make him squeeze harder. My nipples ache with pleasure. I pull my bra down and guide Ness’s head. His tongue circles my nipple before taking me between his lips.

Ness slowly kisses his way up my chest, up my neck, finds my lips again. He brushes loose strands of hair from my face. The frenetic energy is gone, replaced by a comfortable caressing, a writhing embrace, a pleasurable squirming. I wrap my arms around him and squeeze. I kiss his neck.

“Maya,” Ness whispers in my ear. If there is more, it is lost as he buries his head in my shoulder. The steel shell around us groans. We are the torus inside. There is no space nor time. No concept of being. Just a floating feeling, a sense of escape and flying, another Icarus kiss, completely free, the empty cosmos around us, exploring each other there at the bottom of the sea.