A transparent tube snakes out of my other wrist. Some sort of IV in each arm, rigged up to a black life jacket.
Callum’s eyes track past me, and he staggers to his feet, pointing to the lagoon in front of us.
Another body, floating.
I skid down the sand and trip into the water, sending up sheets of spray. The figure travels across the surface of the water towards the beach, but his or her arms and legs don’t seem to be moving. Impossible.
I wade out and grab the body. Not Poppy. A girl whose deep-brown skin contrasts with the pale-grey hood of the suit. I recognize her as Beti, the girl who took us foraging. I grip her under the armpits and tow her across the surface of the water; she’s kept afloat by the same black life vest I’m still wearing. Even though it’s mainly Callum who drags her up the sand, my arms tremble with the effort. Her lips are a deep-plum colour, bluish around the edges. I crouch at Beti’s side as Callum peels transparent tape from her eyelids. There isn’t even a flicker of movement in her eyelashes. He leans forward, his ear to her mouth.
‘I can’t hear her breathing.’
My eyes skitter over the beach. If Beti came out of the lagoon and she’s – she can’t be – then Poppy . . .
Callum’s voice breaks into my thoughts. ‘Aster? She hasn’t got a pulse.’
I stare at Callum blankly. ‘I have to go in – my sister.’
Callum’s voice cracks, ‘Please – do you know how to help her? Iona showed us, but I can’t remember.’ His eyes shine as they meet mine, desperate, and I recognize the blankness in his face that comes with panic. Suddenly I remember a first-aid class at school. An afternoon off lessons, all of year nine in the school gym.
I pinch Beti’s wrist. I can’t feel anything and I swallow. What now?
More memories from that first-aid lesson sweep through my head, there was that dummy torso thing. Check airway, then chest compressions? Isn’t there supposed to be a rescue breath first? What is a rescue breath?
‘She hasn’t breathed once, I’m sure. Like – that must be what? Nearly a minute. That’s bad isn’t it? How many minutes before she . . .’ Callum’s voice rises.
‘You hold her wrist, keep checking for a pulse,’ I say, forcing a calm voice.
Visions of Poppy flash through my mind. I have to try to help this girl. I collapse into the sand beside Beti’s head. Tilt the chin, check the mouth for obstruction. I press my hand against Beti’s forehead and take a deep breath, preparing to cover her lips like we did on the plastic dummy thing.
‘I felt something!’ says Callum. ‘A pulse in her wrist, I felt it and she twitched, she’s alive!’
I grip Beti’s other wrist. Nothing. I wait, and the sea makes a steady rushing sound as if counting for me. Too long. Then a weak throb, followed by another, then nothing again. I adjust my fingers. Another pulse.
‘Did you feel it?’ says Callum. I nod, and he closes his eyes for a moment in relief.
‘It’s really slow – I’ll try breathing,’ I say. I tilt her chin and cover her lips with mine. Her skin feels rubbery and yielding and I shudder; this is nothing like the dummy torsos we practised on. I breathe hard into her but the air pushes back into my own mouth, puffing out my cheeks as well as hers. I try again.
‘I can’t, I’m not doing it right,’ I say, my whole body trembling.
‘But her pulse is better, here, feel,’ says Callum. He’s right. It’s still slow, but at least it is steady, a beat every few seconds.
A hiss fills my ears. I’m panting. Callum looks up and meets my eyes for a moment.
Not now.
The panic can’t rise now. I focus in on the details around me, the sound of the sea lapping, the sand crunching beneath my knees. Three breaths in, six breaths out.
Callum holds Beti’s wrist and says something else but I’m tuned out, everything seems to stop as we wait, my eyes combing the sea. Maybe it doesn’t matter now if Beti has a pulse. If she’s not breathing she’ll die from lack of oxygen. It’s already been too long.
This is a nightmare. It has to be. Just a nightmare, so I’m going to wake up.
I lean closer to check her breathing again, then her body gives a tiny shudder and I think I’ve imagined it but when Callum’s eyes dart up to meet mine I know he felt it too. Before he can say anything, Beti’s chest heaves and Callum releases his hold as thick liquid gushes from her lips, milky and blue. Arm under her head, he lifts her so she’s tipped to the side. At the same time as relief floods me, I shift back, horrified at what I’m seeing. What is that stuff she’s spewing up? It certainly isn’t seawater and it’s coming from her lungs. Her eyes are still closed, her body limp.
I’m about to suggest we lie her in recovery position, when she splutters, arms flinging up and around Callum’s neck as she wakes up, spitting the last of the bluish gloop down his back.
‘Is she OK, is she breathing?’ says Callum.
I nod. She’s coughing, so she must have air in her lungs. Coughing is a sign the body is well enough to protect itself, getting rid of what it doesn’t need. When things are really bad, there’s no coughing. I learnt that from Mum.
Beti is now flopped over Callum’s shoulder, her lips look a better colour and her eyelids flutter as she gasps in breaths. I glance across the lagoon. We don’t know she’s OK. She went far too long without breathing.
Even though I’m disgusted I touch a blob of the bluish liquid resting on the sand, before it soaks in. It’s warm and slippery between my finger and thumb and reminds me of laundry liquid. I gingerly sniff it. It smells faintly synthetic. Medical. This is the same stuff I was coughing up, I remember now.
‘What is it?’ says Callum, still gripping Beti tight.
I shrug and notice that one tear has spilt over and wet his cheek. His face shivers with relief; I don’t know how to tell him that this is not all right, his friend had too little oxygen for far too long.
Beti leans back, her arms still around Callum’s neck, eyes unfocused. ‘Wha goin on?’ she says in a slurred voice.
My eyes blink rapidly in disbelief.
‘Hello Beti, you just vommed down my back. No need to apologize,’ says Callum, his voice gruff. He sniffs, looking down at her with a trembling smile.
Beti lifts her head, blinks and coughs again, detaching herself from Callum, ‘Oh, it’s only you, Cal. What’s wrong?’
Callum laughs and then his face crumples and he presses it against Beti’s shoulder. He reaches a hand over to me and although I don’t know this boy at all, I grip his fingers very tight in shared relief.
I stand. The lagoon is glassy, enclosed by a rocky reef. Behind, the sun catches on the white caps of small waves. A fringe of palms lines the pale-golden beach behind us. The sun is hot, too hot. Tropical. This is nothing like the beach we were on, it doesn’t even look like New Zealand. I need to find Poppy.
What I just saw was impossible. Beti’s heart was too slow and she went too long without oxygen. I’ve heard of people falling into ice and surviving when they had been declared dead, but there is no ice here, far from it.
Beti sits on the sand, shading her eyes, and Callum blows out a long ragged breath, wiping his cheeks with his fist.
‘We thought you were dead,’ he says. ‘You weren’t breathing, for ages.’
Beti is still disorientated and Callum fetches another coconut and helps her sip.
‘I need to go out there, in the lagoon, look for the others,’ I say.
‘I don’t get this, but I don’t think the boat sunk,’ says Callum. ‘We’re not injured and—’
‘This must be the next one,’ finishes Beti.
Callum glares at her and his eyes dart to me, but she shrugs, indicating the lagoon in front of us.
‘What? She’s going to find out now, isn’t she?’ she says.
My eyes flick from Beti to Callum. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The way we got here – seriously messed up,’ says Callum, ‘but this must be what I
ona was training us for. The next Wildhaven.’
‘How can this be the next Wildhaven?’ I say, my voice trembling with frustration. The life vest pulls at my shoulders, constricts my chest. I unzip it, then remember I’m rigged up to it by the tubes at my wrists. I need to get into that lagoon and look for Poppy.
Callum surveys the tubes in his wrists with a frown and I see he genuinely isn’t any more familiar with this bizarre kit than I am.
‘Need to get free of this,’ I say.
I yank on the left tube with my eyes screwed tight, and then it’s free – revealing a narrower tube that must have been in my vein, stained pink with blood. I feel sick.
Callum and Beti exchange looks but neither says anything. We stand at the edge of the lagoon, the teal-blue water smooth, unbroken.
‘So you guys were expecting to be here? But not like this?’ My voice comes out through gritted teeth as I yank the other tube from my right wrist with a sharp scratch and hold it up.
Both Callum and Beti look horrified, then he squares his shoulders and tries to sound nonchalant.
‘We knew one day we’d be relocated somewhere more remote. We had survival training for tropical areas,’ says Callum.
‘But not like this. The snorkelling trip was a ruse, but why didn’t Iona just tell us? And rigging us up with tubes and coughing up blue stuff, it makes no sense,’ says Beti. ‘Sorry Aster. Iona said there would a right time and place to tell you properly about Wildhaven, just not right away.’
I rein in my questions and focus on drilling them for only the information I need right now. I shrug off the jacket, letting it drop to the sand.
‘So where are the others? Why aren’t they here?’ I feel desperate.
Beti bends and picks up a couple of pieces of driftwood.
‘We need to get a fire started,’ she says.
A fire? They want to make camp? My panic overides reasonable thought. It’s impossible Poppy isn’t here. She was in my arms and I would never have let her go, no matter what. Without thinking I cup my mouth and yell, ‘Poppy!’
My call echoes across the lagoon and returns to me as if it has nothing to report.
I hold my throat. I’m at what the therapist would call a ‘high level of background anxiety’; my thought processes erratic and muddled, panic close. I blow out a long, slow breath. I’m supposed to acknowledge the anxious feelings and let them pass on by, ground myself in the here and now. I look down at my wrists. There are twin beads of blood at the holes the tubes left.
‘I’m going to search the lagoon.’ I’m managing to sound calm. That’s good.
‘I’ll come with you,’ says Callum.
I glance at him. His hair flops forward, drying into reddish waves. He’s a few inches taller than I am and his muscles bulge, but bulky guys aren’t usually the best in the water.
‘Are you a good swimmer?’ I say.
He gives a half-nod, half-shrug. ‘Iona liked us to swim, and I used to fish, with my da. He made me swim laps of the boat, no matter how rough or cold it was, to make sure I wouldn’t freak out if I fell in.’
When I meet his eyes he looks away and swings his arms as though limbering up. I realize he’s trying to put on the brave face he didn’t have earlier, embarrassed now by his reaction when we were reviving Beti.
‘OK then. We need goggles,’ I say.
Beti points to a wide equipment pouch strapped to my waist. I hadn’t even noticed it beneath the life vest. I locate a pair of minimalist-looking goggles inside. There’s other stuff in there, but I zip it back up and put on the goggles.
I wade into the water.
Callum snaps his goggles in place. We are both still in our grey bodysuits.
Beti has already collected a neat pile of driftwood. ‘I want to come with you, but someone should stay. In case,’ she says.
Callum squeezes her arm. ‘We won’t leave the lagoon,’ he says, and the way his eyes cling to her face tells me he still can’t believe she’s OK.
I pause for a moment.
I have to do this for Poppy.
Mum’s voice.
Reach. Kick. Bre—
I shut down her voice in my head. Not now.
Inhaling deeply, I plunge into the lagoon as if it is cold and will take my breath, but the water is surprisingly warm. My legs and arms remember what to do and the water calms me like it always has even though it’s been months since I was in the pool.
I adjust the goggles, and survey the pale seabed through clear water. The lagoon is at least five times the size of a swimming pool and slopes gradually from the beach, levelling out at around three or four metres deep. The reef that protects it protrudes from the water in a broken line, almost completely encircling the turquoise water within.
I skim along the surface, Callum close by. My eyes reach across the seabed and my heart curls tight in my chest with fear of what I might find, but the rippled sand of the lagoon bottom is empty of clues. The sea holds me with that familiar sensation of being completely surrounded, cocooned. I slice smoothly through the water, my muscles remembering, despite my time out of training. I imagine surfacing to Mum’s voice cheering me on; I couldn’t see Mum in the crowd at swimming galas, but I could always pick out her voice.
My heart thumps and I feel dizzy at the memory. Stop. Not now.
I focus on the real sounds around me, on the science of it, on anything but Mum. Physics will tell you that sound travels further in liquid, and it does – but our ears are made for air and the sounds beneath the surface are muffled and unearthly. I blow out all my bubbles and tilt my head to suck in a really deep breath. Better.
Callum and I criss-cross the entire lagoon, staring down from the surface and intermittently diving to scatter interweaving schools of metallic and technicoloured fish. I’m petrified that at any moment the wrecked ship will loom out of the blue depths. Deep Retreat. That was the name of Iona’s boat. It’s impossible, the boat was too big to have entered the lagoon and there’s no sign of debris on the undulating seabed, only the occasional clump of seagrass or starfish.
When we reach the reef we swim alongside corals of all shapes and colours; round, purple and brain-like, huge feathery red ferns, knobbly yellow branches like witches’ hands. The tropical fish that scatter before us are just as varied in colour, shape and size, and at any other time I’d be gawking in wonder, mesmerized. But all I’m interested in is finding my sister. Above the surface the tangled coral carcasses along the reef are bleached like bone, and create an uneven barrier to the sea. Callum and I surface together at a break in the reef around four metres wide, forming a channel into the open ocean.
We bob in the current and I suck in a deep breath, slip my goggles back on and dive under. I hover by the gap where the sandy bottom gradually slopes away into the distance. The open ocean side of the reef is lined with swaying fronds of brown seaweed, attached by large root systems to rocks at the base of the reef around six metres down. Callum swims closer to the seaweed grove, running his fingers through the ribbon-like fronds.
But my attention is out into the vast blue. He taps my shoulder and points at the seaweed and I catch sight of a black tail disappearing.
We both surface.
‘Did you see that? Reef shark,’ he says, eyes wide. ‘They aren’t dangerous, but I think we should turn back.’
I shake my head. I can’t, not yet.
I dive again and kick down deeper, my ears popping as I scan the seabed. The sun is lower in the sky and stripes the top layers of water with shifting rays of gold and amber. Below that top layer is only blue; boundless, another world. No sign of the ship, so where is Poppy? How will I ever find her out there? I’m already desperate for breath and I’ve only dived a couple of metres—
I freeze.
A shadow against the cobalt blue of the water ahead.
Star shaped.
Person shaped.
Poppy? Flooded with adrenaline, I swoop towards it. Bubbles blind me as I try to
call out with my last huff of air.
The shadow sinks deeper. I stretch out, kicking hard. The figure spins and darts away into the far blue. My lungs are burning now but I search frantically for another glimpse, then turn. I can’t see the reef behind me. The bottom is many metres below, nothing but uniform blue ahead. I burst through the surface, gasping, as Callum slices through the water towards me.
‘I thought . . . I thought I saw—’
I duck under and search again, then reality descends. It couldn’t have been a person, not that deep, not swimming that fast. My panicking mind can’t be trusted.
Callum’s eyebrows knit together as he sculls backwards towards the reef. ‘I don’t think we should leave the lagoon just yet. Open-water predators can be big. Or there could be a rip current.’
We swim back through the gap into the warmer lagoon waters and I strike out for shore, scanning the seabed again, taking a long last look through the reef gap, willing Poppy to just be there.
We both wade out on to the beach, and lean, hands on our thighs, as we get our breath back. Where to look for Poppy now? The rest of the island?
How is this happening? We should never have left London, less than a week ago we were at school.
Beti jogs down the beach to join us. Behind her in the trees a thin column of smoke rises.
‘Did you see anything?’ she says.
Callum shakes his head and chews on a thumbnail. Beti raises her chin. ‘I’ve got the fire started. We’ll keep it burning so someone could spot the smoke.’
The lagoon is where Beti surfaced from, so it seemed the obvious place to start looking as I presumed me and Callum came from there too. But we can’t presume anything. What if Poppy arrives in the lagoon – somehow – while I’m not there?
‘We need emergency help,’ I say, trying to clear my mind, to think. I should be able to work out what to do; I’m good at problem solving. But panic has dulled my brain. I unzip the waist pack.
‘Is there an emergency phone, signalling equipment?’
I already know the answer.
Callum shakes his head and starts along the beach and Beti and I catch up.
Secret Deep Page 5
