by Kaz Morran
Ronin and Kristen joined in, and a minute later Anton’s faint reply came from the darkness. “Guys?” He splashed weakly. “Guys. I …”
“Anton, I’m coming,” Taiyo yelled and dove under. He kicked hard against the drag of his clothes and surfaced where he thought Anton had called from. “Anton!” he cried out again. No reply. “Anton, say something. Are you close?” Still nothing. Taiyo gyrated in the water, straining to tune his ears against the pounding of his heart and lungs, and against the water cascading from the chimney.
He heard something: a swish in the water. But from the opposite direction of where Anton should’ve been.
Taiyo twisted to face the noise. “Anton?” He tried to float without paddling to keep quiet. The thunder of the waterfall made it impossible to be sure if there'd been a reply.
“I’m here,” Anton cried. His voice, even weaker now, came from the same spot as the first time.
Taiyo sucked in air and dove under, kicking his hardest in the direction of his crewman’s voice. He came up for air. Staying calm, he listened. He turned right, then left, but only heard the waterfall and the murmurs of Kristen and Ronin. “Quiet over there,” he ordered. And then, “Anton, say something.”
“What’d you say?” It was Kristen.
“Quiet a second,” Taiyo called.
“What?”
“Just shut up for a second so I can listen.”
“Shut your fucking fetish hole,” Ronin yelled at Taiyo. “Don’t talk to her like that.”
Taiyo ignored him. “Anton?” He put the full force of his lungs into his cry. “Anton. Where are you? Answer me, buddy. I need to hear your voice.”
“What the fuck, Taiyo?” called Ronin. “You lost Anton? How do you lose a doctor? He was right in front of you.”
This time, Kristen told Ronin to shut up. Through the bickering. Taiyo heard something splash to his left, maybe twenty meters away. “Anton! I’m coming. Hang on.” He swam for the sound.
“My leg.” The reply was faint and trembling, but not far. “S-something …”
“I’m here. I’m here. Keep talking, buddy.”
“What’s happening? Tai … My leg. Something … There’s something …” Anton trailed off.
Taiyo got to where he expected Anton to be. “I’m here,” Taiyo said. He felt around for Anton but found nothing. “Where are you?” He whirled one way then another, reaching out and grasping handfuls of water. “Anton, do you hear me? Where’d you go? Anton?”
He stopped. Tried not to thrash, but when no sounds came back, he grew desperate.
“Anton! Anton, you have to answer me. Goddammit, Anton, answer me! Anton! Anton!” Mentally, Taiyo sectioned the area into a grid and checked off rows of boxes as he swam. When he still couldn’t find Anton, he tried the same method again a meter below the surface. Useless. Adding a third dimension made the area too vast.
Valuable minutes passed.
“Anton, please answer me. … If you can. … Please.”
Bubbling and gurgling sounds broke the surface of the water. Then a splash, but less like a someone coming up for air and more like a bath toy held under then released. Without light, Taiyo could only feel the body—bloated and without a pulse. Being afloat added to the despair, but Taiyo performed every lifesaving technique he knew, but alas he had to accept that he’d failed to revive his crewmate.
Taiyo lay on his back, floating face up under the weight of the black, humid air. His mind searched for refuge but was unable to clamber out of its own sinkhole—not with Anton’s body bobbing alongside him.
He told himself not to think of the body as human. Detach. Procedure now; emotion later.
Next task: tell the others. Bring the body? Leave it? Both options felt wrong. He had a hand on the sleeve of the body’s jumpsuit, but the body kept wanting to keel onto its side. Taiyo felt around its waist, hoping for a flashlight, and found a shredded pant leg—minus the leg below the thigh. The missing foreleg was throwing off the balance of the floating body.
Before Taiyo could balance the uneven mass, the body reeled from his hands, faster than he could regain his grasp. Anton’s corpse had plummeted straight down into the depths of the flooded cave.
In retrospect, Taiyo rationalized that the lungs must have filled to capacity with water, pushing the density beyond buoyancy. Nothing else could explain how suddenly the body had heaved from his hands and gone under.
On the swim back to Ronin, Kristen, and Walter, a noise like squeaky wet hands on the edge of a bathtub made Taiyo stop. He treaded water and trained his ears on the sound.
“Nel?” Unsure why, he hesitated to call out, and when he did, he spoke softly until he could be sure it was her. “Nel, is that you?”
He found her struggling for grip against the sleek sides of a bobbing crate. She’d get a palm on each side only to have the crate flip and dump her off. Then she’d try again.
They should have built a raft.
The surviving five treaded water in a huddle, with the four relatively healthy candidates taking turns keeping Walter afloat. The commander had regained consciousness and insisted he’d be fine but was clearly having a hard time on his own.
“Anton drowned,” Taiyo told them bluntly. They needed efficient communication more than they needed sentimentality, and he was too exhausted for euphemisms. “Walter’s next if we don’t find something to hold on to.”
They took turns swimming out from the group and back again until Kristen shouted back that she’d found a wall. The rest of them followed her voice until they joined her. The wall gave them the reference point that floating aimlessly in the dark couldn’t, but the slippery, featureless surface offered little to hold on to.
Still treading, they inventoried what supplies they had on them: a ball of used wet tissue, one dead flashlight, one working headlamp, five functioning body cams, and five smartphones—each with around half the battery left.
“I lost my multitool,” Ronin said of the pimped-out Swiss Army knife they’d each been given before leaving Wujal Wujal. “It sunk. Like Anton.”
Ronin’s words seemed random and far more insensitive than Taiyo’s had been, but it might’ve been due to shock—either making Ronin say it or making Taiyo interpret it that way.
“Okay,” said Taiyo. He double checked his belt and found he still had his own multitool. “But we’re taking stock of what we have, so …”
Apparently feeling a bit better, Walter added, “We might be here a while if we’re going to start listing all the things we don’t have.”
“I think we’ll be here a while either way,” Nel said.
None of their phones could get a signal, but they messaged T3 anyway.
It ran through Taiyo’s mind that in a crisis most people either froze, panicked, or relied on others. Only a small number of people took action, and if asked about their apparent heroism they usually said they’d had no other choice. They hadn’t thought. They’d just done what needed to be done. Some who took action thanked their god, but that wasn’t why they did it. Somewhere, somehow, those heroes had rehearsed. If they hadn’t received outright training, there’d been other influences: relevant experiences, habits, mindsets. They’d been primed to act without thinking. It was the same as how a driver could swerve or brake to avert a crash before knowing what had happened, or how a goalie could kick out a puck shot too fast for the human eye to track.
This thought gave Taiyo confidence. As top-of-their-class astronaut candidates, he and his crewmates were the types to take action. Of course, that didn’t always mean that as individuals they’d act in the best interests of the group, or that they’d agree on what to do.
Regardless, staying afloat would not be possible for much longer.
Taiyo felt for an outcrop, crevasse, or glow-worm den to use as a handhold but found nothing. He tried making one with the multitool, but he needed something heftier, so he sent Kristen, the strongest diver and the only one of them with a proper light, down t
o the floor of the flooded Asylum to check the depth and bring back a rock.
“About three or four meters,” she reported when she resurfaced, holding a fist-sized shard of basalt.
Like in space, with nothing to brace himself, each time Taiyo struck the wall with the rock, he was propelled backward into open water. Kristen treaded over and illuminated the wall for him with the headlamp. He opened his mouth to thank her but froze at what he saw.
A hand. Lots of hands. Reaching, stretching, clawing up out of the water, desperate for life. The fingernail scratches were fainter than the painted outlines of the fingers, but they were there.
A quick series of images flashed in Taiyo’s mind. First, the classroom. Sakura at her desk; her dangling shoe. The rising hem of her skirt. The ticking wall clock: 2:43…2:44… Then the windows blew in, and she was gone. Lastly, before he jolted back to the present, through a fogged window he saw Sakura’s palms pressed against the glass, her fingers frozen as she clawed to get out.
“Save the battery,” Taiyo told Kristen.
“Turn it off?”
“Yes. I don’t need to see.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“But—”
“I said turn it off!”
It took a while without the aid of the headlamp, but Taiyo eventually chipped out a nook, leaving a jut of rock sticking up like a trailer hitch. He took off his boots, hooked them to his belt—rather optimistically, for later—and looped his socks around the knob so the candidates had something to grasp. Ronin took the rock and made a similar handhold a meter away. Footholds would’ve been nice, too, but it was too hard to hammer underwater.
When Walter slipped back into unconsciousness, they harnessed him to the second handhold using bootlaces and more socks. Nel checked his breathing and pulse while Kristen used the headlamp to look for head trauma. They all had first aid, but they weren’t medics. That had been Anton’s role.
“The doctor’s always the first victim in a crisis,” Ronin said.
“Not helpful,” said Nel.
“I’m serious,” said Ronin. “Think back to high school, to the kid that went on to med school. I bet he wasn’t the captain of the rugby team or figuring out side hustles to feed his siblings. And med school only turned him softer …”
“Ronin, when did you even talk to Anton?” Nel said it like an accusation. “Did you ever ask him about his life or family?”
“He has two kids,” Kristen said, using the present tense as if Anton was still alive.
“Daughters,” Taiyo answered. “One teen and one in college, I think.” He wasn’t sure, and it made him feel guilty for not taking more time to get to know the man. “I did humanitarian work. War zones. Refugee camps. Disaster relief.”
Nel said, “He was quiet. Gentle. But tough in his own way. Never complained.”
“Do you know why he wanted to be an astronaut?” asked Taiyo.
“Thrillseeker, I guess,” said Kristen. “Same reason he went into war zones. And to help, of course. I’m not saying he did it selfishly, I just—”
“Stop digging,” Ronin told her.
Taiyo told them, “He really did want to help. He thought he could make a difference in the world, one surgery on the front lines after another. But—”
Ronin interrupted to tell the true story of how he performed his own appendectomy while hanging off a 6,000-meter Himalayan slope in 200-kilometer-an-hour winds. “Before I could even get to the appendix I had to cut open my abs and set aside my intestines. And I was jacked back then. Nearly busted the blade of the jackknife. And like a boss, I did it without anesthetics. I bet Anton never operating on himself.”
“Are you trying to tell us things could be worse?” Kristen asked.
Taiyo had always detested that line of consolation. Once, when he’d complained about the overabundance of kindergarten rules, Dad told him, “It could be worse. Would you rather live in Somalia? —a libertarian dystopia of tribalism, free-range violence, squalor, corruption, and famine.” Then and now, Taiyo failed to see how other people’s agony was supposed to relieve his own. How would that even work? Did the universe have a finite pot of suffering to dole out? Life in Somalia clocked in at 93 percent on the misery allocation scale; therefore, not enough percentage points remained in the universe for Mrs. Suzuki’s kindergarten class to rank higher than 7 percent. Even if that was how it worked, 7 percent was 7 percent, and 7 percent felt like shit.
His loving father had thrust the collective sorrow of the entire nation of Somalia into Taiyo’s little five-year-old head—a whole dimension of psychological angst he’d been blissfully unaware of until he’d come to Dad for help in dealing with his own issues. He’d never even heard of Somalia until then.
This was the kind of thing one’s mind replayed when clinging helplessly to the wall of a pitch-black flooded cave beneath a volcano in the jungle.
“Is there water?” said Walter, evidently awake. “Gosh, my head hurts.”
“Drink,” said Ronin. “There’s no shortage.” He slurped loudly from the black lagoon to demonstrate.
Taiyo inched the light of his phone up the wall—careful not to aim at the cave art—but the glow failed to illuminate the ceiling. Kristen was probably right about the bottom only being three or four meters down. That put the ceiling at a little over twenty meters away.
Clinging idly for however-many-hours finally made Taiyo borrow the headlamp to check the painted hands. In the pale yellow glow, only the claw marks remained visible above the rising water. He opened the blade of his multitool and scored the wall to mark the water level. The horizontal slash turned the fingernail scratches into what looked like a tally of the days spent locked in a dungeon.
The sound of the waterfall only grew louder. Taiyo wondered how much rain a cyclone could bring, and how much the cave system could hold. He pictured the valley above his head like a basin filling with rain. He saw the creek swell and new channels form. The field of red mud turned into a shifting sea, dragging new swaths of forest down the mountainside and swallowing the hab and ventilation shed. It was a wonder that the chimney hadn’t yet clogged like a backed up drainpipe. The shaft they’d first repelled down to enter the mouth of the cave had probably filled. That didn’t mean there weren’t other cracks and openings letting water into the lava tubes. The Wormhole they’d crawled through to enter the Asylum was probably filled as well.
The Wormhole! They could swim through it!
Kristen had the same thought. “Let’s go,” she told him.
“You know the way?”
“You’re the nav officer.”
The heel of Taiyo’s multitool held a compass, and the phones had a magnetometer, but the high mineral content of the surrounding rock messed up the readings. Above and below water, the headlamp didn’t project far enough to guide them, and they were too far underground for GPS.
Taiyo thought out loud: “The east and west walls stretch around nine hundred meters. North-south, only three-thirty, so we’re more likely to be at one of the side walls—” A different thought stopped him.
“What?” said Kristen.
“We’re at the west wall now. Not far from the Wormhole at the south.”
“What, you just have a feeling?” She sounded skeptical.
The cave painting was on the west wall. He remembered. “Something like that,” he replied.
“How about you go left, and I go right?” she said.
Nel joined the discussion. She said, “No splitting up.”
“Then we pair up,” said Kristen.
“And leave Walter tied to the wall?”
“No,” she said. “Of course not. … How about swimming the perimeter?”
“We’re not splitting up, and we’re not leaving anyone alone,” said Taiyo. “The Wormhole is on our left. To the south.”
Neither woman responded at first. “You’re the navigator,” Nel finally said.
“Okay …” Suddenly,
Taiyo wasn’t so sure he wanted the responsibility. It’s only geometry, he thought to himself. “We’re around two-fifty from the southwest corner, so heading out on a thirty-five-degree angle should land us right over the spot we came in.”
“And you guys think you’re going to swim all the way through that pipe?” said Nel. “And then what? Just pop up into an oasis on the other side?”
“Your cynicism is noted.”
“How long is it again?” Kristen asked warily. She’d be the one swimming it, not Taiyo.
“Two hundred and twenty meters long with a diameter range of forty to a hundred centimeters,” Taiyo answered.
Unhelpfully, Ronin added, “Even in Imperial that’s too far.”
Taiyo was glad he couldn’t see Kristen’s face. Even with proper gear, a dive that risky would never be undertaken in normal circumstances, and all their proper gear had been lost in the quake and flood. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll just go check it out to see what our options are. How’s that sound?”
Kristen agreed, and Nel wished them well.
Taiyo’s kicks and strokes came robotically; the pain of exhaustion was just the noise of his gears. But those gears and his geometry got them to the right spot. He treaded water at the south wall while Kristen dove down to find the mouth of the Wormhole.
Alone, he floated, waiting in the still black water. His perceiving mind shifted its focus back and forth from the distant rumble of the cascading chimney to his own breathing. Both sounds felt amplified in the absence of optics.
He startled when Kristen resurfaced. She drew in a lungful of air then reported, “It doesn’t look good, but I’ll have another look.” The next time down she took a video. The headlamp did little to brighten the opening of the pipe-like passage, and what she did capture was not encouraging. She made three dives in all, and Taiyo also took a turn, but each time only confirmed the worst. A large chunk of the wall had broken off and collapsed the Wormhole under a mound of boulders, some as big as cars.
“We’re sealed in,” said Kristen. She sounded close to hyperventilating.
“We’ll figure something out,” he said, but mostly out of an instinct to reassure her. “Come on. The others are waiting for us.”
