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Chapter OneDanica Hearn felt her heart rhythm bump up a notch as she spied a dark shadow moving sinuously along the seabed. Her mind instantly broadcast a shark alarm. She was slightly relieved when she saw it was only a baby and wasn't even one of the 'man eaters', but not much. To her way of thinking, sharks were like snakes or spiders--the world wasn't big enough for her and them.
She checked her watch again for the fifth time in as many minutes and sighed. Why in God's name am I doing this?
The water was beautiful, and the tropical fish stunning, but the plain truth was scuba diving just wasn't for her. The ocean gave her the creeps. She didn't know why she'd persisted in taking the damned lessons.
Some vacation!
The really stupid part was that she'd had this half-baked notion that it would be a good way to meet men and/or make herself more desirable to them. Sports minded gals seemed to have men flocking around them all the time, but learning to scuba dive wasn't going to make her like sports any better.
She hated sports.
Disgusted, she looked around for her diving partner to let her know she was going back up to the boat.
Her heart, which had only just regained its natural rhythm, commenced to thudding in dismay once more when she'd done a complete 360 and hadn't seen a sign of her partner--whatshername.
Calm down, Danica. The nitwit's got to be around here somewhere.
Slowly, she did another turn. Dimly, in the distance and fading fast, she saw the moron. Diving might not have been quite as nerve wracking if she hadn't been paired with a woman who had no fear--because she was too stupid tohave any imagination; had no sense of direction; and topped that off by being as easily distracted by a flash of color as a six month old child.
She'd probably gotten a glimpse of a school of tropical fish and was following them to take another hundred pictures or so.
Danica stared at the retreating form with a mixture of dismay, irritation and indecision.
Indecision wasn't something she was accustomed to. Ordinarily, she had no trouble at all assessing a situation and making a sound judgment call. In this particular case, however, she was torn between the diver's guidelines/rules which stated diving buddies were supposed to stick together, a completely natural reluctance to take a chance on getting lost, and an irrational sense of responsibility for a woman who's name she couldn't even remember.
Glancing up, she could see the bottom of the boat bobbing on the surface of the water above her. After another moment's hesitancy, she started after the nitwit, deciding to make an honest effort to retrieve her before she was permanently lost at sea. She'd be safe enough as long as she kept her eye on the boat.
She began swimming, stopping occasionally to look up and locate the boat. She could not tell that she was gaining any headway on the vanishing woman, however, and finally stopped and looked for the boat once more.
It was much further away than she liked.
She checked her watch and saw that she'd used fifteen minutes of her air already.
Looking around once more for the woman, she started back, ascending gradually as she headed toward the now distant boat. She'd just begun to breathe a sigh of relief when a strange sensation swept over her. Confused, she stopped and glanced around. The water around her seemed to be swirling. Her heart jerked uncomfortably in her chest as she felt the pull.
Fighting off a sense of panic, Danica began to swim harder, struggling to free herself from the whirlpool. Within moments, she was totally disoriented and realized that she was moving with the circular current, not across it. She struggled harder, unable to see beyond the swirling water now but uncaring where she exited so long as she managed to swim through it.
It wasn't until she began to tire that she noticed something she hadn't noticed before. Her stomach wasn't just tight with fear. A sensation of weightlessness gripped her.
It stopped abruptly. The water settled. Too frightened by now to consider the advisability of surfacing too fast, Danica took a moment to orient herself and began swimming upward as fast as she could propel herself.
She drove her head into something so hard she felt a bone in her spine creak ominously. For several moments, darkness encroached. Completely disoriented, Danica put one hand on her pounding head and reached upward with the other. Her hand met something solid. The boat?
But how could it be the boat? She'd still been a long way from the boat when the whirlpool had caught her.
Slowly, the pain and confusion began to subside. The darkness didn't and Danica realized finally it wasn't just the crack on the head that had brought it about. It wasn't imminent unconsciousness, or at least not entirely. It was dark, suddenly, for no apparent reason, dark.
She wondered with a touch of panic if it was possible that it was night time, that she'd knocked herself unconscious and lost hours. It didn't take much thought in that direction to supply her with a vision of a search party, calling, unanswered, the search party giving up and departing.... It didn't 'feel' like natural dark, though. Wouldn't the water be lit with moonlight? Or starlight, at least? If her fear was a reality?
Flipping her legs, she swam upward once more, cautiously, with one arm extended above her head. Her hand broke the surface of the water and touched something cold and metallic. Again, confusion filled her.
The hull of the boat would be in the water, not above it.
She began to follow it, feeling her way along the surface. It was perfectly smooth, and although she felt around for some time, she could find no end to it. The hard surface seemed to go on forever.
Fear crept its way up her spine. Try though she might to block the ticking minutes from her mind it hammered as insistently in her brain as her heart pounded in her chest.
She was going to run out of air.
Balling her hand into a fist, she began pounding on the solid panel above her. She pounded until she was tired and had to stop to rest, then began hammering again. She'd just begun to wonder if she could somehow manage to fit her nose and mouth in the tiny space between the panel and the water and suck in air when light suddenly flooded the area around her.
Blinded, Danica covered her face mask with her hand, closing her eyes. When she finally lowered her hand and opened her eyes a small crack, a wave of shock and horror washed through her.
She wasn't in the ocean anymore.
She was in a tank.
It wasn't people staring at her through the windows along the sides, however.
