Sixteen Fathoms Down

Chapter 1: The Wrong Kind of Quiet

The water in the lagoon was the wrong kind of quiet.

Mara Quinn felt it first as a pressure against her eardrums, a thickness that had nothing to do with the brackish Florida current pushing through her regulator. The lagoon was shallow—eighteen feet at its deepest—but the silence had depth today. It pooled in the hollows of the sand, hung in the curtains of sea grass, pressed against the pale bellies of the nurse sharks that dozed in the shade of the dock pilings.

She should have been teaching. That was the job. That was the whole of it now.

Two tourists hovered in the water before her, their eyes wide above their masks, their fins sculling nervously as they waited for the next step in the certification drill. The woman—Deborah, from Ohio, an accountant who'd confessed she was afraid of open water—had just completed her mask clear. The man, her husband, had flooded his regulator twice and was starting to shiver despite the ninety-degree surface air.

"Again," Mara said, her voice muffled through the regulator. She pointed at the man's mouthpiece, made the sign for purge. "One more time."

He fumbled it. Water leaked in. He surfaced in a burst of panic, coughing, one hand flailing for the anchor line.

Mara let herself rise slowly, arms loose at her sides, the way her father had taught her. Never rush to meet the surface, Mara. The surface has no patience for those