Rychor suddenly became inpatient, looking up at the ceiling first as if he had heard something. “Go,” he said, pushing her toward the hole before she could get her arms in the suit.
“Wait, I… what…?” But she gave up, because she sensed that this was what Rychor had asked her to trust him about. She eyed the edges of the rectangle Rychor had made in the door warily, but incredibly, they were not made of twisted metal with sharp edges, but were rather nice and smooth.
She twisted through the hole easily and stood on the other side. It was the cavern with the soothing waters, and she was relieved to be there, even if she couldn’t say why.
She slipped her arms into the suit as Rychor wriggled through—a task far more difficult for him because of his size.
He looked her up and down. “Go. Go to the edge of the water.”
“Why?”
Rychor glared at her and started to run in another direction, out of her sight almost before she even recognized that he had started running.
She got flustered, heat flaring up all over her skin, but then instinct kicked in and she made a series of decisions very quickly. There was no other option that seemed viable at this point but to do what Rychor said.
She stood at the edge of the water, fiddling with the various straps and devices for the exo-suit. J Stevens was a great deal bigger than her, and so she wasn’t even sure if it would work. She tried out the headpiece—it operated like a deployable life safety jacket or helmet, automatically in case of a severe fall, but could also be activated manually. It worked, and she retracted it.
Rychor was still gone, and the cave seemed empty. She looked at the door and the hole in it, and her heart almost stopped when she saw that the green-blue light on the interior was flashing, and distantly, far down the corridor, she was sure she saw movement.
“Rychor?” she shouted.
They were getting closer, close enough now that she could hear their incoming footsteps, like the beat of horse hooves, thundering toward the cavern.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, looking down at her exo-suit, wondering if she should get out of it, quickly concluding she had no recourse and was going to have a lot of regrets in the final seconds of her life. She squeezed her eyes shut, one last pang of hurt throbbing in her heart for Rychor’s having betrayed her. She guessed. If not, what was happening?
She had always been stupid in love, she thought. It was really no coincidence that it was going to be the death of her, though she really had always assumed her curiosity would do her in all by itself.
“It’s been a joint effort, guys,” she whispered, smiling a little in spite of the situation. The footsteps became louder, she felt a breeze, she accepted her fate and stretched her arms out just as the roar became so loud that she was sure everything was ending… in an engine, from the sound of it. But she wasn’t about to look at it.
A sudden silence.
She opened her eyes.
She was still standing at the edge of the water, her arms outstretched, but the door and the thundering feet seemed to have disappeared.
Completely.
She stared, her arms falling slowly to her sides.
Where the door had been, there was now only rock, a fine dust swirling around it. Despite being a scientist, her first thought was of magic. But then she began to piece it together. From the doorless rock up along a steep embankment, there was a trail of freshly chipped rocks and boulders, and leaping like an animal on the hunt was Rychor, coming down toward her.
Had he just moved a whole boulder to close off the door? She blinked slowly, impressed.
“We don’t have much time,” Rychor said, as he leaped toward her. She expected and craved his embrace, but he seized her by the shoulders and turned her toward the water and pointed her hand toward a stream that disappeared into a tunnel in the rock. “Your suit is compatible with liquids as well as gases, is it not?”
“I…what? If it…” she searched her mind for the answer, trying to put down the other questions surfacing in her mind.
“It will extract oxygen from the water, will it not? Tests indicate that it will.”
“Uh… yes.”
“Can you swim a long distance?”
She looked over at the tunnel and back at the boulder, then at Rychor. “I don’t… what are you doing? What’s happening?”
“Can you swim a long distance? Yes or no?”
“How long?” she wailed, getting scared as she looked at the strange tunnel and stranger water, slowly realizing that Rychor was suggesting she swim into it.
