“You should not have given me all of the oxygen,” Alexei murmured from somewhere far away, probably right next to me.
“I didn’t.”
I’d taken mine when he wasn’t looking. Because I’d known full well that on dry land, once he’d seen that respirator in my mouth, he wouldn’t tolerate it in his, and he’d needed it more.
Or so I’d thought. But I couldn’t deny I was in bad shape right now. Dizzy, sick, unbalanced. How I’d piloted the boat back to shore, I’d never know. All I remembered was Alexei fumbling the satellite phone, dropping it overboard, and to be honest, I was struggling to gauge how much time had passed since then.
One day.
Two.
I need to sleep.
But I couldn’t close my eyes without the world spinning so hard I threw up, and I was done puking. I had to be. There was nothing left inside me.
The dizziness passed. I raised my head and looked out over the dark road. It swam a little, but I could handle that. I had to if we were ever going to get home.
A cool hand landed on my arm.
Aclumsyhand from the passenger seat. “I’m sorry,” Alexei said. “Is my fault we surfaced so fast.”
It was the first time either of us had acknowledged the source of the mess we were in. Decompression sickness. The bends. It wasn’t going to kill us, but there’d been moments when I’d feared it might. “You didn’t break your respirator valve.”
“I panicked. Maybe if I had not—”
“I ran out of air too. And it was my fault we didn’t pick up the other tanks.”
“Those tanks would not have been there without you.”
I was too tired to play this game. “Forget about it. We had a plan. It worked. Nothing else matters except getting home.”
“You can drive?”
“I can try.”
Right now, it was the most honest answer I could give.
And optimistic, as it turned out. Half an hour later, I pulled over to puke at the side of the road. The pressure in my head made my eyeballs hurt, but when I was done, something had shifted in me and I no longer felt like I was looking at the world sideways.
It’s passing.A thought that should’ve comforted me but didn’t, because I knew what was coming next.Pain. Lots of it. The kind that found the worst parts of me and dredged them up to the surface.
I dragged my aching body to the back of the van, found a water bottle, and washed my face. Torture bloomed in every joint—hips, shoulders, wrists—and my weary mind took me on a trip down memory lane. To a sterile room in an American hospital.
“Take these for a few weeks. They’ll help you sleep.”
My hand shook.
I dropped the planet-killing plastic bottle.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t pick it up.
I left it where it was and drifted back to the driver’s seat.
Alexei was asleep, reminding me how hard the bends had hit him. How close we’d come to leaving too much of ourselves in the ocean.
Another hour and he’d have needed hyperbaric.
I pushed the thought aside. Looked forward, not back.Decoy.I needed him so bad it choked me, and at the pace I was driving, I couldn’t see an end any time soon.
