Chapter 15
Tia Cameron
Call sign: Thimble
Tia lugged her full tank to a bare space on the bow where she could set up the regulator and BCD. When everything was connected—tubes
and mouthpieces flailing about—she laid the tank on its back and hunted for her fins and mask. Rylan lagged behind her.
Tia hadn’t seen her family laughing and talking like they just had been in years. It made her angry, furious even, but not
because she thought they were faking it or even that it made her guilty about her plan to run away.
She was angry because they had found that sense of family after all this time without her.
Not that it was new for Rylan to be Lila and Francis’s favorite child. They’d always had a sort of fascination with him that
curdled to disgust whenever Tia tried, in vain, to get them to focus on her.
Tia tried to force herself to relax, tell herself she didn’t care about her parents anymore, but she couldn’t help it. It
was like she was a kid all over again, desperate for attention and receiving only mild disinterest.
Francis and Lila had disappeared belowdecks, and MJ was at the stern of the ship, muttering something to Nico, who had popped out from the chart house companionway with his guitar strapped to his back.
Tia headed toward them until she almost tripped into the open dive locker.
The locker was similar to the anchor one up at the bow, only it was wedged in the walk space between midships and the cockpit/stern.
She knew it was there and that it was open, and she wouldn’t have stumbled except that Alejandro was stooped inside, working on a tank valve.
“Alejandro?” What was he doing in the dive locker? As far as Tia remembered, he had never been on a dive with them. He wasn’t
certified, let alone interested.
Alejandro straightened up and nodded to her. “Tia.”
“What are you doing?”
“MJ asked me to grab a tank for her while she speaks to Nicolás.” Alejandro handed her the tank and hauled himself out of
the locker, shutting the panel behind him. “Make sure she gets it, sí, Tia?”
“Sure.” Tia glanced back at MJ and Nico who had gone their separate ways like they’d never spoken.
Tia lugged the two tanks to the stern and laid them on their sides. She had stored her mask and fins in a cabinet in the chart
house, so she headed belowdecks to find them. The counter, which was usually tidy aside from the open ship’s log, had been
papered with maps. Tia stopped what she was doing and peered at the navigational charts spread out beneath and around the
log. A protractor and a ruler were lying on top of Georgia. Someone had drawn out their sailing route from New Haven to West
Palm Beach in pencil with little dots along the way marking the projected coordinates. Icara Key was roughly adjacent with
Southern Virginia. There was a different set of coordinates marked in the ship’s log, circled several times with a red pen.
Francis’s handwriting. He must have left it as a note for himself.
Tia located her mask and fins and headed back on deck where she’d left the tanks.
Rylan came up beside her. “You’re pissed,” he said.
“Thanks for letting me know.” Tia double-checked her gear as Rylan fixed his octopus mouthpiece to his tank valve.
“Thimble . . .” He sounded more exasperated than apologetic, Tia thought.
MJ walked up behind them, wet suit bunched up at her hips. She mussed Rylan’s hair, and he ducked his head sharply.
“Like old times, huh? Lord, I haven’t been diving since two summers ago when we saw that eagle ray in Antigua.”
Rylan avoided eye contact. “Yeah. I’m so excited.”
The three of them dragged their gear to the stern of the boat where Nico had unhooked the lifeline and settled on one of the
sunbathing mattresses to strum his guitar. The Old Eileen’s orange life preserver looked like a drop of sunshine against the deck.
Unwind Yachting Co.
Safe to sail in any gale!
Tia stood shoulder to shoulder with her father and her twin as MJ took charge.
“We’re going to enter with a giant stride off the stern,” she told them.
Tia couldn’t help but glance at her father. Was this going to be a fight, MJ taking charge of the dive? Francis, however,
seemed fine. He leaned behind Tia to yank one of Rylan’s shoulder straps tighter.
“Make this signal once you pop up to the surface to show all’s well.” MJ tapped her fist to the top of her head. “Like so.
Then we will all descend together. I’m not sure how this dive site looks, so be careful and stay with your buddy.”
“I’ll buddy with Rylan,” Francis said silkily. Of course he would. Since they were so close now. Tia looked to see Rylan’s reaction. He had his eyes on the deck. Where had all his excitement for the dive gone?
“No, you will not,” MJ answered with all the flexibility of a mountain range. A muscle jumped in Francis’s jaw, and Tia cleared
her throat before the two could go at it again.
She would have loved to buddy with MJ, but the last thing Rylan needed was to spend this whole dive demonstrating skills for
Francis. If he were paired with MJ, he could focus on the fish. He could relax. Tia wished she could just buddy with her brother,
but Francis always stressed the importance of them being with a more experienced diver.
The things I do for you, Minnow.
“Dad, Rylan’s gotten to be your buddy for dives all year,” Tia said. “I want to go with you. Please?” She mustered her best
daddy’s-little-girl eyes, and Francis gave in with reluctance.
MJ patted Rylan’s arm. “That leaves us, sonny. Do you have your underwater whiteboard? You can take notes on any wildlife
we find.”
Rylan nodded but didn’t acknowledge Tia or her sacrifice. She would find a way to talk to him alone after the dive. He’d probably
thank her then for taking one for the team.
“I can go in first,” Tia announced. Protecting Rylan did that to her, flooded her with a strange kind of pride. She wondered
sometimes if his fear made her braver, if there was only so much strength between them and she preferred being the one to
have it all.
Tia inflated her BCD so that there would be enough air to keep her floating on the surface, then put her hand over her mask
and the regulator in her mouth to stop them from flying off on impact. She took a huge step over the side of the boat and
crashed down fifteen feet.
When they were all in the water, MJ gave a thumbs-down to signal that they were ready to descend. Tia took a deep breath, hearing the telltale sign of the regulator’s Darth Vader breathing, and slipped beneath the surface.
Bubbles crowded her mask as Tia sank and blew gently through her nose to equalize her ears. Nico’s guitar-playing and the
steady heat from the sun were inconsequential the moment they were underwater.
A sandy bottom was visible about sixty feet down, and to Tia’s left was a cluster of huge boulders, crumbs broken off of the
croissant island. A school of electric blue and black fish nibbled curiously at the dark underbelly of The Old Eileen. Damselfish, Tia remembered from her dive pamphlet. They were some of Rylan’s favorites.
MJ swam in front and used a metal rod to tap on her gauge, the handheld device that told each of them how much air they had.
Tia took the hint and made a mental note of her gauge, which pointed toward 2800 PSI. Plenty of air for a dive. She turned
over the device to check how deep they had gone: already forty-five feet.
Francis caught up to Tia and waved to get her attention. He pointed at the rock cluster near the island. Tia signaled okay, creating a circle with her thumb and index finger, with her other three fingers sticking up, and stuck her ankles together
and dolphin-kicked, pretending she was a mermaid. If it weren’t for the steady presence of the tank on her back, she almost
could have been.
Her father paused after a few minutes and gestured at something nestled in the sand, flat and seemingly made of sand itself.
It was a regular fish that had been rolled out like cookie dough and now skittered over the ground, paper-thin. The ocean
never ceased to surprise.
Francis swam deeper to examine the fish. He scooped up a shell inside of which a shy pink crab drew in its legs. Before following, Tia scanned the area for Rylan and MJ. They were gone, probably exploring the rocky parts that promised to reveal more marine life.
Tia and her father continued leisurely along the ocean floor. This was the way Tia preferred her father: quiet and exploratory,
like Rylan. Here, there was a temporary truce where there could be no verbal tug-of-war, no power struggle or testiness.
No . . . All human intentions were cut short at the entrance to the sea.
Tia checked her gauge: 1200 PSI. Time lilted underwater. She understood how Rylan felt, never wanting to leave, but there
would be more diving to come on the trip. It was time to find the others and resurface. Tia got her father’s attention and
attempted charades to ask him where Rylan and MJ might be. Should they surface and meet up with the others back there? Francis
signaled they should look around a little longer and then ascend.
Together they retraced their swim, weaving around rocks and even gliding through a tunnel. The Old Eileen came back in sight, the surface of the sea like twisted blown glass.
But not MJ or Rylan. Where could they have gone that Tia and Francis hadn’t seen? Maybe they’d been carried by a current to
a new location or were already back at the boat. Tia gave Francis the thumbs-up, the signal to ascend, but Francis shook his
head and pointed behind her.
Rylan was swimming toward them, doing everything a diver shouldn’t.
His arms scrambled through water to reach them faster, his mask was half flooded, and Tia knew just by looking into his eyes that her brother was hyperventilating.
Any annoyance Tia had felt toward him before the dive dissipated, and she swam hard to reach him.
A panicked diver was unpredictable and needed—at all costs—to be kept from rocketing to the surface and rupturing their lungs.
Rylan pointed frantically, but what he was pointing at, Tia couldn’t tell.
Was there a shark? A riptide? What had terrified him so thoroughly?
Tia latched onto Rylan’s shoulder straps. They needed to make a controlled emergency ascent. She signaled for him to breathe
and started kicking to go up. As they ascended, she fumbled through the water and found Rylan’s inflator and deflator, deflating
all the air from his BCD and hers so their buoyancy wouldn’t shoot them upward and tear their lungs. She didn’t know where
MJ or Francis were, but it didn’t matter right now. They were almost there.
Their heads broke the surface after what felt like hours. Rylan ripped his mask off his head and the regulator from his mouth
before Tia could stop him. Divers weren’t supposed to shed their gear until they were back on land or boat. Even though the
water wasn’t choppy, it was still moving. He could lose his mask or choke on water or worse.
Rylan gasped and struggled to form words as tears sprung in his eyes. “We . . . w-we’ve gotta . . . We have to . . . Oh God,
oh God . . .”
“Hey!” Tia shook him a little. She wasn’t going to get anything out of him in this state. “Count with me. Just to ten, okay?
One, two, three . . .”
He counted with her, stuttering over the words, until he finally found a pattern of breathing that wasn’t going to cause him
to faint in her arms.
“Okay,” said Tia once they reached ten. “Talk to me.”
He stared at her with the eyes of a wild animal.
“Something happened to MJ.”