Chapter Forty
“Struggle - to move about strenuously so as to escape from something confining.”
Piper
When I realized the sound of splitting ice was coming from beneath my feet, I knew true fear. All I could think about was the glacial, dark water that churned just below me, waiting to swallow me whole.
I called out to Dex, knowing he was too far away to help me, knowing if he came any closer he, too, would be captured by the ice, but I couldn’t stop my lips from forming his name.
At first he looked confused. Like me, he hadn’t realized we’d driven onto a frozen lake.
Then he looked scared, like watching me drown would be too horrible to experience.
And then I was falling, thrust into the shadowy, subzero water.
The layers of my clothes acted like an overzealous sponge that soaked up the water as fast as it could, and then the weight of the wet layers seemed to drag me down.
Down, down, down I went until I thought I would never go up again.
But then my arms started working and my brain started screaming.
I have to get out!
When my head broke the surface, I gasped, taking in air, air I knew was cold but actually felt warm compared to the rest of my body. My lungs filled painfully, almost as if the warm air was too much to breathe.
“Dex!” I tried to call, but I got a mouth full of water that I had to spit out. “Dex!” I called again. This time my voice was stronger.
Finally I caught sight of him. He was still in the same place he had been when I fell and I wondered why he was still standing there. It felt like I’d been fighting this water for hours.
The rational part of me knew it probably had been only a minute, but when the water was this cold minutes might be all I had.
I glanced at him again as I struggled to stay afloat, my arms straining under the weight of my layers, and he had the strangest look on his face. Almost like resolve. Almost like he was watching something he didn’t quite like but was still going to do nothing about it.
I heard another jagged cracking sound and then Dex was gone—my only hope of survival swimming with the ice as well.
In that moment my arms stopped cooperating and my thoughts became sluggish. It became harder and harder to stay afloat and I felt myself sinking… sinking down into the depths of a frozen world. A world where nothing would be warm again.