Into the light

Oh god — don't. Don't go there. Breathe!

Breathe.

It doesn’t help.

The back of my neck is taken under first. Then both arms at once, the skin pulling tight, goosebumps so hard they hurt — and a half-second behind them, always behind them, the sweat. Inside the suit. Cold turns it to ice. I'm shaking so hard I almost have to stop. But I can’t. I cannot be in the dark any longer. I have to get out. Get out of here and be finally done with the diving. The threats. And the fear. The fear was always there. Since that day.

Nine years old or twenty-three, the suffocation is exactly the same. It doesn't fade with age; it just waits for the lights to go out. I’ve lived with all kinds of fear since that day, but never like this.

I'd never had to face anything like this.

I didn't want to come down here. They pay for the dives — my parents' dives, and now mine — perpetual paychecks wrapped in threats and mockery. They wanted what's in the case. So I went. I had to. They didn't know I'd read the notebook first. They think I'm bringing it up to them. I'm bringing it up against them.

I’m being pulled under, again recognizing the darkness around me. My body convulses. No! Breathe! Light! Think of the light! The good light, the healing light, surrounding you, taking you in.

I can see them further ahead. On the boat. I check my oxygen and it shows almost red.

Fuck. I must've been down here longer than I thought. It’s only about a hundred meters now.

You can do this. Look at the light. The beacon of hope coming from the ship anchored a hundred meters away. About a hundred strokes. Two hundred kicks.

I can do it.

Breathe — slow, not too deep.

Concentrate on the light!

My father taught me how to read currents before he taught me algebra. "Water always tells you where it's going," he'd say. I found it the week after the funeral — both funerals, to be exact.

There was only one coffin.

People kept telling me that didn't matter. They'd never had to stand beside an empty hole in the ground while someone explained closure.

The sea gave me plenty, but nothing to bury. It gave a date, the fear, the betrayal. The sea gave me his notebook and took every chance I ever had to ask him what it meant.

My parents spent their lives on this. My dad went down into this trench on a day exactly like this one, and my mother went in after him when he didn't surface. The dark took them both and never said why. The dark was all that was left. It mocked me after that, waited in every corner. Even with lights in every socket of my life.

I never sleep without lights.

But even down here, my mind tries to count the sockets in my hallway at home. I know which bulb flickers first. I know the exact pitch of the hum they make when they’re beginning to fail, that high, thin frequency that signals a corner is about to go soft, then gray, then dark. People my age save for trips, for cars, for futures; I spend my inheritance keeping the darkness out of my life.

Eighty strokes. The case is clipped to my chest. It weighs less than it should and still pulls me down, like it wants to be where my parents are. Sealed. Mine to carry, not to open. I am carrying their dirty secrets up into the clean, blinding midday sun just so I can buy my way out of my parents contract. Finishing what they died for. I am trading their truth for my right to never look at the ocean again.

I kick toward the boat's beacon.

About seventy strokes away. Something is fundamentally wrong with the pressure. The water surrounding my visor should be thinning into a pale, structural blue as I rise, but the sky above must be choking on storm clouds; the murk remains a thick, unyielding graphite. It isn't getting lighter. If anything, the dark is flattening against my glass, compressing the space around me.

There is a flicker to my right. I freeze.

I’m suspended in the void. How can pitch black get even darker? It’s a displacement of light that isn't there, a sudden density in the water that makes the hair on my arms stand up inside the thermal lining. The ice-cold current meeting my suit shifts its weight. It is massive. It moves with the slow, horrifying familiarity of a mattress dipping when someone sits on the far edge of your bed in a pitch-black room.

Swim! Get out of here. Sixty strokes.

I kick, hard, but the water doesn't yield like it should. It feels thick, heavy, like turning through molasses. My heart rate spikes, hammering against my ribs, and on my HUD, the oxygen gauge doesn't just drift—it drops. The low-oxygen alarm begins to pulse, a tiny, rhythmic red light bleeding into the corner of my vision. Don't look back. The boat. Just the boat. It’s just the trench breathing, a tidal bore moving through the shelf, it’s just the trench—

A wall of displaced pressure hits me from the dark, slamming into my left side and jolting me sideways a few feet. I scream, a sound that rattles uselessly inside my fiberglass helmet.

Fifty strokes. Come on!

And that is when the memory of my father's notebook finally clicks into place, not as a collection of words, but as a survival map I am failing to follow. The three pages near the back—the ones where his smooth, elegant handwriting suddenly fractured into small, tight, desperate chicken-scratch. Careful words, as if he didn’t know what to reveal. It didn’t help. They got him anyway. It is patient, his frantic script had warned. It does not chase. It waits and lets you come closer, because it knows you are climbing toward the only thing that can—

The sentence had stopped there. For fourteen years, I thought he had been interrupted by a sudden attack. But as the water shifts again, pulling away from me like a giant lung drawing in a breath, the terrifying truth hits me. He wasn't interrupted. He just couldn't bring himself to write the conclusion because the conclusion meant giving up. It doesn't chase you, because it doesn't have to. It uses your own desperation against you. It lets you do the hard work of swimming right into its mouth because it knows you will always run toward the glare. The fear is gripping me again, the physical reaction of my body almost taking my breath.

Breathe! It’s all that I have. And the light. My lifelines.

I've lived with fear my whole life. But this is new.

The cold under the suit becomes absolute, freezing the sweat on my skin into a sheet of ice. My lungs seize. The red alarm on my visor is a solid, blinding strobe now, casting frantic crimson bars across the black water. I am completely out of air, choking on an empty regulator, staring into a dark so absolute it feels intelligent. It is surrounding me. I can feel its mass, an ancient, freezing presence waiting for my final kick.

Oxygen deprivation plays tricks on the brain. The lack of air makes my mind splinter, reaching backward into the safety of childhood, into the thousands of polite, well-lit rooms I built to hide from this exact moment.

It must be the sheer, panicked madness of me drowning, the words bubble out of my mouth and into the microphone of my dead radio:

“Have we met before?”

I don't expect an answer. But the low-frequency vibration doesn't come through my headset. It comes through the water, rattling the steel plates of my chest harness, vibrating directly into my bone marrow.

No, the cold answers from the deep. You'd have remembered.

The words don't just terrify me; they physically launch me upward. I don't think. I don't calculate. Every survival instinct I have left screams at me to tear myself away from that voice, away from the bottom, away from the floor of the world. I kick blindly, thrashing against the weight of the suit, tearing through the water until my vision blurs with silver bubbles.

And then, the black is finally thinning at the edges, going grey, going almost-blue, the way the world comes back when you climb toward morning.

Suddenly the lights from the boat are extremely bright, they don't just pierce the water; they shatter it. To me, they are holy. They don't reach far down. The black swallows them after a few meters.

The ladder swims up out of the murk.

The ladder my father never climbed.

I can barely see it against the bright lights.

I’ve made it!

The old rule of my childhood—the one I whispered to myself while staring at the ceiling of an empty bedroom while the lawyers argued over my parents' missing wills—hits me like a physical rush of adrenaline: Reach the light, and the things in the dark can't touch you.

I feel a bubble of hysterical laughter trap itself in my throat, rattling against the silicone of my regulator. I’m breaking the rules of the ascent, climbing too fast, my lungs screaming as the nitrogen bubbles dance in my blood, but I don't care. The glare is swallowing me whole, and for the first time in fourteen years, I am warm.

I almost cry with relief when my fingers close around the metal.

Not yet, you still need your oxygen!

The lights above me are so bright I throw a hand over my eyes.

So bright.

Too bright. Brighter than a boat. Brighter than the drowned sun.

What is this? I pause halfway through hurling myself up — one more grab and I break the surface — it's too bright.

I can’t move.

Why does it feel like the light is coming toward me? Why does it hurt so much?

Why does it feel like it’s swallowing me…

I’m slipping! I can’t breathe.

I can’t feel my fingers any longer. The light hurts so much I have to close my eyes, avert my face.

The dark never took them. It was the last mercy any of us got.

And the light — the light I prayed to my whole life, the light I swore was safe...

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