I spent six weeks creating a special mermaid performance for my brother’s bride, only to be publicly humiliated—then she asked why he’d accused me of trying to steal their money.

Arthur Sterling weighed two hundred and ten pounds dry. Wet, wearing a three-piece wool suit, he was dead weight.

Elise dropped into the chest-deep water beside Maggie, gasping as the freezing cold hit her ribs. Together, the two women dragged the seventy-two-year-old man off the bar into the swirling water.

“Arthur!” Maggie slapped the old man’s cheek with her wet palm. “Arthur, wake up! Look at me!”

Arthur’s eyelids fluttered. His gray eyes, usually so sharp and predatory in the boardroom, were cloudy with hypoxia and pain. “Maggie...?” he rasped.

“Take this,” Maggie ordered, shoving the primary regulator between his lips. “Breathe, Arthur! You want to see Elise have children? You breathe!”

The old man’s chest hitched. He clamped his jaws down on the silicone mouthpiece and took three deep, ragged breaths of Maggie’s remaining air.

*HISS-CHOP. HISS-CHOP.*

The dive computer gave a final, continuous high-pitched tone: **0 PSI. EMPTY.**

The tanks were dry.

At that exact second, the center window failed.

It didn't shatter into small pieces; the four-inch acrylic sheet ruptured down the middle like an ice shelf splitting in the spring. A wall of green, freezing Atlantic ocean water eight feet high blew through the frame with a sound like an exploding artillery shell.

The wave hit them from behind.

Maggie saw it coming in the reflection of the stainless-steel sconces. She grabbed Elise with her left arm, hooked her right arm under Arthur’s chin, and threw all three of them toward the open mouth of the intake pipe just as fifty tons of water crashed over their heads.

The force was unimaginable.

Maggie was slammed against the masonry wall, the breath knocked violently from her lungs. The water in the room rose in three seconds from five feet to ten feet, submerging the light sconces, hitting the plaster ceiling, turning the room into a totally sealed, airless tomb.

They were underwater. No air. No visibility. Total darkness.

Maggie’s training took over. Her mind went dead, cold, and clear.

She didn't try to swim up toward the ceiling—there was no air up there, only concrete and electrical conduits. She kicked downward, finding the lip of the three-foot pipe with her boots.

Arthur was limp in her right arm. Elise was thrashing beside her, her lungs screaming for oxygen, her hands clawing at Maggie’s drysuit.

Maggie found Elise’s face in the pitch-black water. She pulled Elise’s mouth to her own, pushed the last small pocket of air from her own bronchial tubes into the bride’s mouth, and then shoved Elise violently, headfirst, into the intake pipe.

*Go!* Maggie screamed in her mind. *CRAWL!*

Elise’s kicking boots hit Maggie’s chest as the bride scrambled into the conduit.

Then Maggie turned to Arthur.

The old man was completely unconscious. His mouth had fallen open; bubbles were trailing from his lips. He had thirty seconds before his heart stopped permanently.

Maggie grabbed the collar of his suit jacket with both hands, jammed her boots against the stone doorframe of the underwater room, and backed into the dark pipe, dragging Arthur Sterling’s two-hundred-pound body across the razor-sharp barnacles with her bare, bleeding hands.

The current inside the pipe was reversing now. With the room completely full, the water had nowhere else to go; the surging tide began to push them back toward the well.

Maggie pulled. Her vision was tunneling into gray spots. Her lungs felt like they were filled with crushed glass. She had been without air for sixty seconds under heavy exertion—her threshold was ninety seconds before blacking out.

Seventy seconds.

Her knuckles dragged against the oyster shells, leaving long ribbons of skin behind on the iron rungs. She didn't feel the pain. She felt only the rhythmic, primitive beat of her mother’s voice in the deep core of her brain: *“Kick, Maggie. Long strokes. Don't fight the water. Let the water carry you.”*

Eighty seconds.

Her vision went black. She was blind. Her chest heaved in an involuntary, violent spasm, trying to pull water into her throat. She clamped her teeth shut, biting her tongue until the copper taste of blood filled her mouth to stop the reflex.

Then, hands grabbed her.

Strong, young hands gripped the wrists of her drysuit.

Tessa was in the water. Tessa had swum down from the wellhead with a spare rescue cylinder.

A rubber regulator was slammed between Maggie’s lips. A palm hit the purge button.

*WHOOSH!*

Clean, sweet, high-pressure oxygen blasted down Maggie’s throat. She choked, coughed, and inhaled the air with a ragged, whistling roar that echoed inside the iron pipe.