But this wasn’t that.
I remembered Evan saying that he’d become bent on serving Madaster justice. Now, I’d become the bent and twisted one. I thought of only one thing as I stowed my equipment on the speedboat and started up the motor: Revenge. The word pulsed in my veins.
It was my true birthright.
I anchored a little farther to the south of where Manny had secured the cruiser that day when Valeria and I dived. There was an outcropping of stone here that I believed would obscure Madaster’s view of the boat from the tower.
I back flopped into the cold water alone. I recognized the whitish-gray, bleached sand below me, and the skeletal stone outcroppings. When I reached the drastic drop-off of the Great Wall, I turned on my dive light. I swam along the cliff’s ledge toward the n
orth, trying to approximate where Valeria and I had dropped over the wall. I feared that I wouldn’t find the wide, deep cavern we’d previously entered.
Thinking I’d swum far enough, I kicked over the cliff. More than a thousand feet of water yawned below. Coldness and that dreadful thrill passed through me. I descended over the massive stone wall.
I was insignificant and alone, and I couldn’t trust myself.
Terror seized me. Large clouds of bubbles burst from my regulator. I couldn’t catch my breath.
(You’re not alone, darling.)
(Follow your instinct.)
Stay with me, Elizabeth.
It was the first time I’d ever addressed her by name in my head. Whether it was crazy of me or not, I don’t know. I acted purely on survival now. Maybe being a little mad would keep me alive.
Just when I was thinking of surfacing and reorienting myself, I spotted the large hole in the wall below me. I entered the wide cavern, my dive light reflecting off the pale walls. A reassuring feeling of familiarity went through me.
You dived here often, didn’t you, Elizabeth?
(Yes. Both into the cave and out of it. The spring has been there since the tunnel was first built. They built around it. You’ll see. Follow the light in the darkness, darling.)
A jolt of adrenaline went through me. Like that first time with Valeria, I swam with a confidence I shouldn’t have felt. I realized now I’d been—and was now— experiencing Elizabeth’s certainty. These were her waters.
I got to the place where the tunnel of gray boulders and smooth rock faces narrowed. I looked up, but saw only a stone ceiling. Had I gone too far? Where was that tiny, flickering light that had made no sense to me?
No sooner had I started to worry when I glided out of the horizontal tunnel into a vertical one. The stone floor and roof disappeared. I shined my light upward. I looked up a stone tube. It was like a natural well, approximately ten feet in circumference. I tilted the flashlight down, and realized I was suspended in deep water. My light couldn’t find the bottom, it went down so far.
I turned out my light, abandoning myself to the cold, black water and trying to ignore the anxiety tightening my chest.
There it was. The tiny light far above me. It shimmered slightly, as though it reflected upon a circular pool of water. The spring. Stark relief, combined with a sad sense of inevitability, swept through me.
I swam up the vertical tunnel, already knowing what I was about to face. I’d already seen it in the mirror in Les Jumeaux.
I used my flashlight to scan the rock walls as I ascended the vertical tunnel. Twenty to thirty feet below the surface of the pool above me, my light illuminated something that made me start. I almost dropped my light into the unknown depth of water below me.
I hung in the water, my flashlight beam trained on her.
Madaster had intended to dispose of Elizabeth’s lifeless body into the void of the vertical drop. But she’d been caught on a suspended rock outcropping. She’d landed in a C-shaped indentation very close to the ledge, one leg bent awkwardly behind her, her torso slumped against the curving stone.
Willing my breathing to even, I slowly approached her.
On the night Elizabeth had disappeared, she’d come here. To see her father. To confront him here, in their secret place. To tell him she planned to cut him out, like a cancer, from her life.
(Daddy didn’t take it well, when I told him that I understood the truth now. Or at least I understood better. Evan, the doctors, the counselors, and other patients had really started to get through to me. I understood better than I ever had before, how horrible my own father had been to me for my whole life. We weren’t gifted because we were Madasters. We were sick. Interbred. Emotional cancers twisted and pierced every cell in our body. But Evan had finally started to convince me I could get better… that maybe, just maybe, the Madaster poison could be eradicated.
When I called Daddy and said I wanted to speak to him, he insisted on meeting here. In our secret place. I think he suspected that I was going to say I never would see him again. That was a truth he couldn’t bear. I think he knew he could hide the truth, in this place only we knew about.)
I saw it now, as if it was my own memory, not hers.