13

Air hunger tore me from sleep.

Gasping and hacking, I levered to a sitting position, which should have sent a shock of pain through my chest wall but didn't. When the choking spasms eased, I touched the broken rib. Still tender but not nearly so much as last night. That unguent Maya had applied seemed to have worked. I'd have to find out what was in it and—

Listen to me, I thought. As if I'm ever going to have a chance to put it to use.

My throat was so swollen I could barely swallow my saliva.

I looked around and realized I was alone. I wanted her here, wanted to hold her, to tell her how curing me no longer mattered, that she'd transformed the remainder of my life. But Maya must have left during the night. I felt crushed. I hadn't heard her go. I'd slept like the dead.

But just before I'd dropped off I had an idea . . .

I struggled to my feet and stumbled to the door of my hut. I stared across the beach and the water to the spires of the La Mano Hundiendo. I thought I knew a way to reach the water tines.

But why on earth should I want to? I felt weak and sick, and I knew this was probably the last day I'd be able to swallow anything, so why devote my rapidly shrinking time and energy on such a fool's errand?

I couldn't explain it, but I felt driven to reach that last tine. Maybe it was because this was a task I'd begun and hadn't completed. Maybe I didn't want to leave behind any unfinished business. Maybe Captain Carcinoma was metastasizing through my brain and affecting my critical faculties. But as much as anything else, I wanted to do it for Maya.

I was determined to win my fourth tine before I died.

I spotted Maya standing with Ambrosio and my pulse quickened. Just looking at her gave me new strength. I realized then how completely I'd fallen under her spell.

I started toward them. Her warm smile when she saw me approaching made me lightheaded. I started to reach for her but a fleeting look of warning and a quick shake of her head warned me off. Why? Wasn't the sabia allowed a public display of affection? To have been with her, within her last night and now not to touch her . . . I might have been devastated if I hadn't sensed that her response would have been different in private.

“I want to try for the water tine again,” I said in a dry rasp.

Maya looked at me with pain in her jade eyes. “But your rib, your strength . . .”

“I think I have a way,” I said. “But I'll need Ambrosio's help.”

“I do not know if this is right,” Maya said as Ambrosio piloted us toward La Mano Hundiendo.

“How can it be wrong?” I said, straining to be heard over the little outboard. “I'll be entering the water as I was born, as you said I must.”

“But you will be holding onto a stone.”

“Yes. All stones belong to the Mother, right? I'll merely be taking one from the land and depositing it in the sea.”

“I do not know,” she said.

For the first time since we'd started this quest, Maya seemed unsure of what must be done and how to do it. And I felt like some sort of ersatz theologian, taking the premises of her mythology and interpreting them to my own advantage.

“It is just that I have never heard of it being done this way before.”

“Well, either we try this, or give up. Because there's no other way I can do it.”

Last night's image of a stone dropping into a pool of water had haunted me, reminding me of the weight belt that was an indispensable part of scuba gear. Why not use a heavy stone to speed me into the depths?

Before leaving shore, Ambrosio and I had scouted up a granite boulder that weighed in at a good fifty pounds. It sat beside me now in the front of the boat.

I watched the thumb spire almost hungrily as it loomed above us. I was in a fever now. The imperative to obtain my fourth tine had ballooned out of all sensible proportion. I was going to accomplish this, even if it was the last act of my life.

No longer inhibited about being naked before Maya, I stripped off my shirt and pants as soon as Ambrosio cut the engine. He came forward and helped me lift the boulder, then backed away when I had a good grip on it. My weakened legs trembled under the weight of the rock I clutched against my chest. Then I felt Maya's hands on my shoulders, felt her lips brush the back of my neck.

“Let the Mother guide your hand,” she said.

I nodded and thought that Mama had damn well better guide my hand—I had only one boulder, only one shot at this. If I missed on this try, I'd have to call it quits.

I stared at the chubby fertility figure carved in the spire's flank and I took four breaths as deeply as the broken rib would allow, then I pushed the stone toward it and leaped off the boat. Keeping a deathgrip on the stone, I followed it into the water, letting it pull me into the depths. I kicked to boost our descent but almost let go when I saw the shark directly below me. It darted out of my path and out of sight as I plummeted past.

I saw the geode approaching and released the stone as I came abreast of it. The granite continued dropping. My lungs were complaining as I reached for one of the green-hued tines among the crystals, but I still had air to spare. Why hadn't I thought of this before? I could have saved myself so much angst.

I snapped off the first tine I touched and kicked back toward the surface, my natural buoyancy drawing me upward. I glanced around for the shark but saw no trace of it.

As I had on every other try, I broke surface next to the boat, but this time I wasn't empty handed.

“Got it!” I croaked as I grabbed the gunwale.

I saw tears on Maya's smiling face as I immediately reached over and dropped the tine into the boat—the last thing I needed now was to drop it back into the water. As I heard it hit the floorboards, a feeling of peace swept through me. Mission accomplished: no more unfinished business.

But as Ambrosio was helping me into the boat I felt something sharp tear into my right leg, clamp on it like a vise, and jerk me back into the water. I gasped half a breath before I was dragged below the surface.

The shark! It could only be the shark!

I fluttered my arms in frantic, panicky strokes, fighting back to the surface, but it kept pulling me down. A strange mix of thoughts and images cascaded through my brain—I saw Annie in her wedding gown, Kelly in the newborn nursery, Maya leaning over me last night, and I thought, Is this how it all ends—eaten by a shark?

And then the terrible tearing pressure on my calf was gone, replaced by the sting of salt in an open wound. Dazed, numb, fighting shock, I clawed my way toward the surface, half expecting another attack.

Air! Where was the surface? How far down had the shark dragged me? I felt hands grab my arms before my head even broke the surface, and then Maya and Ambrosio were hauling me out of the water and into the boat.

Black spots were flashing and growing in my vision. I heard Maya's voice, high pitched with fear, saying “Oh no! Oh no!” I had a glimpse of my bloody leg before she wrapped a shirt—mine?— around it. A roaring grew in my ears, and from somewhere far away I heard Ambrosio.

“Lucky you so thin, señor. The shark he like the fat man. He spit out the skinny man.”

I clutched at consciousness, desperately trying to hold onto it—I had so few moments left, I didn't want to waste a single one—but its hem slipped from my grasp and I dropped into darkness.