Free Unbroken Connection by Angela Morrison Page B

and focuses on my eyes. The computer is going nuts with alarms and flashing numbers. I nod. Slow. Reassuring. I know how to deal with this. Trained long hours to deal with this.
    My computer signals me to stop at 80 feet for our first decompression stop. Karen is over buoyant now without half her weights and the empty tank. I can tell she’s getting freaked. Maybe she’s narc’d. I don’t think she understands why we’re stopping here. Remember your training, Karen. Our blood is chocked full of nitrogen. If we hang here nice and calm for a few minutes, it can come out of solution in tiny bubbles that won’t hurt us. If we skip this extra deco time, the nitrogen bubbles will be too big. She’ll get the bends. You know this, Karen. Come on. Remember your training.
    I hold up my computer and show her the timer—point to the seconds ticking down.
    She shows me her air supply gauge.
    Almost gone. Okay. I reach to hand her my octopus, the spare reg rigged to my tank. I’ve got plenty of O2 for her.
    Instead of taking the mouthpiece like she should be trained to do, she lets go of me and shoots to the surface.
    Freak. This can’t be happening.
    I swim after her. No way can I stay down here safely decompressing. If she panicked and held her breath, she could be unconscious and hemorrhaging on the surface from an embolism—exploded air sacs—in her lungs. Or bent pretty bad. Crap. This could kill her.
    But on the surface, she’s laughing. “Gosh, we made it. That was close. Damn this old vest. Do you have an extra rental?”
    “Breathe from this.” I stick my octopus in her mouth. I’m diving with Nitrox—extra oxygen in the mix. She hasn’t qualified for it yet. She needs all the O2 she can get to minimize whatever damage all that nitrogen is doing inside her body. “I’ll get you on oxygen back on the boat.”
    “What do you mean? I’m fine. I exhaled all the way.”
    “Just a precaution. You might get bent.”
    She laughs it off.
    We’re behind the Zodiac following the main group so they don’t see us on the surface. I fumble to find the emergency whistle clipped to my B.C., blow it and then blow into my long, orange safety sausage. Freak. I should have done this underwater. It just takes a puff of air at depth. Good they see us.
    Karen’s fingers and the side of her face tingle by the time we get to the Queenie N. Bad sign. She’s got decompression sickness. The nitrogen bubbles are already blocking capillaries, starving her tissues. We’ll have to get her to a chamber for treatment. I hope the pain doesn’t get too bad. The faster we get there the less permanent nerve damage she’ll have.
    I get Karen on O2 while Captain Jean calls everyone in. And we motor out of there at top speed. She stays really calm—scared, but not in a knot screaming from the pain. The oxygen must be helping.
    Freak, her right thigh goes numb twenty minutes later.
    The tip of my nose itches, but it’s nothing.
    The closest decompression chamber is in Phuket Town. Freak. Who knows how many hours that’s going take?
    We get to the dock at Rangon in two and a half hours. Jean really booked it—kept the old girl at top speed the whole way. We wait another thirty for the helicopter.
    As we shift Karen onto a gurney, she grimaces and says, “All this fuss. I’m sorry.”
    I pat her hand. “Do you want me to come with you?”
    She watches the Thai EMT strapping her onto a gurney. “Please.”
    Claude tosses me a shirt, and I follow the EMTs off the Queen N., duck as I run to the helicopter and climb in.
    I squat down by Karen as the tech places the helicopter’s O2 mask on her face. I take her hand and stroke it. She squeezes mine.
    “Just breathe.” I glance at the tech, and he nods. “Nice and slow. Deep breaths. Good. Now blow it out, slowly, slowly. Now breathe in deep again. Hold it if you can. Let the oxygen go to your brain. Good. Again.”
    Karen closes her eyes against the sun streaming through the helicopter