Free Flashback by Nevada Barr Page B

panic to fear. Fear escalated to instinct.
    The flashlight fell into shadow. The dive knife strapped to Anna's calf found her palm. The blade slid into the top of her fin and with a slash her foot was cut free. She kicked back and up. The cabin rolled, keel looming into view sharp as a harrow, a kaleidoscope of ruin. The hard edge of the still-attached cabin door clawed at Anna's thigh, scraped down over her knee. Ignoring the pain, Anna pushed off the underside of the wreck.
    The moment she was free and safe, the movement stopped. Panting, bubbles and noise billowing out of her regulator, mask beginning to fog from internal heat, Anna suffered a horror that this was personal: the insensate, ruined hulk had wanted to kill her. Fear, no less intense because unrealistic, pushed up from her stomach in cold nauseating waves.
    Into the glittering cloud of air bubbles came Linda's face, pulled out of human shape by the dive gear. Thoughts of monsters from the black or any other lagoon were gone; for one rare moment Anna was comforted just not to be alone. Her heart slowed, her breathing began to return to normal. The fear was too much, too hard. Then Anna realized she must have coupled the rolling cabin with being trapped in the dark under nearly two hundred feet of ice-cold water nearly ten years before, experienced that fear for this.
    As good an explanation as any, she told herself. Evils sufficient unto the day.
    With the help of Linda's work-lined face, Anna pulled herself rapidly back together. Linda was signing but Anna's brain was not yet quite right-side up. She made the "okay" with both hands, hoping that was all the answer Linda required. Apparently it was, the agitated finger wiggling and twitching ceased. Bubbles returned to their normal noisy bursts. The women looked down on the offending wreck.
    An old hand, Linda hung in the water not moving, weight and buoyancy perfectly balanced. Anna, her weight belt a tad heavy, had to kick gently to maintain. Missing the one fin, she listed slightly.
    Yards of beautifully colored, incredibly varied and terribly fragile living coral had been crushed or scraped away. Anna felt the loss with greater sorrow than the loss of whoever belonged to the hairy, yellow-clad arm. She justified her inhumane leanings with the myth that her job inured her to human suffering.
    The wreck hadn't completely turned turtle. The coral crevice it wedged itself into during the original descent had stopped it. The top half of the cabin door-the left side, had the boat been upright-was above the coral boulder.
    Linda pointed. Down at the bottom, just peeking out of the crush between cabin and coral, was the finger. An image of the Wicked Witch of the East, smashed under Dorothy's house, only her feet protruding, came into Anna's mind, and she half expected to see the finger and the mangled palm to which it was attached shrivel and disappear beneath the fallen boat.
    At her elbow, Linda was scribbling on an underwater pad. Finished, she showed Anna: "We go in now?" Anna shook her head and took the notebook.
    "I go for ropes. Replace fin. You stay out of boat."
    Linda read, then made the okay sign and pointed at Anna's NPS camera. Understanding was established. Linda would continue to record the wreckage. Anna would refurbish her gear and get what was necessary to work safely around the sunken boat.
    In the ten minutes it took to return to the Activa, collect what she needed and swim back, the light grew immeasurably better. The sun had jumped high and sudden above the horizon. Some of the extra matter put into suspension by the shifting of the hull had settled out. All in all, with Linda swimming gracefully about snapping pictures of the kind required on any routine accident investigation, Anna was hard pressed to remember the alarums of a quarter of an hour before. Probably the facility to forget was one of the reasons she stayed in the line of work she'd chosen. Looking back, no matter what had actually