Free Below by Meg McKinlay Page A

whacked me with the paddle twice and almost ran me over once. Which may have been deliberate, although he denied it. But even with the bruises, it was better with someone there. In a strange way, knowing I could stop and get a lift made me feel less like I needed one.
    When we got there, Liam climbed off onto the platform and tethered the raft to the tree with some extra string.
    He was grinning. “Wow! It
is
the fire tree.”
    “Didn’t I say that?”
    “Yeah, I know. It’s just . . . it really is.” He knelt down and peered through the gap in the platform. “You can see the pegs! Five, six, seven . . . cool!” He looked up at me. “Hey, do you think we could go down?”
    “I don’t know,” I began, then stopped.
    I had been thinking about it last night. About how silly it was, really. It was the fire tree. It was huge. It used to take Elijah ten minutes to get down with the bucket. Holding our breath, we’d never get anywhere near the town. And even if we did, it was dark down there. It wasn’t like we’d be able to see anything. A lookout underwater wasn’t a lookout anymore. It was . . . just an old, dead tree, I guess.
    “What?”
    Liam was staring at me. It was funny when you realized that none of the thoughts running through your head had made it into the outside world, that they were yours and yours alone.
    Sometimes, given the kind of thoughts that ran through my head, it was a relief.
    “It’s high,” I said finally. “I mean deep. It’s —”
    “Two hundred feet. I know. I made it, remember?” He made a snipping movement with his hands. “I didn’t mean the whole way. Hang on.”
    Before I could stop him, he had stepped through the opening. Then he grinned, ducked his head under the water, and was gone.
    I pulled myself past the raft and up onto the platform, then peered down into the opening. I could see his feet kicking and the edges of his shorts flapping around in the water. A steady stream of bubbles rose after him toward the surface.
    Then his shorts were gone and his feet. The water healed over him, and the stream of bubbles grew thinner and thinner until there was just dark and the surface was still and quiet, as if he had never been there.
    It couldn’t have been long. I knew because I’ve timed myself, and thirty-two seconds is my absolute limit before I get to the edge of my breath and lift my head, spluttering and wheezing.
    I probably should have timed Liam. At least then I would have known when to start worrying. I would have known when to start tapping my fingers and rocking on my heels and scanning for bubbles. And maybe I wouldn’t have finally freaked out and stuck my face in the water at the exact moment he was rocketing up through it like he’d been shot out of a cannon.
    I reeled backward. “I think you’ve broken my nose.”
    He didn’t reply. He was too busy spluttering and wheezing.
    But he was also grinning.
    “I think I went too far,” he said finally. “You have to remember about getting back.”
    “Yeah.”
    “The pegs are good,” he said. “You can pull yourself down. Can’t see much, though.” He squinted out across the water. “So, the town square would be that way.”
    I thought back to my mosaic map from the day before. “I think so. And then the Old Lenton Road goes up around there.” I pointed around the lake to where Elijah and I had stood all those years ago.
    “I know,” Liam replied. “Dad showed me.”
    “What, when you used to come up here? Could you see something?”
    Liam climbed up onto the platform and sat down on the edge, dangling his feet over the side. “No, just in photos and stuff. He used to talk about it all the time. He had maps and everything. He used to go over them, like this.” He made a scanning motion with one finger. “Mom made him get rid of it all. She said it wasn’t good for him.”
    “How come?”
    He shrugged. “There was this doctor in the city. He said Dad was trying to go back to the