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“You poor thing.”
The words break through the haze of disorientation. Lisa blinks, and blinks again. The world is fuzzy, dark, lights shimmering back and forth in the water turning what little she can see into a broken kaleidoscope.
“Kate?” she mumbles. The figure outside the cage shakes its head, the movement making Lisa’s vision sway with it.
“No, love. I’m sorry.”
“Where’s Kate?” The question is pleading. She knows the answer. She just can’t bear it.
“I came to get her.” The figure touches the bars of the cage with the tips of its fingers. Its tail is luminescent in the dark water, shimmering orange and pink, bright colors that Lisa realizes she expected never to see again. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” the figure says, “but I interfered a little. It was just too awful.”
“You saved her?” Lisa shifts upward, instinctive, and the weight of the cage bites against her leg. She falls back with a groan, pain ricocheting up and down her spine.
“I drowned her,” the figure says. “Before she could bleed out, I pulled off her mask and drowned her.”
The words feel like they hurt, although Lisa finds herself unable to understand why. She cannot follow her own train of logic, cannot connect the ache in her heart with the words the figure is saying or with her sister. She stares at the figure, uncomprehending.
“Since she drowned, I could change her,” the figure says. Its voice is a whisper of a vibration, almost lost in the heave of water against Lisa’s skin. “Since she drowned, I could at least give her a little more time, in another life.” The figure touches its fingers to its lips, and then reaches through the bars, to brush its fingers against the sliver of exposed skin past the edge of Lisa’s mask, just below her hairline. “She asked me to give you that. It’s already more than I should have done.”
The spot on Lisa’s scalp where the figure touched her burns, a bright and horrible warmth, as if she can feel her sister’s soul flaming out in her final kiss. She closes her eyes. She thinks she whimpers. Her ears don’t feel like they’re working correctly anymore.
“It’s okay, love. They’re coming for you now. You’ll be okay.”
Lisa’s eyes fly back open to see the figure turning away, twisting over itself in the water, tail coiled to speed away.
“Wait,” she gasps. “Wait.”
The figure pauses. Waits. Lisa fights through the fog in her brain, thrashing her way towards coherent words.
“Can I see her again?” The words come too slow, slurred, and she’s not one hundred percent sure they came out in the right order, but they come. “I need to see her. I need to see Kate.”
The figure shakes its head.
“I’ve already done more than I should,” it repeats. “I’m only getting away with it because you’ll forget this, chalk it up to a hallucination or wishful thinking, once you get back to the surface.”
“No,” Lisa groans. She shifts; her leg screams. She falls back against the side of the cage. “No, I can’t leave her. I can’t leave her.”
The figure points into the distance, where the glimmer of flashlights struggles to pierce the water. “They’re coming for you, love. You’re going to live.”
It isn’t living if it’s without her.
The thought is too big to try to voice, with her brain still swimming and her leg still clanging alarm bells and her whole body wearied by the hour spent under the water. It’s the sort of truth that is at once simple and endlessly complex, a bone-deep fact that cannot be adequately captured by a single sentence, however straightforward the sentiment.
“I just have to drown, right?” she slurs. She fumbles for the straps of the mask. The figure goes terribly still.
“Lisa, don’t die here.”
“It’s not dying.” Her hand finds the right clasp and undoes a key strap. “Kate promised she wouldn’t leave me. So I’m not going to leave her.”
The figure moves, suddenly and violently, towards the cage, just as Lisa pulls the mask off her face and lets the ocean in.