John Moss - Grave doubts

As she concentrated on keeping Morgan in her grip, focused on their upward ascent, Miranda felt lethal waves of euphoria sweep through her. She forced herself to think. Rachel was dead. She knew they would find her body with Alexander, their bodies entwined in a miserable reprise of the eternal embrace — one final dramatic tableau of inspired depravity. It would be the fulfillment of Rachel’s desire, although with the wrong partner. Rachel wanted to share death with Miranda and be free at last of her demon lovers. Miranda was sure of that. Nothing was certain. Nothing was sometimes enough.

I hope we live, she thought. He’ll owe me,

The shimmering surface spread above them like an enveloping shroud. Blood pounded inside Miranda’s head with deafening urgency — suddenly drowned out by an unmistakable roaring. Instinctively, she cringed downward as the hull of another boat slid to an abrupt halt immediately overhead. With a last surge of energy, she pulled Morgan off to the side, then reached desperately upward toward the dive platform. A hand grasped her wrist.

Peter Singh and two OPP officers in full scuba gear dragged both of them onto the trawler deck.

“Miranda,” Peter exclaimed in a tremulous voice. “You are rescued. You can release Morgan now.” He tried to pull her hand away but she would not relinquish her grip. When he pried her fingers free so the OPP medic could look after him, she rolled on her side and grasped a handful of his hair.

“Miranda,” said Peter Singh. “It is all right now, you are rescued. Please release Detective Morgan.” He made an incomprehensible gesture of flinging his open palms into the air.

She tightened her grip.

“Damn it, Miranda,” Morgan gasped in a faraway voice. “That hurts like hell.”

She rolled closer so their faces almost touched. Their noses were running with mucus and blood, their eyes were raw, their lips bruised. Her hands were weeping blood from where the steel had cut into her palms; Morgan’s hands bled from being sliced when he grabbed at the cutters. She smiled. Stigmata. Morgan understood; he struggled to keep her in focus, his ears throbbed. He smiled back.

“Hi,” she whispered.

“Told you we’d dive together.” He couldn’t hear his own words over the roar of his blood beating against the inside of his skull.

“Yeah.”

“Thanks, buddy.” His smile broadened into an awkward grin.

“You too. Buddy.”

He closed his eyes.

Miranda watched as he drifted into pain-free unconsciousness. His smile faded and his face relaxed as he seemed to turn into a little boy.

She opened her own eyes wide, brown and green and golden in the slanting sunlight, which seemed to wash the rawness and the red away, then shut them and held them closed as she picked out the familiar sounds of her partner’s breathing against the din of rescue activities all around them.