Rick Riordan - The Devil went down to Austin

"Right." In his hooded suit, all black except for blue stripes, Lopez looked like a buff, hightech sea lion. "Time to party."

"You want to use the water slide?" I asked.

"Shut up, Navarre."

Lopez checked my equipment. I checked his. There was an entry bench on the party boat, of course. Lopez looped his fin straps around his wrist. He sat on the bench, facing the deck, scooted his butt to the end, put one hand on his mask and the other on his weight belt, and did a backward somersault into the water.

Next it was my turn.

The splash imploded around me in a haze of cold, white foam. I was surprised at how fast I was sinking, then realized I hadn't inflated my BC. I groped for the button, kicked without the benefit of my fins, which still hung around my wrist. I had a moment of panic, then remembered that I could in fact breathe. I got under control, sent a burst of air into the vest, floated upward, and met Lopez on the surface.

He kept his regulator in his mouth, which spared me several scathing remarks, gave me the okay sign. I responded. We pulled on our fins.

Lopez went to the buoy, pulled the rope taut, retied it. We gave the okay signal to Clyde and Maia. I thought about the last time Maia had watched me descend, at Windy Point, going down to meet Matthew Pena.

Lopez gave me the thumbsdown sign. I reciprocated.

We held up our inflator hoses, released air, and began to sink.

We faced each other as we went down, following the yellow line. Almost fully covered in neoprene, my body felt unreal, only the area around my mouth feeling the full effect of the cold.

Bubbles trickled up my fingers. Lopez was a dark, multilimbed thing across from me, vaguely outlined in spears of light from the surface. Below, a chasm-black and green brush strokes of water, shifting.

Lopez unclipped the flashlight from his belt, tapped it. I got out mine. We switched them on and continued descending finsfirst.

About every ten feet I had to pinch my nose to equalize the pressure in my ears. Soon, the light in the world was reduced to our two yellow flashlight beams-like a cockeyed car driving through green JellO. Occasionally the ghostly form of a catfish or Guadalupe river perch would flit into our light, then turn as if scorched and vanish.

We hit a thermocline at thirty feet. The temperature line was as sharp as a razor-cold above, frigid below. Just when I'd gotten used to it, when I thought I'd gotten as cold as I could get, we hit the second thermocline layer at seventy feet. And we kept descending, following the yellow rope that was no longer yellow at this depth, but pale gray. Even the blue stripes in Lopez's suit were starting to seep away. I decided the rope couldn't have been this long, ravelled in its net bag on the surface.

Slowly, the darkness below us intensified. I swept across it with my flashlight. One moment, nothing but water. The next moment, there they were-black Ys and Xs of wood? branches? twigs doing aimless somersaults. It was a huge, skeletal landscape of lines and cracks, as if a whole sphere of the water had been frozen, then shattered.

I was looking from above at the bare branches of an enormous tree-a bird'seye view. It was a goddamn pecan tree at the bottom of the lake.

I heard an omnipresent plink, plink: Lopez, getting my attention by knocking the butt of his knife against his air tank. I could barely see him, two feet away from me, until I shone the flashlight on him. He was waving one palm horizontally over the knife-the sign to level out.

I was descending too fast, getting too close to the tree. I kicked up, added a little air to the BC, and my fin brushed against a branch. An ancient, open pecan pod snapped away from the top of the tree and went spinning into the void, its petals like a black claw.

Another two seconds and I would've been ensnared in branches.

I flashed my light around and momentarily lost the rope, and Lopez. Then, just as suddenly, there he was. I could see the dangerhow easy it would be to get disoriented, tangled, panicked.

We floated, suspended above the tree, shining our lights on each other. I felt colder than I'd ever felt. My whole body was tight, like I'd been shoehorned into a much smaller man's wet suit.

Lopez signed, Okay?

I should've made the soso gesture, but I responded Okay.

Lopez tapped his computer. I checked mine. My air supply read 2,700 psi. Depth: ninetyeight feet. Lopez pointed to the rope, then down to the tree, then used more gestures to indicate that since the rope had gone straight through the branches, we'd have to navigate around the circumference of the tree and underneath. Was I okay with that? I made the Okay sign.

He tapped his watch, held up ten fingers. Ten minutes. The clock had started running.

We turned horizontal, angled ourselves down, then carefully descended around the periphery of the pecan tree.

It must've been a monstrous specimen when alive, and down here in the murk it seemed even bigger. We tried to keep a safe distance, but the tree kept surprising us.

We kept getting brushed and snagged, clawed at, almost impaled on branches that were worn to silty pikes from the decades underwater.

Then, at last, we were below the lowest boughs, shining our lights on a trunk so large our hands might just have met had we tried to hug its diameter.

Lopez plinked to get my attention again, gestured with his flashlight. He was warning me not to get too close to the bottom. It wasn't really solid below me-just a fuzzy layer of silt, lumpy and pitch black, like the remains at the bottom of a barbecue pit. Our line from the surface went straight down into the stuff, the anchor completely submerged.

Lopez gestured for me to come over and stay by the rope. He produced a second line from his supply bag-the tender line. He made a loose shepherd's knot, and slipped it around my wrist. He checked his computer, apparently calculating our GPS, then pointed off in one direction, pointed to himself.

I nodded.

Lopez measured out two yards of line the way they do in fabric stores-running the line from his nose to extended thumb. He handed me the slack. Six feet seemed a ridiculously small distance to start with, given how little time we had, but then Lopez moved away, and within a few feet he was gone.

There was no logic to it, what you could see and what you couldn't. In one direction, through a clearer patch of water, I could almost make out the trunk of the next tree in the row, but I couldn't see Lopez six feet away. If I shone my flashlight directly on him, I could just barely make out a smudge of black.

He gave me two quick tugs on the rope. I fed him another six feet of line, and then he was gone completely. I was alone.

I shone my light up through the branches of the ancient pecan. It must've been frozen in winter, fiftyplus years ago, but it looked like it might've been submerged yesterday. There were still hardened knobs of pecans clinging to a few branches, more delicate black claws of open pods-things you would not think could withstand the flooding of an entire valley. The texture of the bark was still discernible. I wondered if the McBrides had picnicked here once, looked up at the sun through the branches, been grateful for the shade back on a Texas summer day before they'd had airconditioning, when Austin had still been a small town a day's wagon ride away.

I reminded myself, a little dreamily, that I'd come down here to do a job. I checked my console-one hundred two feet below. The timer read 12:04 minutes, total dive time.

My breathing had almost slowed to normal. I was relaxed. I started smiling for no particular reason, staring up into the branches of the tree.

Then I was brought back to reality by one sharp tug on the tender line. It meant more than just stop. We hadn't discussed it, but I was afraid that kind of tug must mean, 1 found something.