“Oh man!” Noah shouted as he pulled back on the throttle. The sub began to slow, but it wouldn’t be enough in time. We were hurtling toward the side of the island.

  BAM!

  Our sub careened into the rock wall, jolting to a stop, and I flew forward, banging my forehead against the inside of my dome. I winced, and the world went dark again as my eyes shut from the pain. Easing them open, I rubbed my aching head. Up front, Noah was doing the same thing.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  Noah grunted. “I feel more stupid than anything else. I can’t believe I drove into an island.”

  I slid back into my seat and glanced around the interior. “We’d better check for leaks.”

  We went over the interior in silence. From what I could tell on my end, the cabin had remained bone dry. We still had power—both the interior light and exterior lights remained on—and the air pump hummed on without interruption.

  “All good up here,” Noah announced.

  My stomach knotted as I bent down and looked past Noah at the bow’s main view port dome. The hit had felt so strong that I half expected to see cracks spiderwebbing across it. Even though all three domes were made from shatterproof plastic, we’d built the protective frame so that it wrapped around the nose of the sub. The strong aluminum must’ve taken most of the hit, and luckily it wasn’t even bent.

  I let out a long sigh. “Looks like we built this thing tougher than we thought.”

  “Yeah,” Noah agreed, “but who knew we needed seat belts?”

  We both laughed. I think it was more out of relief than at Noah’s joke.

  But I stopped suddenly when I heard a light tapping on the top of my dome. I glanced up, expecting to see one of the scuba divers knocking on the hatch, checking to make sure we were all right. Instead, pebbles were dropping from the darkness above us and bouncing off the clear plastic. They were followed by larger rocks the size of baseballs. The sound of them striking the hull echoed throughout the cabin.

  “What was that?” Noah asked.

  “You better get us out of here,” I replied. “I think you started a small rockslide.”

  “On it,” Noah said as he turned the wheel left and hit the throttle.

  Larger rocks banged against the exterior of our sub as we ran parallel to the rock face. I looked up and gasped when a huge rock—almost as big as the sub itself—entered our sphere of light. It bounced off the side of the island before arcing toward us.

  “Faster,” I ordered, bracing for impact.

  Noah rammed the throttle forward, but it was too late.

  WHAM!

  The rock slammed into the sub, pitching us hard to one side. The scene whirled past our view ports as we spiraled out of control.

  11 The Exigency Contingency

  WHEN THE WORLD FINALLY STOPPED spinning, I’d been thrown from my seat and was laid out flat. The dome light flickered off and on, and my entire left side was ice cold, soaking wet with water.

  “Tom?” Noah was in a similar position up front. “What happened?”

  I slowly sat up, rubbing my sore elbow, just one of the places that hurt after being banged around inside the sub like a pinball. “We got hit by a rock.”

  “A rock?” Noah asked as he sat up. “How big?”

  “Really big.” I looked out of my dome, now more a window than a skylight, and saw the lake bed stretching out beyond it. A small fish glanced back at me before swimming on its way. This was not good. Our sub was on its left side, resting at the bottom of the lake.

  Noah pushed himself up, putting his hand down in the puddle of water, which was rapidly creeping his way. “Oh man. We’re leaking! Where’s it coming from?”

  While Noah scanned the front, I frantically checked the back and immediately found the culprit. Water gushed from a small pipe poking out of the silent pump in the rear of the cabin.

  “Found it,” I called. “It’s coming from the air pump.” I reached out and grabbed the small cap tethered to the pump by a plastic cord, pushing it back against the flow as I screwed it onto the pipe. “I stopped it,” I announced.

  “So it’s pumping water instead of air now?” Noah asked, panic rising in his voice.

  I shook my head. “The pump’s dead. Water was leaking through, but I capped it.”

  “How is that possible?”

  I crawled toward my dome and pushed my head out as far as it would go, craning my neck to look toward the rear of our sub. A chill washed over me. I didn’t see the long hose leading to the surface. “The snorkel’s gone.”

  Noah scrambled to peer out of his own dome. “How can that happen?”

  “The force from the rock taking us down must’ve disconnected it.” I slid back out of the dome. “That explains why water was coming through the open hole.”

  “So, there’s no more air coming in,” Noah said, eyes wide. “We’re going to run out of air!”

  I took in a deep breath, trying to calm my own rising panic. “We have plenty of air to reach the surface. See if you can drive us out of here.”

  My friend just stared back at me with a horrified expression.

  I pointed to the controls. “You’re driving, remember?”

  Noah shook his head. “Right.” He spun around and reached up for the throttle. It seemed weird from our new angle, as if the controls were mounted on the wall now. He eased the throttle forward and the motor hummed to life. Unfortunately, we didn’t move at all.

  “Try reverse,” I suggested as I crawled into the dome. I knew we were pinned to the ground somehow, since our sub should’ve risen to the surface by itself. I shifted around the dome, trying to see how we were trapped, but I couldn’t spot anything from my vantage point except a cloud of silt being stirred up from the lake bed by our propeller.

  Noah moved the lever in the opposite direction. The motor whined as he gave it full power. Just as before, we didn’t shift at all.

  I pushed out of the dome and stretched out my arms, bracing against the walls as I rocked us back and forth, trying to dislodge us somehow. Noah saw what I was doing and joined me, all the while alternating the throttle in forward and reverse. I didn’t feel the sub move in the slightest. It felt as if we were mounted in cement.

  “It’s no good,” I said, chillingly aware that I was now slightly out of breath. With a limited amount of air left, it hadn’t been a good idea to exert ourselves like that.

  I took a deep breath and tried to clear my mind, pushing back against the rising terror. Just like I’d learned in scuba class, panicking was the worst thing we could do right now.

  Unfortunately, Noah hadn’t taken that class with me. He snatched the mic from the radio, his hand trembling as he brought it to his mouth. “Hello?! Can anyone hear me! We’re trapped in our sub over by the island!” His eyes were wild as he waited for a response.

  I shook my head. “Dude, the antenna was part of the snorkel. No one can pick up our frequency from the bottom of the lake.”

  As if he had to test my theory, he keyed the mic again. “Hello? Come in, anyone! Please!”

  He was answered with silence.

  I held out a steady hand and stared at him with the best calming expression I could muster. “Look, we have to remain chill and conserve the air we have left.”

  Noah’s face was still panic-stricken. “Oh sure. Because we’re not gonna die from lack of oxygen. We’ll die of carbon dioxide poisoning way before that happens.”

  I pointed to the small air tank mounted to the right of the driver’s seat. “Don’t forget we made a plan for this.”

  Noah’s eyes went wide when he spotted the tank. He unclipped it from its mount and cradled it in his arms like a teddy bear, then his hand ran over the tank’s short hose and mouthpiece. “But there’s only one regulator.”

  “We’ll take turns,” I reassured him. “Just like I told you we did in scuba class.”

  We had talked about this before, of course, when we were building the sub. We couldn’t store two emergency tanks, because they would’ve added too much weight. I couldn’t blame Noah for forgetting that fact now, though, given our current situation.

  Noah shook the tank. “But how long will this last us?”

  “Long enough for us to figure out what to do,” I replied, glancing around, trying to think of what else we could try to dislodge ourselves. My mind raced, but I couldn’t come up with anything we hadn’t tried already. If the rock was strong enough to drive us past seven meters, snapping off our snorkel, as it pinned us to the lake bed, then it looked like the Advance had made its last voyage.

  I winced. “Or long enough for us to swim out of here.”

  “What?” Noah asked, hugging the tank tighter.

  “I think we have to bail,” I admitted. “We’re lucky the rock didn’t pin us upside down.”

  “You call this lucky?”

  “If the sub was upside down, the hatches would be blocked, and bailing wouldn’t even be an option,” I explained. “We’d be trapped here.” I locked eyes with my best friend. “But we’re not trapped, okay? So we have to stay as calm as possible.”

  Noah closed his eyes and let out a long breath. When he opened them again, he gave me a nod. “You’re right. Lucky… I guess.”

  “Okay, first, test the air tank,” I instructed.

  Noah spun open the valve and put the regulator in his mouth. It hissed loudly as he took in a breath. “All good,” he reported.

  I crawled toward my hatch and put my hand on the latch. “We open them together, swim outside, then stick together all the way up, right?”

  “Right.” Noah shuffled toward his hatch and grabbed the handle.

  “Just swim to the surface,” I repeated. “No big deal, right?” I think I was trying to convince myself as much as I was Noah.

  I locked eyes with my best friend through the clear domes. “On the count of three. One… two…” My eyes widened. “Wait!”

  Noah flung his hand away from the handle as if it were red hot. “What?!”

  I slid back into the main compartment. “This is very important. You’re going to want to hold your breath all the way up, but you can’t.”

  “What do you mean, I can’t?”

  “I learned this in scuba class,” I said as I pointed to the air tank. “We’re breathing compressed air, right? Deep underwater, under all that pressure.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So as you swim to the surface and there’s less pressure, the air in your lungs is going to expand,” I explained. “If you hold your breath, the expanding air can pop your lungs like balloons.”

  “What?!” Noah’s eyes bugged out, and I wished I’d chosen different words.

  “But it won’t,” I reassured him. “You’ll be fine. All you have to do is blow a little stream of bubbles from your mouth. It doesn’t matter how small. The surrounding pressure will push out the right amount of air.”

  Noah closed his eyes and grimaced. “Okay, little bubbles. Got it.” He slid back toward his hatch.

  I grabbed the handle once more. “All right. One, two… three!”

  We flipped open the latches at the same time, and… nothing happened. I was preparing to hold on as water gushed in through the opening. Instead, only a small trickle poured from the seam. I reached up and pushed on the dome. It didn’t budge. I saw Noah doing the same thing with no more success.

  We really were trapped.

  12 The Recovery Discovery

  I BEAT A FIST AGAINST the dome, then grunted as I shoved it with both hands. My gut twisted in a knot as I felt my panic rising again. Panting, I quickly spun around and tried to kick the hatch open with my feet. Nothing worked.

  “Did the rock dent the hull?” Noah asked as he copied my foot maneuver. “Are the hatches bent shut somehow? How can they both be stuck?”

  I didn’t reply. Instead, I stopped my attack on the hatch, took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and tried to calm myself again. The solution was there—it had to be. In my panic, I was missing it somehow.

  We may not have foreseen being pinned to the lake bed, but we’d planned for other kinds of emergencies. We had the radio, the positive buoyancy design, the emergency tank of air…

  Noah crawled to the nose of the sub. “Do you think we can detach the front somehow?”

  My mind went back to the air tank. I’m glad I thought to tell Noah about the dangers of breathing compressed air at this depth. It had been the first thing they taught us in scuba class. But there was something else about the pressurized canister that nagged at my brain. Something to do with the pressure.

  I clapped my hands together as the information snapped into place.

  Scrambling back, I unscrewed the cap from the air pump. Water immediately gushed out of the pipe and splashed inside.

  Noah spun around. “What is that? Water?” he asked. “Are we leaking now too?”

  “No,” I replied. “I mean… yes, we are. I uncapped the air pump.”

  “What are you doing?” Noah demanded. “Is drowning better than carbon dioxide poisoning?”

  I pointed to the tank in his hands. “Look, our sub isn’t pressurized like that air tank, right?”

  Noah screwed up his face and glared at me. “What?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Right?” I pressed.

  Noah threw his hands up. “Okay, right. So?”

  I gestured toward the domes. “So, if we were pressurized, those hatches would pop open like soda cans.”

  Noah’s brows drew together. “Yeah, so…” His eyes widened. “So the pressure is actually greater outside the sub!”

  I nodded. “That’s what’s keeping them shut.”

  “And you letting in water will equalize the pressure differential,” Noah continued with a wide grin. “The hatches should open no problem after that.”

  A matching grin stretched across my face. Mrs. Lee, our physics teacher, would be proud. I just hoped my idea worked so we could tell her about it someday.

  The hardest part of my plan was waiting for the sub to fill with water. I wasn’t a naturally patient person, and when you add in our dwindling air supply, the tension increased faster than the sub’s carbon dioxide level. Plus, the flickering dome light and the temperature of the water wasn’t helping.

  Noah shivered as the water covered our legs. “Aw man. This is freezing.”

  “It’ll be warmer closer to the surface,” I said from my past diving experience. “But down here at the bottom of the lake? Yeah.”

  After a few more agonizingly slow seconds, the water level crept halfway up the clear domes. Once it covered them completely, they should swing right open. Even though there was probably plenty of breathable air still trapped inside, Noah and I traded the regulator back and forth, just in case. As the water level reached our waists, I had to stop my teeth from chattering so I could get the thing in my mouth.

  The water slowly reached our chests, and our sub’s air pocket continued to shrink. Noah took another breath from the regulator and glanced toward the hatches. They were almost completely submerged. “Well?” he asked, passing me the mouthpiece.

  “Hang on,” I said. I took a breath and handed the regulator back before ducking underwater. The cold nearly made me exhale my entire lungful at once. The flickering dome light barely lit the way as I moved toward the hatch, feeling my way along since everything was one big blur underwater. I wished we’d thought to pack goggles.

  My hand brushed against the hatch, and I gave it a shove. Relief washed over me as the dome easily swung open. I scrambled back into the sub, poking my head into the air pocket.

  “Well?” Noah asked before taking another breath.

  I smiled. “It opened just like we thought.”

  “Good,” Noah said with a shiver. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I moved closer to the hatch. “You ready?”

  Noah nodded, taking one more breath from the regulator before handing me the tank. “You better take this. You’re a better swimmer.” He edged closer to his hatch.

  “Okay,” I said before taking a breath. “On one… two… Wait!”

  Noah stopped mid-dunk. “Now what?”

  “Give me a second.” I took a breath and dipped underwater again, feeling my way along until I found the driver’s seat. I reached past that until my hand landed on the button I was searching for. I hoped that it still worked underwater as I pressed it. A soft thunk outside the sub told me it had. I pushed off the side and poked my head back into our shrinking air pocket.

  “What were you doing?” Noah asked, wide-eyed.

  “I released the drone,” I told him. “Maybe we can come back and see how bad our sub is damaged.”

  Noah rolled his eyes. “Let’s get out of here first, please.”

  I handed him the regulator for another breath, then took it back to do the same. “Okay, for real this time. One, two… three!”

  We ducked underwater, and I scrambled through the hatch. Mine was already open, so I was able to swim out of the sub first. Through my blurry vision, I saw Noah push out from his hatch. I quickly grabbed at his hand and pressed the regulator into it. Noah put it in his mouth before we both shoved off from the ground.

  With the tank in one hand, and Noah tethered to the regulator, I led the way, kicking and reaching up with my free hand. I focused on the rippling surface, determined to get us to safety. Unfortunately, I was so determined that I completely forgot my own safety rule—I was holding my breath! I loosened my lips and exhaled a tiny stream of bubbles, following them up toward the surface.

  Not weighed down by the tank, Noah quickly caught up to me. He shoved the regulator into my chest, trying to give me a turn. I kept kicking as I exhaled the rest of my air before taking another pull from the tank. Noah shot past me.

  Swimming in frigid water is hard enough, but swimming in frigid water, fully clothed, wearing shoes, and holding a heavy air tank seemed almost impossible. With Noah’s blurry form well above me, I took a calculated risk. I dropped the tank and used both hands to swim up as quickly as possible, concentrating on the moonlit waves and blowing a steady stream of bubbles all the way.

 

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