The void that enveloped Connelly was all consuming. She attempted to look at her hands. They were gone. She tried to turn her head, hoping for a better view, but she lacked a neck. In fact, she had no body at all. For a brief moment she thought that maybe she had been killed and the Catholics were right all along, there was a purgatory and she was there. She'd always thought of purgatory as all white.

Why not blue? she thought. It's not the most extravagant color…but it wasn't bad either…just somewhere in the middle. In limbo.

But the blue void began to change. Light filtered down from above, the beams reflecting off of a cloud of tiny bubbles. The light shimmered and shook. There was a surface above her. As the density of her surroundings increased, Connelly felt that she was underwater and that the illumination from above was sunlight glimmering through the surface.

The world around her became real. She was in a tropical lagoon. Snorkeling. She was seven years old.

A memory.

Her parents had taken her to Hawaii on her seventh birthday. Not really for her birthday, but she had always pretended the vacation was in honor of her birth. After a day seeing the smaller islands from the air on a helicopter tour, her mother, father and two brothers had retreated to a small beach, hidden inside a cove on the big island. Her father had bragged that discovering its location had only cost him fifty dollars. While her brothers built a sand castle out of the fine grey sand and mom and dad laid out to tan, she had taken to the ocean with snorkel in hand.

She was an avid and skilled swimmer, but she had never used a snorkel before. She'd seen it done, though, and needed no lessons on how to use the device. The feeling of freedom the snorkel had given her was like nothing she'd experienced in her seven years of life. For the next half hour, Connelly had swum in circles, admiring the snails, crabs and multicolored fish, and never once had to come up for air.

Thirty-one minutes in the water marked the point where her experience changed drastically. Her insistent splashing had attracted the attention of a small tiger shark, a dwarf at only three and half feet long, but still more than a match for a seven-year-old girl in the water. Connelly had heard her father give warnings about sharks, about what attracted them: constant splashing, blood, and waving white skin on the palms and soles of feet. It was the first and last of the three that Connelly had been tempting the shark with for the past thirty minutes. It was the middle of the three which the shark would add to the mix.