The powerful suction has clamped onto Rex’s body with frightening strength, dragging him into deeper waters. He kicks harder, the pressure building in his ears as he struggles to release his weight belt with one hand and grab on to the flailing rubber hose behind his head with the other.

The belt slips off his waist, disappearing in the intense light. Rex fingers the buoyancy-control device and squeezes the handle, inflating his vest.

His descent slows but does not stop.

An unfathomably strong current suddenly wrenches him sideways as if he is being sucked out of a plane. He lurches sideways, the current threatening to rip the regulator and mask from his face. He bites down hard and grabs his precious mask, twisting futilely against the unrelenting turbulence.

The sea drops open beneath him. He stares one hundred stories below into the blazing green eye of the vortex, a hole in the sea whose centrifugal force now pins him against the inner wall of its widening, churning funnel.

Rex’s heart pounds wildly in fear. The grip on his torso increases, tearing at the Velcro straps, all that prevents the air tank from being torn from his vest. He closes his eyes, sickened, as the whirlpool whips him along its interior wall at a dizzying velocity, all the while sucking him deeper into its mouth.

I’m going to die, oh, God, please help me—

His face mask cracks. A viselike pressure squeezes his face. Blood pours from his nostrils. He gags, then squeezes his eyes shut as tightly as he can, screaming into his regulator as his eyeballs are pulled away from their optic nerves, bulging out of their socket.

A final scream is obliterated as Rex Simpson’s brain implodes.

The monstrous G forces created by the funnel of water have impaled the Manatee’s hull against the steep, swirling walls, tearing sections of the boat away with each revolution. Centrifugal force has pinned Carl Reuben’s unconscious body against the back of Iz’s legs, crushing the terrified biologist against the fiberglass transom.

Iz grips the guardrail in front of him with two hands. The whirlpool is roaring in his ears, its dizzying speed pushing him toward unconsciousness.

He wills his eyes open, focusing them on the source of the green light. Death is minutes away, the thought somehow both frightening and comforting.

The brilliant beacon suddenly dulls. Iz cranes his neck forward, leaning precariously over the transom. He sees a gurgling, tarlike ooze spew forth from an enormous hole within the seafloor. The black substance belches—Iz can smell its sulfurous, rotting stench—then finishes blanketing the emerald glow as it continues to rise within the funnel of water, darkening the still-churning sea.

Iz closes his eyes, forcing himself to think of Edie and Dominique as the maddening torrent pushes the Manatee down into its spiraling vortex.

God, let it be quick.