Leaving Ron’s body in the cave system, however, was not an option for Elsa—it would be like leaving the victim of a car crash on the side of the road—and over the next two weeks she planned her own recovery effort in secret, organizing a group of twenty divers from the US and Mexico to assist her. The police were right; recovering Ron’s corpse from the way he’d entered the traverse was not possible. That meant they would have to enter the cave system from an alternate entrance and approach his body from the other side. After nearly a month of exploring a warren of unmapped tunnels, they found the one that led to him. The first step in what would be a three-day operation was to lug more than half a ton of gear to the new cave entrance, which was at the top of a large hill. On the second day they got everything into position, leaving twenty cylinders of gas along the route to Ron’s corpse. And on the third day they began the recovery itself, a team of support divers waiting in the shallower level of the traverse while Elsa and a former Navy SEAL named Tom Jarrett dived to the deep section to extricate Ron’s body. Elsa’s nerves had been tense, but by then—six weeks since Ron’s death—she’d had time to process her emotions, and she was laser-focused on the task at hand. When they reached Ron’s corpse, they cut away his equipment. She tried not to look at his exposed hands and lower face, which had been chewed to the skeleton by shrimp, crabs, and other scavengers. Finally they freed his body, but while they were trying to manipulate it into a body bag (which they would tow behind them out of the tunnel), his head snapped free from his neck and sank to the floor. Horrified, Elsa began breathing more quickly, her rebreather struggling to filter out the excess carbon dioxide. Knowing she was doomed if she didn’t get her breathing back under control, she calmed herself, collected Ron’s skull, and returned to the surface with his body to raucous applause from the gathered team. The second she removed the rebreather from her mouth she doubled over and vomited…

An awful, echoing sound, shrill and discordant, assaulted her ears.

Elsa thought she was hallucinating, but it was real, coming from the water ahead of her—where she could see two pale faces bobbing above the surface and illuminated by blue bioluminescent hair.

They were looking at her with their black eyes.

Their mouths were open.

They were laughing at her.

Chapter 35

Chapter 35

RAD