It was an eternity, too long, and her lungs were burning, the air almost gone. Still, she stayed frozen, unmoving, and just as her eyes were rolling back in her head and her mouth was about to open, the shadow vanished.

No time, no time.

Thrashing now, she grappled at the ice above her, trying to claw her way to the right. If she wasn’t correct, if she had lost all sense of direction and the exit hole wasn’t over there, she wouldn’t have time to go back the other way.

Too late.

Colours burst through the ice, the sky lightened to daytime and through the opaque ceiling overhead, she watched, quite unaware that she had stopped moving, stopped fighting, as green and blue flares lit up her underwater world.

Heaven, she thought, but then the colours changed to a bloody scarlet, with flashes of slate blue and frightening bolts of black. Her heart sank. Sadness hung suspended over her, covering her, like the water she was in.

Not heaven, but hell.

The intensity of the hues above her rippled and bled, and then she saw nothing at all.

Sight gone. Feeling nothing. But a sense that she was moving, a knowledge, a sensation almost akin to sleepwalking. And then… air. An icy blast that forced her eyes open, just narrow slits, but enough to see the lip of the ice, the new environment apparent as the last few flurries of snow landed on her lashes, obscuring her vision once again.

She drew breath, but the lower part of her face was still submerged, and the water burned down her throat. She shifted, throwing her weight up and forward, and then she felt it: cold wind on her face. Jagged inhalations, exhaled as part scream, part vomit. It floated past her, nestled against her neck, regurgitated food sticking to her sodden scarf. Tilting her face upwards, she laughed. It had a hysterical edge.

The colours were still there, those deep red and purple lights. Heavenly lights. Or hellish, maybe. She still wasn’t sure.

She gulped and passed a wet hand across her eyes. Blinking hard, she looked again.

The Northern Lights.

Tipping her head back, she began to laugh again. All this time, all the money spent on the trip to see the lights, all the evenings of disappointment, of gazing fruitlessly at cloudy skies, and now, here on the brink of death, they had come out to play.

The laugh she heard coming from her frozen lips loosened something in her, a fear that had been settled in her soul for a long time now. Before this trip, before she’d ever clapped eyes on Anna. Even before Tommy. She had smothered it throughout the years, kept it hidden like a dirty secret.