Chapter Six
1229 Words
The tunnel entrance looked like a mouth.
Lux had seen it a hundred times on sonar. Knew its dimensions. Knew the way the limestone curved inward like a throat. But seeing it in person — through her mask, in the dim wash of her dive light — felt different. Felt personal. Like the trench had opened its jaw and was waiting to swallow them both.
She checked her gauge. Two hundred ten feet. Twenty minutes of bottom time left. Enough to enter. Enough to see. Not enough to stay.
Behind her, Rafael breathed slow. She heard it through the water — the steady suck and push of his regulator. He'd stopped panicking. That worried her more than the panic had.
She signaled. Follow. Close. No lights except mine.
He nodded. His eyes looked huge behind the mask. Not scared. Focused. She wished he'd blink more.
---
The tunnel swallowed her light first.
Then her shoulders. Then the rest of her.
Limestone scraped her tank as she pushed through a narrow pinch. She felt the vibration travel up her spine. Behind her, Rafael grunted — a sound the water swallowed almost immediately. He'd hit the same spot. Good. He was learning to keep his body compact.
The passage opened after twenty feet. Just enough to stretch her arms. Silt carpeted the floor — untouched, undisturbed. No fins had been here. Not recently. Maybe not ever.
She ran her light along the walls. Stalactites hung from the ceiling like broken teeth. Some had snapped off and lay in pieces below. An old collapse. Recent enough that the edges hadn't rounded yet.
Rafael touched her fin. She turned.
He pointed past her shoulder.
The chamber glowed.
Not with light. With something else. A greenish phosphorescence that clung to the walls like mold that had learned to burn. Bioluminescence. Rare at this depth. She'd seen it once before, in a cave off Belize. The dive master had called it ghost fire. Said it meant the rock was breathing.
She didn't believe in ghosts.
But she believed in her eyes. And her eyes said someone had been here.
The footprints weren't fresh. Silt had started to reclaim them, softening the edges. But they were there. Boot prints. Heel. Toe. A pattern that suggested someone walking — not swimming, walking — across the chamber floor.
That made no sense. They were three hundred feet underwater. No one walked at three hundred feet.
Rafael grabbed her wrist. Squeezed. Hard.
She followed his light.
The second ship sat at the back of the chamber.
Not a galleon. Smaller. Older. Wood so dark it looked like coal. The hull had collapsed in on itself — ribs poking through like a starving animal. But the bow remained intact, and carved into the wood, barely legible through the growth, were letters.
Santa Águeda.
1538.
Lux's heart stopped.
A Portuguese nau. Older than La Dama by nearly a century. If the records were right — if this ship had actually existed — it carried something no salvage log had ever mentioned.
Rafael swam toward it. She caught his fin. Pulled him back.
He turned. She saw his mouth moving behind the regulator. Yelling. She couldn't hear the words. Didn't need to.
She pointed at his gauge. Air.
He looked. Swore. She saw the shape of the word on his lips.
Three minutes left.
They'd spent too long in the tunnel. Too long staring at the impossible. Now the trench was calling in its debt.
She grabbed his hand. Pulled. He resisted for half a second — long enough for her to see the hunger in his eyes. He wanted to go inside that ship. He wanted to find whatever Mateo had found.
She couldn't let him.
She kicked hard. Dragged him back toward the tunnel. He followed. Barely.
The limestone scraped her tank again. Then her hip. Then her ribs. She didn't feel any of it. Just the burn in her legs and the clock ticking behind her eyes.
They broke through the entrance with one minute left.
The ascent felt like forever.
---
They surfaced screaming.
Not words. Just noise. Lux ripped off her mask and gulped air so fast she nearly choked. Beside her, Rafael floated on his back, staring at the sky, chest heaving.
The Rusty Spoon waited fifty yards away. She'd anchored her closer than usual. Thank god.
She swam. He followed. Neither spoke.
The ladder felt like mercy. She climbed. He climbed. They collapsed on the deck in a heap of neoprene and shaking hands.
Five minutes passed. Maybe ten.
"Santa Águeda," Rafael said finally. His voice cracked. "That ship went missing in a hurricane. Every historian said she sank off Brazil."
"Historians are wrong a lot."
"You knew."
Lux sat up. Peeled off her hood. Her hair stuck to her face in wet ropes.
"I suspected," she said. "Leo's notes mentioned a second shadow on the sonar. Something beneath the galleon. He never had the gear to reach it." She looked at Rafael. His lips had gone blue. "Congratulations. You found your brother's secret."
He turned his head. Stared at her.
"I don't want a secret. I want him."
"He's not down there."
"You don't know that."
"I know there were footprints." She held his gaze. Didn't blink. "Someone else has been in that chamber. Recently. And they walked. Not swam. Walked."
Rafael sat up slowly. His expression shifted — from exhaustion to something sharper.
"A dry chamber."
"Or a flooded one with a current strong enough to sweep silt into footprints. Either way, someone beat us." She pulled off a glove. Bit her thumbnail. A nervous habit she'd never killed. "Could be Seb. Could be someone Voss hired. Could be a local who found a c***k in the rock."
"Could be Mateo."
She stopped biting her nail.
"Rafael—"
"Don't." He stood. Water poured off him. "Don't tell me to be realistic. I spent fifteen years being realistic. It got me nowhere."
He walked to the rail. Stared at the water. His shoulders rose and fell with each breath.
Lux joined him. Didn't touch. Just stood close enough that their arms almost brushed.
"I'm not telling you to give up," she said. "I'm telling you to be careful. That chamber isn't natural. The way the light glowed. The way the walls curved. Someone built that space. Or carved it. And whatever they put down there — the Santa Águeda, the box, the footprints — they didn't want it found."
Rafael turned. His face was inches from hers. She could see the salt drying on his lashes.
"Then why did your father leave you the map?"
Lux had no answer.
The wind picked up. The sky had gone from blue to bruised. A storm was building somewhere south. She could feel it in her teeth.
"We need to get back," she said. "Before the weather turns."
Rafael didn't move.
"We need to go back down," he said. "Before Voss sends someone who won't just leave footprints."
She wanted to argue. Wanted to tell him he was insane, that diving again so soon would kill them both, that she needed time to process what they'd seen.
Instead, she said: "Tomorrow. First light. We go deeper."
He nodded.
Neither of them mentioned the way his hand found hers on the rail.
Neither of them let go
- Writer
