back to her friend.
“Better?” he asked.
“Yeah. Thanks,” she said, feeling more grounded with each passing second. “What am I doing here?”
“You don’t remember?”
She shook her head. Trying to make sense out of her jumbled memory.
Taylor took her hand, and this time, she didn’t pull away.
“We were on a training mission. There was an accident. An explosion.”
“An explosion?” The incident came back to Jess in broken, disjointed frames. The stripped screws. The wrong countdown. The disabled DPV. The fear in Latham’s eyes as the explosion ripped him from her grasp.
Latham.
“Latham. Where is he?”
Taylor’s gray eyes softened, and he ran a hand over his military short, salt-and-pepper hair. “ICU.”
She opened her mouth to ask if he was okay then stopped herself. If he was in ICU she had her answer. She clenched the sheet in her fist, wishing she didn’t have to go to the next obvious question. “Will he live?” she whispered.
“No idea. If he does, there might be brain damage.” He sighed. “He went quite a while without oxygen.”
“His mask broke,” Jess said, remembering the nightmare. An image of Latham, his face twisted in death, flashed across her thoughts. Just a dream, Jess. She reminded herself. Just a dream.
“Yeah,” Taylor confirmed. “You were holding on to him when we located you. His mask was cracked. Flooded. It took us almost a minute to convince you to let go of him.”
“I was awake?”
“Kind of.”
She shook her head as both her nightmare and reality converged until she didn’t know which was true. Latham had been unconscious, unable to save himself. She’d tried to take him to the surface. She thought.
Whatever the truth, she told herself, he’s alive, and where there’s life, there’s hope. “Take me to him.”
Taylor shook his head. “No can do. You’re confined to bed.”
“No, I’m not.” Not even Taylor could force her to stay in bed. Not when one of her men was hurt.
She pushed back the covers and swung her legs over the edge of the cot, wavering as the world tilted around her. Taylor moved to help her, and she waved him off. “I’m fine. Just give me a minute.”
He sighed again, obviously annoyed by, and resigned to, her decision.
Making sure the pea-green hospital gown was tied in the back, she rose on unsteady legs. He didn’t offer to help again. “Show me,” she said.
He led her down the hall, through a set of doors and into a small pale green room. Machines whirred and beeped. The smell of rubbing alcohol, sweat and death permeated Jess’s nose. She covered it with her palm before she retched at the scent.
But beyond the sounds and the hospital smell was Charles Latham in a bed next to the window, being kept alive by tubes and a ventilator.
The room swayed, but she took a deep breath and shuffled over to her trainee’s bed.
Careful not to jostle any of his tubes, she stroked a palm over his cocoa-colored, shaved head. When he’d come to her for training, his dark, curly hair was just over an inch long and stylish for a Marine. He’d shaved it off. Keeping it simple, he’d said when teased about the transformation.
And now, he lay here. His face puffy. His skin ashen. His body limp.
A shadow of the man she knew.
“I am so sorry, Chuck,” she said.
“Chuck?” Taylor asked.
“He hates Charles,” she replied, unable to think of the boy in front of her as Latham. Under the circumstances, his last name sounded cold. Aloof. Impersonal. The boy in the bed was none of those things. Not to her.
He was a person. Her student. Her responsibility.
She put her hands in her lap and squeezed her eyes shut, refusing to believe that such an energetic, strong young man would not pull through. “You’re going to make it,” she whispered, praying that this room, and the comatose man in the bed, was nothing more than a continuation of her nightmare.
When she opened her eyes, Chuck still lay in bed. Dead except for the machines breathing life into him. “This is my fault,” she said.
“Things happen,” Taylor said from behind her.
“Not things,” she corrected, anger tinting her voice and wiping away any attempt at professionalism. “Sabotage.”
“What?” Taylor asked, surprise in his voice.
Jess shifted to face him. “When we were going to the ship, the DPV gave me trouble. I should have stopped. Aborted the mission. Instead I kept going.”
“Those things foul up. We both know that.”
“Yeah, but if I’d stopped…” She glanced at Latham then continued her story. “We set the limpet. The timer didn’t work. Wouldn’t abort. I looked closer, and the screws were stripped. When we tried to bug out, the DPV failed.”
She met Taylor’s widening eyes. “You and I both know that explosion was bigger than anything either of us would use for training. Did you hear me call out? Tell you to run?”
He nodded. “Still, sabotage? You’ve got to be kidding me,” Taylor said, the words not doubting her but uttered in surprise.
“I wish I were.” She shook her head, a part of her unable to believe it could happen on her watch. On any watch. Who would have done such a thing? “We were set up, John, and Chuck is paying the price.”
“You came close,” Taylor said. “We almost lost you, as well.”
Jess stiffened. “What do you mean? You said I was awake when you found us.”
“I said kind of. Your mask was filled with water. You were babbling.” He squeezed her shoulder. “We must have reached you seconds after it flooded. Otherwise, you’d be in ICU, too.”
Jess bit her lip. Taylor was one of her best friends, but not even he knew that luck had nothing to do with her survival. Her mask could have been filled for hours, and she would be fine. She was special. Different.
When she was a child, her parents discovered that her body chemistry was different. She processed gases, like oxygen and nitrogen, with an unnatural efficiency that gave her an advantage when it came to holding her breath. When tested, she discovered that she could remain submerged for ten minutes, and if she remained unmoving, twenty. But it wasn’t her efficiency that saved her when she was unconscious in the water.
It was the set
