Chapter 11: The Scratch File

We listened at the drafting table, with the lamp turned low.

Kit set the watch on a stack of blueprints and pressed the side button.

A hiss came out of the tiny speaker. Then a door closed, and a chair scraped.

"Take one," said a man's voice.

I knew it. It was the technician who read the script.

"Taking on water. Thirty-five thousand feet," Kit's voice said, thin and nervous. "Em, please come. I'm out of air."

"Flat," said a second voice.

My father.

He sounded relaxed, and a little bored.

"Softer, Kit. He has to believe you're drowning, not reading. Think about the last time you were scared."

"Dad, it's a stunt."

"Then it's a stunt that has to work. Again."

Kit said the lines again.

He said them eight times.

On the fifth, between the lines, I heard what he'd told me. Quiet and rushed:

"Em. The ladder's loose."

Nobody in the booth reacted.

The tape rolled on.

"That's the one," my father said. "Keep it. That's the one he'll come for."

Kit's hand closed hard over his mouth.

"He'll come," my father said, in the recording. "He has never once not come for you."

I didn't move.

I sat in my own apartment and listened to my father explain me to a stranger.

Kit reached for the watch.

"There's more," he said. "It's from the second night. It's worse."

"Play it."

He thumbed a button.

This time it was a different room, with the dull echo of a corridor. A muffled speaker voice came through a wall, thinned out by the door.

It was Quist, quietly pleased.

"The flange is in. Torque checked. It'll hold two cycles and a long dive. Past thirty thousand, it goes."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Brother Called From the Ocean Floor, So I Hung Up from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.