Sea Haven 01 - Water Bound

her, unmarred by any hint of fear. She loved to be in the water. Being alone was an added bonus. She didn’t have to try to adhere to conventional social customs. She didn’t have to worry about hurting someone’s feelings, embarrassing her chosen family or having people make fun of her.
    Out here in the water she could be herself and that was enough. Out here she couldn’t hear the screams of the dead, feel the scorching heat of a blazing fire or see suspicion on the faces around her.
    After rubbing herself down with baby shampoo, she warmed her suit by pouring hot water from the engine in it before putting it on. Once again, she checked her air compressor—her lifeline. She’d spent a great deal of money on the Honda 5.5-horsepower engine and her Atlas Copco two stage air compressor with the three extremely expensive filters, two particulate filters with a carbon filter on top. Divers had died of carbon monoxide poisoning 28

    and she wasn’t about to go that way. She had a non-locking Hanson quick release on her end of the main hose so she could detach quickly if necessary.
    She carried a thirty-cubic-feet small bailout—her backup scuba tank—on her back. Some of the divers dove without one, but since she usually dove alone, she wanted the extra protection. Rikki didn’t care to be bent by an emergency ascent. She wanted to be able to come up at the proper speed should anything happen, such as a hose getting cut by a boater who did not see her dive flag.
    Donning her weight belt and then her bailout, she put on the most important instrument, her computer, which kept track of her time so there was no chance of her staying down too long. She had a compass to know where she was and where she wanted to go. Grabbing her urchin equipment, she slipped into the water, taking four five-hundred-pound-capacity nets with her.
    The massive plunge into the water felt like leaving earth and going into space, a monumental experience that always awed her. The cool liquid closed around her like a welcome embrace, bringing with it a sense of peace.
    Everything inside of her stilled, made sense. Righted. There was no way to explain the strange sensations she experienced that others obviously didn’t feel when being touched. Sometimes fabrics were painful and noises made her crazy, but here, in this silent world of beauty, she felt right, her chaotic mind calm.
    As she descended, fish circled her curiously and a lone seal zipped past her. Seals moved fast in the water, like small rockets. Normally they would linger, but today, apart from a few scattered fish, the sea seemed empty. For the first time, a shiver slid down her back and she looked around her at the deserted spot. Where had all the fish gone?
    The San Andreas Fault was treacherous. A good nine hundred feet deep or more, it was a long black abyss stretching along the ocean floor. At around thirty feet deep, a high shelf jutted outward, and the extensive jagged line of rock was covered in sea urchins. The drop-off was another good thirty feet across where a shorter shelf held an abundance of sea life as well.
    Rikki touched down at the thirty-foot shelf and immediately began to work. Her rake scraped over the urchin-crusted rocks along the shelf wall, the noise reverberating through the water for the sea creatures to hear. She worked fast, knowing that sharks could hunt her from below, whereas normally when she worked on the ocean floor she wasn’t in as much danger.
    Her feeling of dread increased with each stroke of her rake. She found herself stopping every few minutes to look around her. She studied the abyss. Could a shark be prowling down there in the shadows? Her heart rate 29

    increased, but she forced herself to stay calm while she went back to work, determined to get it over with. The sea urchins were plentiful and large, the harvest amazing.
    She filled her first net in a matter of twenty minutes, and as the weight increased, she filled the float with air to compensate. In another twenty minutes she had a second bag filled. Both nets floated just to one side of her while she began working to fill the third net. Because she was working at thirty feet, she knew she had plenty of bottom time to fill all four five-hundred-pound nets, but she was getting tired.
    After finishing the last bag, she hooked all four bags to her hose and stayed on the bottom while she let the bags go to the surface, holding the hose to slow the urchins’ ascent and to keep the