Absolute Pressure by Sigmund Brouwer Page A

little weird world, colors stay with me everywhere. For instance, for me, Wednesdays are light blue. And whenever I hear the national anthem, I taste chocolate. Some people with my condition taste chocolate when they hear a Beethoven violin concerto. Some will hear a certain sound and get atickling feeling. Or they’ll feel something tickle them and hear a certain sound.
    It’s called
synesthesia
. When two senses are linked together. I know that sounds weird. That’s why nobody knows I have it. Not even my mom. I don’t want anyone to know I’m a freak.
    At seventy feet deep, I still had another sixty feet to go to get to the bottom of the ship. There were elevator shafts and chambers and rooms long since stripped of equipment.
    I checked the dial on my air tank. It showed full. I had only been in the water for fifteen minutes. Above me, in the
GypSea
, a guy named Judd Warner was waiting for me to return. He had just been hired by my uncle a couple of weeks earlier. Judd expected me back in half an hour.
    I slipped inside the structure and kept going lower.
    At eighty feet, I stopped to plug my nose through my dive mask. I swallowed hard and popped my ears, something I hadbeen doing all the way down. It helps keep your eardrums from exploding.
    At 130 feet, I finally found a great cubby hole deep inside the immense steel structure to hide the treasure chest in, and I began to rise again.
    As I was going out of the cubby hole, a small fish brushed against my left elbow. Bright red filled my vision. I didn’t panic. I knew about that spot on my elbow. Behind my right knee, there’s a patch of skin that makes me see green whenever I rub it.
    Yeah. Like I said, weird. But I’ve learned to live with it.
    And I liked being alive.
    Which was why I was always so careful when I went diving.
    So what happened fifteen minutes later on my way up was a total shock.
    At ninety-three feet, still inside the ship, something ripped my mouthpiece away from my face. And the water around me exploded.

chapter two
    For a couple of seconds, I bucked and danced at the end of my line. I was like a rag doll shaken by a giant.
    Was it a great white shark, twisting and turning me from side to side, like a bulldog with a rat in its jaws?
    I couldn’t see what was happening. It was dark, and air bubbles kept exploding around my face mask.
    Don’t panic!
I told myself.
Don’t panic!
    I tried to think it through. I didn’t feel razor-sharp teeth cutting through my wet suit. So it wasn’t a shark.
    Don’t panic. Don’t panic.
    I was still attached to the main cable that was my guideline. Without it, the force of the exploding water would have fired me in different directions like a pinball bouncing off flippers. If that had happened inside this ship, I’d already have broken arms or legs.
    Don’t panic. Don’t panic.
    With both hands, I grabbed for my mouthpiece. The rubber tube was like a live snake. It twisted and turned in the water, trying to get away from me.
    I finally figured it out.
    A pressure valve must have broken. Air in tanks is pressurized at about 3,000 pounds per square inch. A valve lets the air out slowly when you breathe. With a valve broken, this air was shooting out from the tank through the mouthpiece. In a hurry.
    I was losing so much air and losing it so hard that the force of it was shaking my entire body.
    I finally got my hands around the mouthpiece tube. I pulled the mouthpiece toward me.
    I needed air!
    There was no way I could get the mouthpiece back into place. The air was shooting out too hard. It would have been like turning on a garden hose and putting the end into my mouth and holding all the water. And trying to breathe air from the exploding bubbles would have been like trying to sip water from a fire hose.
    My lungs screamed for air. But all I’d gulp into my lungs would be water.
    With ninety-three feet to get to the surface.

chapter three
    I