Flashback by Nevada Barr

Right," Anna said. "What happened?" Then, more sharply: "Where's Linda? I was diving with Linda." She stood quickly with the half-baked idea of going back down. Dizziness smacked into her. Teddy caught her before she toppled over the side.
    Teddy gently pushed her head down. Blackness receded. "I know what you did for me," Anna said. It came out in a creaky little whisper. "I am grateful. But I'm in a hurry. Where is Linda?" She pushed herself upright, but this time had the good sense to remain seated. Fainting was embarrassing, and as the shock of being alive wore off, her entire body had begun to hurt.
    "She's okay." Danny knelt in front of her, the gesture of an adult soothing a child.
    "Where?"
    "On the Atlantic Ranger. There." Daniel pointed. "Right after the explosion I radioed Mack to get another diver over here. Rather than wait, Teddy went over the side in a snorkel.
    "Mack got here a few minutes ago, just as Teddy broke surface with you. Linda'd come up a minute or so before. She's on board with Cliff now."
    "She's okay?" Anna asked.
    "Shook up. Bruised. She was closer than you but didn't seem as hard hit. The hull must have aimed the explosion up and out where you were.
    She got cut up pretty bad on the coral but managed to keep her regulator in her month and never lost consciousness. The blast stirred up the bottom and knocked you clean out of her sight. She'd come up to see if she could see your bubbles, but Teddy'd already gone down."
    Explosion. Blast. Anna remembered none of that. For a second she just sat, watching the water on the deck around her feet turn pink.
    "Guess I'm bleeding," she said. "What blew up? The boat?"
    "The boat," Daniel confirmed.
    "How could the damn thing blow up?" Anna asked nobody in particular. "It'd already blown up. There were pieces scattered all over hell and back." For some reason the image of the damaged fingers beckoning from the misshapen cabin door flashed behind Anna's eyes. Terror seized her: fear the finger belonged to the grim reaper himself, that he stalked her and, having missed this time, would try again, and soon. The horror was so intense and unexpected Anna sucked her breath in.
    "What's the matter? Are you okay?" chorused in her ears, and she was pulled out of her paranoia.
    "Must have broken a rib," she lied. Raw fear born of a mental-picture-become-real was as frightening as the false hell of the image.
    It was insane.
    Anna rubbed her face hard with both hands, scrubbing away the disease.
    "Extra fuel tanks in the bow, is my guess," Daniel said, returning to her question of how a boat could explode twice. "That or explosives of some kind."
    "Fire," Anna said. "Just before nothing, I saw a bubble full of smoke leaking from the hull."
    "An explosive detonated by fire," Daniel amended his earlier supposition.
    While she'd been sitting, gathering what wits were left to her, ignoring Teddy, her savior, and making demands for information, the Atlantic motored over to raft off the Curious, and Teddy and Daniel had divested her of tank, weight belt, fins and snorkel.
    Anna reached down to retrieve the heavy buoyancy compensator-BC-that held tank and regulator. "I'd better go back down," she said. "Figure out what the hell happened."
    "That might not be the best idea."
    Cliff, with his kindly professional face and quiet voice, leaned on the gunwales where the two boats touched. "Might want to rethink that one. Linda's not going back down. Not today."
    Anna's vision, narrow and inward for the few minutes she'd been out of the water, opened to include sky, ocean and this handful of people floating in between. Linda, free of dive gear as she was, sat in the Atlantic's bow. Mack was cutting her tattered dive skin off of her. The exposed flesh oozed with cuts and scrapes, one or two quite deep, bleeding freely, though not life threateningly.
    "Are you okay, Linda?" Anna asked.
    "Better than you. And I've got sense enough to call it a day. I hurt too bad not to be stupid down