The Year I Stopped Being His novel Chapter 214

"Sloane, talk to me. What's your status?"

Josh's voice crackled through her earpiece, laced with a faint hiss of static.

Sloane bit down on her regulator, her voice muffled. "Visibility is terrible. Water temp is about... twenty-eight degrees. Still descending."

"Watch for pressure spikes. The White Lake is deeper than we anticipated. The professor thinks it might exceed three thousand feet."

Sloane gave a brief sound of acknowledgment and kept dropping. The numbers on her depth gauge ticked relentlessly upward: six hundred feet, eight hundred feet, a thousand feet. The water pressure was escalating rapidly. The wetsuit squeezed against her body, feeling as if an invisible vise were tightening from all sides. Breathing became a chore; every lungful of air had to be forcefully dragged in.

"Sloane, are your eardrums holding up?" Josh's voice buzzed again.

"A little muffled."

"Equalize the pressure."

Sloane pinched her nose, clamped her mouth shut, and blew hard. A sharp pop rang in her ears, relieving the tension momentarily, but it crept right back. Eleven hundred feet, twelve hundred feet, thirteen hundred feet—she abruptly froze.

It wasn't by choice. Her body had slammed the brakes for her.

It felt as if a phantom hand had plunged into her chest and crushed her lungs. The air inside her was compressed with nowhere to go. The regulator valve was working frantically to supply oxygen, but it felt like she was inhaling nothing but dead space. A blinding, agonizing pain stabbed through her eardrums, feeling as though someone had shoved spikes into both sides of her head. Bright flashes burst across her vision, not from hypoxia, but from the sheer, overwhelming agony.

"Sloane? Sloane!" Josh's voice shifted, spiking with sheer panic. "What's happening?"

Sloane gritted her teeth, forcing the words out past the regulator: "Pressure... too high... suit compensation... is failing..."

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