The Year I Stopped Being His novel Chapter 225

"If you don't come up, I'm not leaving."

Sloane frowned deeply.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Exactly what it sounds like," Garrison repeated. "If you don't come up, I will not leave."

Sloane let out an exasperated sigh. This was no time to argue with a man as stubbornly immovable as Garrison, so she offered a single word in reply.

"Fine."

She pulled away from him, turned around, and stepped to the edge of the ice hole, leaning her weight forward.

With a sharp splash, she plunged straight into the freezing lake.

Water sprayed upward, landing on the surface and instantly crystallizing into tiny beads of ice...

*

Three hundred feet, six hundred feet, nine hundred feet...

Sloane's breathing remained steady. There was only a slight pressure in her eardrums, which vanished entirely after a single equalization.

The wetsuit's pressure compensation system operated flawlessly in its segmented escalation mode. With every preset depth marker she passed, she could feel the seals automatically tighten and then ease up, acting like a pair of invisible hands fighting off the crushing pressure surging from all sides.

Thirteen hundred feet, sixteen hundred feet...

She glanced at her depth gauge; the numbers were still climbing. The beam of her headlamp pierced the water, swiftly swallowed by the crushing dark, illuminating only a tiny cloud of suspended particles directly in front of her.

There was absolutely nothing around her. Nothing but endless water and pitch-black emptiness.

And the sound of her own heartbeat.

Thump, thump, thump—

Around eighteen hundred feet, the water temperature began to shift.

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