The Year I Stopped Being His novel Chapter 455

Sloane was drifting beneath the surface, her dark velvet dress blossoming silently in the water. Her eyes were shut, her face terrifyingly serene, as if she were simply asleep. A faint, desperate stream of bubbles trickled from the corner of her mouth.

He fought the freezing current, kicking furiously toward her.

*

The world was slowly going dark...

She couldn't feel the cold anymore, nor the pain. There was only an endless, suffocating wave of exhaustion rising from the marrow of her bones.

Her consciousness was untethering from her body, drifting upward like a kite with a snapped string, while she sank deeper into an abyssal void.

In her hazy delirium, a massive rock suddenly materialized in the water.

This wasn't the bottom of the lake—this wasn't the lake at all. She was somewhere she had never seen before, a place more vivid yet absurd than any dream.

The rock was the size of a small mountain, completely smothered in a dense colony of fungal growth. The tendrils swayed gently in the water, radiating a faint, haunting blue luminescence. They looked like millions of ancient, slumbering ocean spirits, pulsing in time with the ocean's breath.

The blue light wasn't cold. It carried a strange warmth, a gentle beckoning.

She watched them stretch, sway, and bloom in the dark water, overcome by a profound, inexplicable sense of awe.

She knew them.

She knew she was supposed to know them. A single term breached the darkest, most hidden corner of her mind, bursting forth like a buried seed finally breaking through the soil—

The White Microbe.

*

Garrison reached Sloane in seconds.

He hooked his arms tightly under her armpits, clamping her against his chest from behind, and relentlessly hauled her upward until they broke through the jagged ice hole.

She felt like a heavy, waterlogged bolt of silk in his arms. Dead weight. Completely unresponsive.

He saw a woman lying flat on the cobblestones. The soaked black velvet clung to her skin. Her face was the color of ash, her eyes shut tight in total unconsciousness.

It was... Sloane?!

And kneeling beside her was a man, thoroughly drenched. Freezing water dripped from his dark grey turtleneck, his hair plastered to his forehead, his lips blue. He hovered over her ear, chanting her name like a madman, "Sloane! Wake up!"

Who else could it be but Garrison Foster.

Josh's brain short-circuited.

Sloane... she knew how to swim, didn't she? Wasn't she a professional diver?!

She had always moved through the water like she belonged there—

How could she be dying?!