A man, dressed only in a pair of wetsuit shorts, slept restlessly inside a glass cylinder full of murky green water. Repeated strong twitches ran over his square face, through his beefy torso, down his sturdy arms and legs; his whole body shook, then relaxed. After a moment of stillness, the man opened his narrow eyes.
As cold, oily water filled his vision, he blinked several times, yet the blurriness pushed back, refusing to go away. He wanted to wipe the smear and with it the remains of his nightmare, but his hands stopped when they touched a black triangular mask that covered his nose and mouth.
Startled, he grabbed the triangle with both hands and tried to shove it away from his face. The mask’s rubber harness stretched around his head, …show more content…
They had to sedate him before trapping inside as he didn’t remember climbing in here. But how did they put him inside? The bottom was solid. There were no openings in the walls. The tubes passed through the hole in the ceiling. They had to do it through the top. There was no other way.
Andor looked up. Bright light played tricks with the water, creating patterns of wavy lines. The patterns looked strange, too symmetrical as if drawn by someone.
He swam up close to the ceiling until his forehead almost touched the glass. Examining it, he found faint seams that curved and spread from the hole in the center to the nearby walls. The seams split the ceiling into many segments that looked like flower petals or shutter blades of a photo camera. He couldn’t open the glass lid because it wasn’t a lid. The blades had to be retracted, not lifted or unscrewed. Shutter button. There had to be a shutter button that opens it. But where was it?
If there was such a button at all, it wasn’t inside the water tank.
Andor shoved all the excess tubes through the hole in the ceiling. The loose tubing coiled on the other side. He inhaled as much air as he could, then took off the air mask, and waved it until one coil slipped off the ceiling and formed a loop visible through the glass wall. He rotated his whole body, watching intently how the loop followed him along the edge of the