Right.
He now had one hour and ten minutes to cut her out.
It was going to be fucking close.
CHAPTER 8
Tabitha was doingeverything she could not to become unnerved.
Which was something she was normally good at, except in a low air-supply situation.
During extremely stressful moments such as this—ever since her parents had died of carbon monoxide poisoning—Tabitha often had trouble catching a full breath. Luckily, small spaces weren’t her trigger.
Which they certainly could be.
No. It was all about limited air.
After the accident, she’d spent months conditioning herself to submerge in Endora again, thinking about how her oxygen supply might be compromised, but eventually—even though it should have been antithetical—she’d one-hundred percent come to feel that her sub was a safe space; a friend.
Not anymore.
Now it was nothing more than an inert, metal box, taunting her as her breathing space dwindled.
She gasped for another breath in the foot-and-a-half of her remaining air bubble.
Dammit.Her oxygen difficulties right now had to be all in her head, but tell that to her lungs when they were trying to suck in the life-giving gasses.
Yeah, how’s that working for you?
Poorly, but…
Holy shit.Her breathing troubles weren’t her imagination!
She coughed convulsively. It was the smoke and volatile fumes from Spencer’s plasma cutter that were encroaching into her space.
Tabitha quickly took a necessary gulp of the toxic air, zipped up her suit again and submerged. She knocked and knocked until she couldn’t hold her breath any longer, then finally took the only action possible. She opened the first Nitrox valve and turned the air on inside her suit.
Frick.
She now had forty minutes left; twenty minutes from these tanks, and twenty more from the auxiliary ones she had strapped to the ceiling.
Picking up a crow bar she’d earlier rescued from her tool kit—something she’d done hoping to help facilitate getting herself out when the time was right—she abandoned her position, which had been well away from the sparks, and wailed on the hull next to where Spencer worked.
He looked up.
Thank God.
She pointed to her tanks to let him know she was relying on them now.
He took a second to shrug out a “why”, and Tabitha didn’t hesitate to point to his device, then mimic choking.
Spencer’s face went slack with horror.
Yeah.He got it. And he was clearly pissed that he hadn’t accounted for the toxicity of his burning metal.
Forty minutes, he signaled his understanding before he went back to his task with renewed determination.
Tabitha backed up while he began working again.
