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She had not slept during the long years spent under the water. There were only the deep interminable moments spent drifting between life and death. The only light came from strange fish that sometimes darted nearby in the rare moments when she was not trying to scream or thrusting her fists and knees against the metal of her cage. Knowing that someday the metal must bend, or rust, or break. That nothing, not even immortality, could last forever.
Down there, in the dark, her panic drifted to anger and her anger to rage. She could not know how long she waited, but for the first long stretches of time, the first few thousand deaths, she would chant Andromache, Andromache in time with the beating of her body against the cage. Hoping against hope that Andy would, somehow, find her, and drag her to the surface. Believing with a fool’s heart that Andy could keep her promises and pull back the sea to bring Quynh home.
The dreams came to her in those deep moments. She could not sleep, but she was, sometimes, without consciousness. Sometimes she dreamt of Andy, of Yusuf and Nicolo. These were not seeing dreams; she could not have borne a seeing dream. To watch her family search for her and not find her - or worse, to see them mourn her - was beyond imagining.
Until the seeing dreams came, and she had to survive them. A man, first hanging, and then with her family, who did not mourn her, and who did not search for her.
She did not sleep. She dreamed, and she raged, and as the years passed and she did not die, her rage had a name and a heartbeat: Andy, Andy.