Infinity Beach

12

Kim caught the red-eye back to Seabright and addressed the physicians and surgeons at the Institute breakfast. That went well, but Matt remarked quietly that it was good to see her again. His tone was simultaneously worried and accusing. He was always good at making her feel guilty. She explained that life had got hectic, and got away before he could press her. Afterward she went directly to the station and took the first train to Wakonda, home of the University of Amberlain. Solly was waiting for her in the physics department, where he’d borrowed a handheld sensor unit that the technicians were configuring to scan for gold.

When asked by the lab people if she’d uncovered a vein, Kim nodded and observed that she and Solly were about to acquire some serious wealth.

The unit tested to a range of about thirty meters for the quantity of gold one would expect to find in a bracelet roughly equivalent to the one Yoshi had been wearing.

Afterward, they caught the Snowhawk, which connected a half dozen cities across the central tier of the Republic, from Seabright on the east, through Eagle Point, to Algonda on the west.

They retired into a first-class cabin and were back reviewing the Hunter logs minutes after the train left the station.

The sun was already down as they eased out of Wakonda Central, picking up speed until the landscape blurred and eventually faded into the darkness. Solly sprawled leisurely in a padded chair; Kim sat on a cross bench, her arms wrapped around drawn-up knees.

They went back to the point at which the Hunter had dropped out of hyperspace, and watched Kane work on the AFS.

They ran the segment again, slower this time.

Kane finished up, notified the AI, and disappeared offscreen. Forty minutes later, scrubbed down and in a fresh uniform, he arrived in the pilot’s room. Emily came up and they surveyed the enormous star-clouds.

“In there somewhere,” Emily said, dreaming of celestials.

“Maybe,” said Kane. He was invariably more forthright with her than with Tripley. “But unless you’re damned lucky, you’ll need more than a single lifetime to find them.”

She sat down in the right-hand seat.

“Eight minutes to jump,” said the ship.

Kane pushed back and let his eyes half close. “We’ve been fortunate,” he said. “This is the first serious technical problem we’ve had in, what, a dozen or more missions? That’s not bad.”

She looked across at him, her spirits visibly sagging. Emily did not want to go home. “A lot more than a dozen. Markis, how long do you think it’ll take to make the repairs?”

He considered it. “They’ll pull the unit and replace it. A couple of days. No more than that. But the ship needs some general maintenance too before it goes out again.”

They continued in that vein while the AI counted down. The minutes ticked off and the conversation subsided while Kane turned his attention to the console. The power buildup that routinely preceded a jump became audible.

At thirty seconds, the main engines shut down and Hunter went into glide mode.

“There’s nothing here,” said Solly, somehow disappointed, as if they hadn’t already seen the sequence, didn’t already know nothing was going to happen. The jump procedure was now too far along to stop. If a celestial had pulled alongside and waved, they could have done nothing.

When the Hunter made its transition to hyperspace, Emily was staring out the window at the stars.

The Snowhawk was passing through a valley. Two of Greenway’s moons were in the sky, drifting among wisps of cloud. Dark slopes rose on either side. Treetops swayed in the blast of the passing train. Away to the north she could see the glow of a town. “Can’t really expect to hit it right away,” said Markis. “You have to be patient.”

“We’ve been patient.”

“Okay,” said Solly. “That does it for the celestials. Now we’re just looking for a motive for murder.” He looked at her. “You think if someone killed them, Yoshi and Emily, he wouldn’t have taken the gold?”

“If it was a burglar, something like that, sure he would have. But Tripley’s the prime suspect. You think he’d kill over some jewelry?”

“You really think Tripley did it?”

“No. But I can’t bring myself to believe they were killed by a robber. Wherever Yoshi is, she’s wearing her gold.”

Kim and Solly fast-forwarded through more conversations, all routine, mundane, what they would do when they got home, how they would spend the unexpected time. Tripley made it clear that he planned to mount the next mission as quickly as time permitted, and that he hoped to retain the services of the current crew. They didn’t hear him say it explicitly, but that the sentiments had been delivered beyond the range of the recording devices was apparent from the conversations in the pilot’s room. Everyone planned to return.

All this took the edge off the frustration, particularly for Yoshi, who’d come as an intern and who must have been worried that she might not be invited back. The weeks passed, and the general morale recovered and was reasonably high when they returned at last and docked at Sky Harbor.

Yoshi told Kane that she would stay the night with Emily at the Royal Palms in Terminal City, and then spend some time with her family until they were ready to try again. There was no indication, no nonverbal signal, that she was not telling the truth.

Tripley promised to hustle the repairs along. He estimated a relaunch in about a month. Was that satisfactory for Kane?

It was.

Tripley informed him that he would receive a bonus for his performance. Then he left Kane alone in the pilot’s room.

The captain spent a few minutes with the instruments, collected his sketchbook, and left. The imager blinked off.

It was over.

“No matter how many times we run it,” said Solly, “it’s going to keep coming out the same way. Nothing happened.”

The flight home had required forty-one days. They went back and looked again, with no idea what they were hoping to find. When Tripley spoke of Yoshi, he showed a genuine affection for her. And he seemed far too gentle to perpetrate either physical or psychological violence against anyone. His clone-son, thought Kim, was a different order of beast altogether.

They reviewed Kane’s conversations with the other crew members, listening, moving on. Kim watched Emily as the days ran down, thinking how luminous her sister looked, how energetic she was, how driven by the great search. And she was within days of losing her life.

But gradually an inconsistency emerged. She watched the interplay between the captain and Emily, went back to their conversations in the first part of the mission, and compared the earlier with the later. “Do you see it?” she asked Solly.

He leaned forward and squinted at the screen. She’d frozen the images, a few days from the end of the voyage. Kane and Emily had been talking about getting more serious about their physical conditioning programs on the next flight.

“What?” said Solly. “I don’t see anything.”

“What happened to the passion?”

“What passion?”

“Do they sound like lovers to you?”

“They never sounded like lovers to me.”

“Solly, they were hiding it before. Maybe from the others, or from the imager. Maybe from each other. Now it’s just not there.”

“Maybe they had a fight. We can’t really see very much, you know.”

“No, it’s not like that. There’s no tension between them on the return flight. This isn’t the kind of behavior you’d see in the aftermath of a breakup. It’s simply a cordial relationship between congenial colleagues. Not at all the same thing.”

The train was pulling into the outskirts of Eagle Point.

“What are you saying?” he asked.

Kim shut down the program but she stared at the screen until the train stopped moving. “I’m not sure,” she said.

They checked into the Gateway and Kim stayed up most of the night replaying the conversations between Kane and Emily. Outbound, the captain’s depth of passion was quite evident. He loved her sister. She could see it in his eyes, in his tone, in his every gesture. She wondered what the interaction between the two was like when they were away from the recording devices.

But it had changed during the return. Not because, as Solly had suggested, they’d had a falling-out. In that event they’d have been cold in each other’s company. The body language would be exaggerated. She’d see resentment in one or the other. Or both.

But none of that was present. Their mutual regard was precisely what one might expect from good friends. Nothing more, nothing less.

Again and again, she listened to their final conversation, recorded during the approach to Sky Harbor:

“Thanks, Markis.”

“For what?”

“For getting us back. I know we put some pressure on you to continue the mission.”

“It’s okay. It’s what I would have expected.”

They were on the night side of Greenway. The space station looked like a lighted Christmas ornament. Its twin tails were also illuminated, one reaching toward Lark, the other dipping into the clouds.

“As always, Markis, it was nice to spend time with you.”

Kim shook her head. The remark was artificial; the voice contained all the passion of a cauliflower.

“You too, Emily. But I guess we’ll be back at it in a couple of weeks.”

“I hope so. I’m getting tired coming home empty all the time.”

The station grew larger in the screens and then the Hunter was approaching one of the docks. People were visible in the operational sections and a spacesuited technician waited for them with an umbilical. There was a slight bump as the ship came to rest. A bank of console lights blinked furiously before settling on amber.

“Time to go home,” said Kane. They unbuckled and left the pilot’s room, Emily leading the way. If they said anything else to each other, it was lost.

Solly had come out of his bedroom during the last minutes. He was wrapped in a muted yellow robe. “So now,” he said, “Kane stays with the ship for a few hours to take care of the paperwork. Then he goes down to Terminal City and checks into a hotel. Tripley flies home. Yoshi and your sister flag down a cab, tell it to take them to the Royal Palms, but they don’t arrive.”

“That’s the scenario.”

“But we think Yoshi somehow or other got to the Severin Valley. Which probably means Emily was there too.”

“Probably.”

“Okay.” It was still dark outside. “If we’re going to go looking tomorrow, we’d better get some rest.”

They used the network to rent diving gear and a collapsible boat from the Rent-All Emporium, and a flyer from Air Service. Then they went down to a late breakfast. The flyer, with the equipment inside, was waiting for them when they finished.

Kim tied the gold sensor to an input jack, through which it would interface with the onboard tracking systems, displaying results on an auxiliary screen.

At a few minutes after noon they lifted off the roof of the Gateway and turned south toward Severin. The day was cold and cloudless.

“How’d it happen,” Solly asked as they flew through bright skies, “that both Kane and Tripley lived in the same small town?”

“Tripley didn’t live there,” Kim said. “Severin was a tourist spot, and he vacationed there. He also used it as a retreat during the off-season. He liked the solitude.

“Kane moved there in 559, when he inherited a villa from a relative who’d admired his war exploits. He was already beginning to make a name for himself as an artist, and he decided it would be an ideal place to work. The town only had a thousand or so people then, so it’s no surprise that the two eventually met. When Tripley went looking for someone to pilot Hunter, Kane was at hand.”

Mount Hope dominated a group of peaks to the southwest. They were coming down the Severin, flying low, barely a thousand meters off the ground. This stretch of the river wasn’t navigable: it descended toward the dam through a series of cataracts. On either side, thick forest advanced to the water’s edge. They saw an occasional farmhouse, inevitably dilapidated. The landscape was deep in snow.

Kim watched a freight train moving west. It was gliding just over the treetops, and the trees reacted to its passing in the manner of a bow wave, parting in front, closing behind. It was headed toward the Culbertson Tunnel, which would take it through the solid wall of mountains. The tunnel wasn’t visible from her angle, but she saw the train begin to slow down as it made its approach.

She hadn’t been able to give the flyer the exact coordinates of Tripley’s villa, so she switched to manual as they glided out over Remorse. The lake was a sheet of glass.

Solly activated the sensor. The display gave them groups of configuration data, blanked, and then went green. Negative return.

Ahead, Tripley’s villa sat on its lonely hilltop.

The place felt as if it were pinched off from the real world, like a black hole, a singularity where the laws of physics were slightly warped. Where footprints vanished.

They descended to treetop level and moved in directly over the roof. The display remained green.

The utility building showed nothing.

She circled the immediate area, keying off the villa. Most of the old Tripley property was new-growth forest and heavy underbrush. Its fences were down, and a group of spruce trees on the east side looked dead.

Next she extended the search several kilometers west, flying a Crosshatch pattern, scanning as far as the ridge that had protected the town on the night of the explosion. She checked along the summit, surveyed the far slope and the woods beyond until the ground got rocky.

Using the map, she came back and flew over the town. The center of Severin Village was in the water. She went down until the treads got wet. The display remained green.

“You didn’t really think the killer would hide her near city hall, did you?” asked Solly.

“If he was a maniac,” she said, “who knows what he might have done?”

A killer would have been likely to throw the body into the lake, which had been much smaller then; or into the river. Or he might have buried her north of town, in ground that was now at the bottom of Remorse. In either case, she’d still be in the water. So Kim flew systematically over the lake surface, marking off squares until, after an hour and a half, they’d covered it all.

That eliminated, Kim thought, the most likely places.

She took them east along the southern shoreline. Almost immediately the screen began to blink. “Got something,” said Solly. The rate varied back and forth as she jockeyed through the sky.

Down there.

Just woods. “I see an iron fence,” said Kim.

“And some headstones.” They were overgrown by thick brush, hidden by trees.

And a pair of wrought iron gates.

“Cemetery,” said Solly. He got a fix on the hit so they wouldn’t lose it when they moved out of the scanner’s range.

Kim set down in a glade about a hundred meters away. There was a short argument about who would go and who stay. “It’s my party,” she insisted.

Solly shrugged. “Keep talking to me.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said.

She sealed her jacket, climbed down from the flyer, and plunged into the woods. The day was cold and hard and very still. Snow crackled underfoot.

She wasted no time getting lost and had to double back. Solly’s line of sight provided shortest distance to the target, but did not allow for fences, thick shrubbery, creeks, or other obstacles. On her second try she found the gates. An arch was inscribed with the words JOURNEY’S END.

“These people weren’t much for subtlety,” she told Solly.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll explain later.”

“Okay. Are you inside?”

“Yes. Give me a bearing.”

Solly checked the map he’d made and compared it with her position. “To your right, about sixty degrees.”

There were a lot of headstones, and the cemetery was overgrown. She headed off in the indicated direction.

“Good,” said Solly. “Keep straight.”

She glanced at the markers as she went by. Some were two centuries old.

“You got it,” said Solly. “You should be right on top of it.”

She was looking up at a stone angel. “Nothing here except a grave,” she said. “Old one. Husband and wife. Both buried at the beginning of the last century.”

“That’s got to be it. It’s down there.”

She looked at it. Looked at some elms and a couple of mausoleums and more headstones half hidden in the underbrush. “Can’t be,” she said.

“Sure it is. It’s ideal. Nobody’d want to dig it up.”

“But the killer would have had to disturb the original grave. Somebody would have noticed.” Maybe the couple had been buried with their wedding rings. “This is not where you hide a body, Solly. You put it in the woods, or weight it and drop it in the lake.”

She walked back to the flyer and they took off again and resumed the hunt along the southern shore, and then off to the east. They broke out pork slices and apples while the AI executed the search pattern. The afternoon wore on.

By twilight, Solly had given up. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything,” he said.

“Where haven’t we looked?”

“Tripley had a flyer.”

“Yes.”

“If I had a flyer and I wanted to get rid of a body, I don’t think I’d dig any holes. It’s too much work, and you’re too likely to get caught.”

“We’ve looked in the lake.”

“To hell with the lake. I’d fly it out to sea and dump it.”

“If he did that,” she said, “we’re out of luck.” She tapped her index finger on the instrument console. “The explosion occurred three days after they arrived. We have to assume things were happening fast and he had to get rid of it locally.” The sun was touching the crest of Mount Hope.

“Top of the mountain?” he suggested.

“It’s all granite up there. No way to bury it.”

“The river,” said Solly. “But upstream. The other side of the dam.”

“Why would you put it there?”

“The water was deeper up there. Look at your map.”

Large sections of the dam were still intact. Sluices had been left open. The river rushed through them, and through gaps in the concrete, and roared out the south side, crashing down fifty meters into the lower canyon.

They flew low over the structure and were rocked by the wind. Kim yowped and the flyer warned them belatedly that turbulent conditions were common in the area. “We should exercise caution,” it added.

The wreckage reminded Kim of the remnants of a monolithic altar, or perhaps a vast jawbone left in the river.

The onboard AI apologized for the rough ride, assured them it would strive to be more careful, but complained that they had imposed a ceiling which prevented it from rising to a more comfortable altitude.

They looked down at the dam. On its upstream side, the river was a patchwork of water alternately rough and tranquil, of wakes and eddies, of sandbanks and splintered trees. It rushed at the shattered dam, crashed through it, and fell about forty meters into a canyon, which carried it into Remorse.

Solly instructed the AI to take them lower, but it complained that the action wouldn’t be prudent. “High winds,” it said. “Best to stay where we are.”

Solly sighed. “Kim,” he said, “change seats with me.”

She shook her head. “Going to manual won’t do any good. If it doesn’t like what you’re doing, it’ll override.”

“Change seats,” he said.

She complied and they climbed over each other while the flyer asked for instructions. When he was seated again, Solly looked to his left, found a panel marked A-DATA and opened it.

“What are we doing?” asked Kim.

“Taking out the AI.” He showed her a yellow-coated cable and disconnected it from a black box. The flyer momentarily lost headway and started to sink. Solly threw a couple of switches, and a yoke snicked out of the deck and locked in place. He tested it, pulled back on the stick, and leveled off.

“I never knew you could do that,” said Kim.

He grinned. “Learn something new every day. You ready?”

“For what? You weren’t planning on dropping us into the river, were you?”

“Have no fear,” he said.

“Right. Into the hands of God—”

He picked out one of the larger dam fragments and took them down the north face until they were just over the water. The descent was smoother than she’d expected.

“Good,” she said.

He nodded. “Nothing like having a professional—”

The screen began to blink.

“Bingo,” said Kim.

“Right at the foot of the dam, looks like.” That made sense, of course. Throw an object in anywhere along this stretch of water, weigh it down, and if it moved at all, it would end up wedged in here.

Solly looked at the darkening sky. “It’s late to push this any further tonight,” he said. “Why don’t we come back tomorrow? Work in full daylight?”

“When we’re this close? It’ll only take a few minutes. Let’s get it done. Find out what we have.”

Solly frowned. “Wouldn’t take much for the river and the concrete to beat up a diver pretty good.”

“It just means we have to be careful,” she said. “Anyhow, it’s not as dangerous as it looks.”

“It looks pretty dangerous.”

They surveyed the area for a place to set down.

“There,” said Solly. He was looking at a slab, a piece of the dam that had been hewn off and dumped. It was lying almost flat in the water, one end submerged, the other angled up at about ten degrees. Just enough room for the flyer.

“That the best we can do?” asked Kim.

“There are better landing sites—” he was looking at a couple of beaches, “—but we’d have a hard time getting out into the river.”

The slab, in fact, was perfectly situated, if they could manage the landing. Solly lowered the aircraft cautiously, arranging his approach so that the treads were parallel to the angle of incline, with the forward end up. “Hang on,” he said.

He was feeling for the concrete, much as a person reaches for the next step down in the dark. A burst of wind drove them off. He took it up, came back and tried again.

Kim found herself willing the aircraft down, behaving as if she were at the controls, telling herself easy. Easy. They touched, lifted, and touched again. Solly maintained power. The aft section settled, and it suddenly seemed as if the angle was steeper than it had looked, that they were about to slide back into the river.

And then they were on the slab.

He let the engine run for a minute. When nothing happened he shut it down and took a deep breath. “Nothing to it,” he said.

Kim let her heartbeat return to normal. “I knew you could manage it.”

Solly opened the door, climbed out, and leaned upslope. “It’s slippery,” he warned.

One of them would have to stay with the sensor, to direct the dive. Kim started to remove her earrings. Solly watched her and then shook his head. “You stay put.”

“Why?”

“Take a look at the river.” He had to shout to get above the wind and the roar of the water.

Kim got out, planted her feet on the wet concrete, and nodded. “It is a little rough,” she said. “Which is exactly why you need to stay here.”

“How’s that?”

The target area was just a few meters out from the slab. Not bad. She held up a tether. “If you go in and get into trouble, I’d never be able to pull you out. We need the muscle here.”

His eyes drilled into her. “That’s a dumb argument.”

“Who says? Anyway, this is my project. And Solly, I’d feel a lot better knowing you were up here ready to lend a hand if you have to, than down there where I couldn’t help worth a damn if something happened.”

He stared at her and she saw his irritation grow. Because he knew she was right. She pulled her suit out of the back of the aircraft. “Let’s just get it done.”

“I really don’t like this.”

A pair of iron clamps jutted out of the concrete. “Relax,” she said. She fixed the tether to one of the clamps and clipped the other end to her belt. “If anything goes wrong you can haul me out.”

They argued for another few minutes. Then he gave in and she looked at the rushing river, watched it surging across the lower end of the slab, and wondered briefly whether this was a good idea after all, whether they should not have waited and maybe got a diving team together. She was about to back off when Solly shook his head, lowered the radio receiver into the water, and glowered at her. “Dumb,” he grumbled.

“It’s no big deal.”

He grimaced, apparently uncertain what she’d said, but she shrugged and spoke into her mask radio. “It won’t be bad once I get down a couple of meters.”

He nodded and mouthed the word dumb again.

She tugged on her flippers, connected the jets to her belt, strapped a lamp on her wrist, and pulled her converter over her shoulders.

He gave her a pained expression. “Good luck.”

She returned a smile that was meant to be reassuring, pulled the mask in place, and slipped into the river. “It’s not that bad,” she told Solly.

“The slab’s breaking it up. That won’t last.”

She ducked under, heard the converter kick in and begin extracting oxygen from the water. Competing currents pushed at her, carrying her first one way and then another. She ran a radio check. Solly responded, she turned on the lamp, and started down, feeling her way along the smooth face of the slab. The water was murky and she couldn’t see. She kept descending until she felt bottom. It was thick with mud and rock.

“Straight ahead,” said Solly. “About twelve meters, looks like.”

At first the water was relatively calm. She moved out away from the wall, trying to keep contact with the bottom. She worked her way past debris, drowned trees, pieces of machinery, concrete chunks. The rush of water pushed her one way and then another, then bore down on her until she lost all track of direction.

But it didn’t matter. Solly had both the diver and the target blip on his screen. “Drifting right,” he told her.

The current kept getting stronger. She had to use a burst from the jets to compensate. Dangerous, that, when she couldn’t see.

“Drifting right again. Eight meters dead ahead.”

Another burst carried her forward. The river tore at her, tried to carry her away. She anchored herself to an engine housing and caught her breath.

“How’s your visibility, Kim?”

“A half meter.”

“Okay. You should be right on top of it.”

The lamp was no more than a soggy glow. “I don’t see anything.”

“It’s right there.”

“It could be buried.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. Why don’t you come up? We’ll get a team and the right equipment and come back tomorrow.”

The light reflected against something. Off to her right. Reluctantly, she dug in her heels, let go of the shrubbery, and crawled forward.

It was a piece of plastic. Sticking out of the muck. “We might have something, Solly.”

“What is it? What do you see?”

Inside the plastic. “A shoe.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

She pulled at it. “Solly, it’s a foot.”

“Okay. Go easy.”

“It’s somebody.”

“You can see a corpse?”

“I think so.”

“Man or woman?”

“Are you serious? I’ve got a leg. That’s all.”

“Okay. You all right?”

She knew what he was thinking. “I’m fine.”

“What’s it look like?” All business again.

“It’s small. I guess it is a woman. Or a child.” She removed a line from her belt to fasten it to the plastic. But she lost her balance and the river caught her and sent her tumbling.

Solly’s voice stayed calm. “Status, Kim? What’s going on?”

She crashed against something hard, but found a handhold.

“Kim?”

“Current caught me.” She was hanging onto a tree branch.

“You want me to come down?”

“No,” she said. “My God, no.”

The current tried to jerk her mask off. She grabbed hold of it, got it back in place, and listened to herself breathe.

“I think this would be a good time to come up, Kim. We can alert the authorities in the morning and let them do the rest.”

“Which way’s up?” she demanded. The question wasn’t entirely facetious. She needed guidance getting back so she didn’t pop out of the water at the wrong place and get sucked through the dam.

“You need to go about six meters right. Do that and you’ll come up directly in front of me. Calmest water in the area.”

Which wasn’t saying much.

But it was hard to follow directions in the river. And she was getting tired. How long had she been down?

She used the jets to move right.

“Hold it,” said Solly, alarmed. “You’re going the wrong way.”

But the river caught her. She seized something, a piece of iron, and hung on. “What’s happening, Kim?”

She knew immediately. Communication breakdown: her right wasn’t his right.

“I’m sorry,” he said, figuring it out. “My fault. You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t have to worry about going anywhere you don’t want to. I’ve got the line.”

Her shoulders ached. She’d drifted into an eddy and she took advantage of it to rest for a moment and let the river carry her forward. The current seemed to be getting stronger and suddenly she was tumbling and being swept along. She banged into something. Lights flashed behind her eyes and the tether yanked at her hip. The river rushed past her, dragged her mask up onto her forehead. She swallowed water and slammed into a tangle of branches. Pieces of iron or wood stabbed at her belly and the river tried to drag her clear but she hung on.

The torrent roared in her ears. It pounded her and pressed the breath out of her.

She got the mask back on and used the purge valve to clear the water. But it wasn’t happening fast enough so she blew it out herself. The mask immediately began to fill up again.

“Kim!” Solly sounded far away. “Are you okay?”

She tried to answer but only swallowed more water. The purge valve didn’t seem to be doing anything and the river was pouring in around the lens.

“Kim, what’s happening?”

She cleared out her mask again, tried to push off from the tree. But the tether brought her back.

The tether. It was fouled.

And the river had become too strong, or she too tired. She couldn’t fight it, couldn’t even think about making headway.

“—stuck—” Solly was saying. “If you can hear me, I’m on my way. Hang—”

She wanted to talk to Solly, tell him to send for help, to stay away. But she couldn’t get the water out of her mask, couldn’t talk, couldn’t even scream.

She tore it off, disconnected the hose, bit down on the mouthpiece, and sucked in a lungful of air. It allowed her to retreat inside her head, away from the rushing river—

Can’t stay here.

She tried to free the tether, get clear of the branches, but every movement was fighting the torrent.

Solly would be following the tether down. But he’d no more be able to survive this than she was.

Something crashed into her ankle. The current dragged at her, and her shoulders hurt, and she almost lost the mouthpiece. She kept one hand clamped down on her belt, holding the tether lest it be torn away; the other held the mouthpiece in place.

Theoretically she could last for days. As long as the converter kept working she could just wait for Solly to bring help. But Solly wasn’t bringing help; he was coming himself.

If she did nothing, they would both die down here. Or at least, she would.

Her lamp went out.

She tried to untangle the tether from the tree, but it was hopelessly snarled. She made her decision, undipped it, and let it go. Then she pushed clear.

She rose in the torrent for a brief moment, and it slammed her into a wall. Her mouthpiece was torn away. The wall had openings, culverts, and she was dragged into one. It squeezed down on her, scraped her converter, wedged her into a narrow space. She felt around frantically for the mouthpiece.

She was jammed in headfirst and the mouthpiece should be in front of her, had to be in front of her, but she couldn’t find it.

It was a sluice. A spillway. But it was partially blocked with debris. The converter, which was mounted on her back, was caught against mud and concrete.

She found the mouthpiece, gratefully put it between her lips, and took a deep breath. The air tasted very good. But she was fighting panic.

She would not get out the way she came in, and she could not squeeze through. As long as she tried to hold onto her breathing system, she was going to stay right where she was.

She tried again to wriggle free.

How far was it through the dam and out the other side? How far could it be? Surely not more than twenty meters.

She took a deep breath, removed the mouthpiece and released the converter clip. The torrent threw her against the straps but she struggled out of them and the river tore her away from the unit, thrust her deeper into the spillway. It swept her along, forcing her against walls and rock. She tried to protect her face and head. Once, for a few desperate seconds, she was caught again, but the obstruction broke loose almost immediately.

The flood carried her through the dark. She raised her head periodically hoping to find trapped air, but there was only water and concrete.

She crashed into something metallic, a screen, a grate perhaps. She felt her way past it and was moving downstream again, reminding herself that the water was only passing through the dam, that the lower river lay just ahead. That she’d be out in seconds.

A curious kind of tranquillity settled over her. As if some deep aspect of herself had given up, had accepted the darkness and the river.

And suddenly the pressure was gone and she was falling.

The fall went on and on. The river torrent turned to mist and she caught a glimpse of the river below, of white water and shadows. She gulped down lungfuls of air, straightened out and hit feet first, sinking into quiet depths. Then, delighted that her parts still seemed to be working, she kicked back to the surface.