Chapter 1 Cold Front

The lake rose to meet the floatplane in long black swells, and Nessa Ahlgren brought it down anyway. She had flown in worse. That was the trouble with the north; there was always worse, and eventually you met it. Rain crossed the windshield in sheets. The wipers ran full and lost the fight. Below the starboard float, Lake Omiskwa opened and closed like a slow mouth, twenty kilometers of cold water between the harbor at Kettlehead and the outer Bellamy Islands, and somewhere in that dark a radio had coughed twice and gone silent. "Northreach, say the last position again." Cosima Wray's voice came over the headset, level as a metronome. "Forty-one minutes old. A gillnetter, the *Nightjar*. Skipper reported a flooded engine room, two men aboard. Then nothing." A pause. "Wind gusting to thirty-five at the point. Waves a meter and a half, building." "Two men," Nessa repeated. She banked east and the horizon tilted, a smear of grey on grey. "Any beacon?" "None." Which meant the mast was down, or the radio was drowned, or the men had been in the water before they thought to press anything. She pushed the throttle and felt the airframe gather itself, the old floatplane answering the way it always did, with a shudder and a complaint somewhere in the strut. The Merganser was forty years old and had opinions of its own, but it had never once refused to fly. Ice formed on the leading edge of the wing. She cycled the boot and watched the sheath crack and slide away into the dark. The cold moved into her early, as it always did before a call, a narrowing, a stripping down to the task and nothing else. She had learned to keep it there. It made her steady. It made her fast. It also made her, she suspected, difficult to love, but that was not a problem the lake asked her to solve. She crossed the last ridge of shoreline and let the plane drift low over open water. Even through the rain she could read the lake's mood, the way a rancher reads a field. The swell ran long and even, no chop, which meant the wind had not yet turned the whole surface to chaos. Somewhere below, a boat was sinking with two men who had already stopped being lucky. "There." She said it to herself. A green running light, low and canted, winking between waves. No cabin, just a hull and a stump of mast riding a swell that wanted to swallow it. She circled once to fix the position, then reached for the radio and the switch that would make her the loudest thing on the water. "Northreach to the vessel off Kettlehead Point. I have you in sight. Hold on. I am coming down on your port quarter." Nothing answered. She had not expected anything to. She set up her approach the way Sten had taught her, nose into the wind, wings level, carrying a little power to keep the floats from digging. Her brother had been dead for fourteen months and she still flew his approach, still heard his low voice counting the last fifty meters. Some habits outlived the people who made them. She had decided that was not grief. It was instruction. The Merganser touched the water hard, the port float biting first, and the lake took hold of the plane with a violence that knocked her teeth together. Spray sheeted over the windshield. She held the yoke, let the hull finish its argument, and brought the plane down to a walking speed on the swell. The boat was thirty meters off, listing so far she could see the keel. A figure clung to the gunwale, half in the water, and did not wave. She unclipped fast. The drysuit was a second skin she had learned to wear like a uniform, seals at the wrists and throat, hood tight, and now she pulled it on over her thermals with the speed of pure repetition. Rope. Throw bag. Knife. She opened the door and the cold hit her face like a hand. Water at this latitude in late autumn was a six-minute problem. Ten if you were lucky and calm and had a body that had not begun to lie to you. She had pulled numbers out of it before. She had also watched numbers pull someone else. She went in. The shock hit first, always, a fist to the chest that made thinking briefly impossible, and then her training caught her and she was swimming. The swell pushed her back and she took it and used it, riding the crest, closing on the boat. The man at the gunwale saw her and tried to speak. His lips were the wrong color. He was holding onto the hull with both hands and one of them had already let go. "Look at me," she said, because she needed his eyes, needed him present. "Is anyone else aboard?" He shook his head. Then he stopped, and his face changed, and he said a word she could not hear over the wind but understood exactly. He pointed down, past the rail, into the black water under the boat. The second man was in the net. She saw the line, the float of it riding against the hull. A gillnet had fouled the propeller when the engine died, and one of the crew had gone over to clear it, and now the mesh held him the way the lake held everything eventually. She could just make out the pale shape of a hand, four feet down and drifting. Six minutes. Maybe four. She gave the first man the throw bag and told him to wrap it and hold, and then she filled her lungs and went under the boat. ... I'll continue. The dark was total, and cold beyond argument, but her hands knew the work. She found the net and followed it down. The man was tangled at the elbow and knee, and he had stopped struggling, which was the worst sign there was. She cut, judged, cut again, keeping her own line clear, feeling her fingers go clumsy and stupid with the cold. Two passes. Three. The mesh gave. She got an arm around his chest and kicked for the surface and did not stop when the hull loomed and did not stop when the swell shoved her sideways into the float. She broke the surface with him and took a breath that was mostly water and dragged him to the float and held on. The Merganser, patient as a cart horse, carried them both. Getting two hypothermic men into a floatplane on open water in a force-six wind took eleven minutes that she would later be unable to account for. She did it anyway. Rope, leverage, the door frame as a hoist, her own body as a counterweight, cursing quietly in a voice she did not recognize. The first man helped until he could not, and then lay in the rear seat shaking, and the second man did not help at all. When it was done she stood on the float with the rain in her face and breathed until the shaking passed, then climbed in and started the engine and turned the plane for home without looking back. Behind her the Nightjar rolled once and went under. Kettlehead came up out of the murk at the end of the flight like a memory: a single street along a harbor, a few lights, the long shed of Northreach Rescue with its doors open and the ambulance already waiting. The Shrike, the station's old dive boat, stood at the pier. She landed on the sheltered water inside the point and taxied in, and by the time she cut the engine there were hands on the floats and Cosima was at the door with a blanket and the paramedics were taking the men. She got out. Her legs had gone unreliable. She sat on the edge of the pier with the blanket around her shoulders and watched them load the survivors, and watched the water for a while after that, the way she always did, to be sure she had taken everything out of it she had come for. "Six minutes down and you were under for ninety seconds." Vesta Skale stood over her, hands in the pockets of her coat, grey hair plastered flat by the rain. The chief of Northreach had a voice you could use to steady a compass. "You went under a fouled net. On a night like this." "He was in it." "He was." Nessa waited. There was more, and Vesta was never in a hurry to say a hard thing. "Both men will live," Vesta said. "The hospital called from the road. That was good work, and I will say so in the log." "Then say whatever else you came to say." Vesta looked out at the lake, at the black water and the rain walking across it in veils. "I got a call tonight," she said. "Not about the boat. It came in on the old line, the one nobody uses." She took a long breath. "A man is going to ask you for something, and you are going to want to say no. I am asking you to hear him out before you do." "Who?" "A federal witness," Vesta said. "And the people who want him dead are already closer than either of you knows." ---