Chapter 10 Night Dive

The ice came in the night, thin and black and dangerous, sheeting the cove and the channel and every sheltered water between the islands. By morning the storm had passed and the cold had arrived, hard and clear, and the lake lay under a sky the color of steel and did not move. It was the kind of morning that killed careless pilots, because it looked calm and was not; the ice would build through the day, and by afternoon the channel would be closed. "We fly before noon or we do not fly," Nessa said. They could not fly before noon, because the float was still patched with hope and the two-part sealant needed the morning's cold to cure, and so they did the only useful thing left and went to the one place Isaak had not yet agreed to go. "The backup," she said. "Tarn said you had one. He said it was somewhere you could reach. If we are going to run to the fathom, this is the last chance to bring it with us." Isaak stood at the window with his back to her for a long moment. "It is in the lake," he said. "The night they took the convoy, we were ahead of them on the coast road, and I had time, and I did not know how much. I had the case in my bag. I stopped at a culvert where the road crosses a shallow bay and I put it under the ice, in the channel, where the water is three meters deep and the bottom is mud and the case is weighted and black and invisible." He turned. "I marked it by a rock on the shore. I know exactly where it is. I did not tell Tarn because Tarn is the one who chose the route they knew." The shallow bay was a twenty-minute walk north along the shore, and they took the shore line and a hammer and a lantern and went while the light was still thin. The bay was frozen, black glass, and Nessa walked out onto it carefully, feeling the ice with every step, reading it the way she read a wing. Two inches and rising. Enough to stand on, not enough to be careless on. She found the rock, found the line Isaak drew in the air from the rock to the middle of the bay, and cut a hole with the hammer in the place he pointed to. The water under the hole was black and still and cold beyond any argument she had ever had with it. "I go down, I find the case, I come up," she said. "Thirty seconds, no more, because there is no drysuit now, only waders and a line and you." "Nessa." He held her arm. "The last time you went under, it was thirty seconds and it was almost too many." "The last time I went under, I was under a boat in a swell. This is a hole in flat ice over three meters of mud." She pulled the waders up and tied the line around her chest. "When I pull twice, you haul. And this time, if I do not come up, you do come in, because three meters of still water is survivable and you know it, and I am not going to let your guilt kill us both." He did not smile. But he took the line. She went in. The cold of still water was a different cold from the lake in a storm. It was patient. It wrapped her and squeezed and began, at once, to take her strength, and she knew she had less time than she had claimed. She kicked down along the line, feeling for the bottom with her feet, and the mud rose around her in a slow black cloud, and for a moment she could see nothing at all. Then her hand found the corner of the case. It was wedged under a stone, wedged hard, and she pulled and it did not move, and her lungs began to burn and the mud kept rising and she lost the line for a heartbeat and had to find it again by touch. She got both hands on the case and rocked it and it came free and she turned for the surface and there was the black lid of the ice above her and no hole in it. She had drifted. The mud had turned her, and the current under the ice was a slow hand pushing her north, and she came up under solid ice and it was like coming up under a ceiling, and her first breath was water. She did not panic. That was the one thing she had, the years of it, the calm that the cold could not take from her. She held the case against her chest and followed the ice with her free hand, kicking, and somewhere above her a voice was talking, low and steady, through the water and through the ice and into the bone of her skull. "Two pulls means haul, and you have not pulled, so I am waiting, but I am also talking, because I do not know if you can hear me and it does not matter." Isaak's voice, on the other end of the line, going on and on, calm and a little fierce. "You told me once that survivors try to pay a debt that cannot be paid. I am telling you that the debt does not need you dead. It needs you here. Come back up. Come back to the hole. I am right here and I am not going anywhere, and I am not letting go of this line." She heard him because sound travels in water and because he was pulling, gently, steadily, drawing her along the underside of the ice toward the place where the line went up, and she followed the pull the way she had followed her brother's voice a hundred times in her own head. The hole appeared above her, a coin of grey light, and she surfaced into it with the case in both arms and took a breath that was all air. He hauled her out of the water and onto the ice and did not let go of her until she was standing. "You were under for over a minute." "I know." She was shaking so hard she could barely hold the case. "I heard you." "I know you did." He was shaking too, from the hauling, from the cold, from the thing he would not name. He looked at the case in her arms and then at her face, and something in his expression changed, some final distance giving way. "We should go back to the cabin." "Isaak." "Yes." "You said you had never done this before. Held a line in cold water." "I said I had done it for work." He picked up the hammer and the lantern. "I did not say I had done it for someone." They walked back along the shore with the case between them, and the ice crept out from the bays across the open water behind them, closing the lake for the winter, and neither of them looked back at the hole. ---