第3章 The Passenger

The north arm of Lake Omiskwa at dawn was the loneliest water Nessa knew. The storm had thinned to a needle rain, and the cloud sat low and even over the hills, so that the forest came out of the mist one tree at a time and then disappeared behind her. She flew high enough to clear the ridge and low enough to read the shoreline, following the long brown arm of the lake west until the old logging dock appeared below, a crooked finger of grey wood reaching into black water. A man stood at the end of it. She landed and taxied in, and by the time the plane nosed against the dock he had not moved. He was tall and very wet, and he had been walking all night; she could see it in the way he held himself, careful and slow, the way people held themselves when everything hurt. His coat was wrong for the weather. His hands were bare. She cut the engine and opened the door and looked at him across the floats. "Isaak Sayer?" "Yes." His voice was low and hoarse with cold. "You are the pilot." "I am the pilot." "You are also the diver," he said. "They told me. I am supposed to say that I am sorry for the trouble." "You do not have to say anything." She studied him. The rain had plastered his dark hair flat and there was a long scrape down one cheek, old enough to have stopped bleeding. His eyes were the flat grey of the lake under cloud, and they took her in quickly and without apology, cataloguing, the way an accountant reads a page. "You are supposed to get in and sit still while I fly you somewhere you will not like." He almost smiled. It was not a warm expression; it was the small grim movement of a man who had run out of the energy to pretend. "That is the first honest thing anyone has said to me in a week," he said. He came aboard carefully, keeping his weight over the float, and settled into the rear seat without being told. He had the balance of a man who had spent time on boats, which surprised her. She handed back a blanket and a thermos and told him to drink it and not to talk, and he did both, which she appreciated. She got the Merganser off the water and up into the grey, and the dock fell behind them and the forest closed over it like a hand. For twenty minutes neither of them spoke. She flew; he drank the coffee and stopped shaking and watched the country go by through the rain-streaked glass. She watched him the way she watched weather. His hands were steady now, long-fingered, the nails kept short; there was ink on the side of his right hand that had not washed off. He did not fidget. He did not ask where they were going. He did not look like a man who had spent a night running for his life, except in the small things, the careful stillness, the way his gaze kept moving to the window and back to her and back to the window. "You are a forensic accountant," she said, because the silence had weight and she wanted to know what she was carrying. "I was." "That means you read the money until it told you the truth." "Something like that." He looked at the back of her head. "You have decided something about me." "I have decided you are not a fighter." "No," he agreed. "I am not a fighter. That is why they put me in a car and drove me around the coast at night with two men carrying guns, and that is why it did not work." He was quiet for a moment. "What did you decide about yourself?" She had not expected that, and it caught her. "That I am a pilot," she said. "Nothing more complicated." "People who are nothing more complicated do not fly into a forced storm to collect a stranger from a broken dock." He said it without insistence, almost to himself, and she let it sit because answering it would have cost her something she did not have the altitude to spend. They came out of the arm and the open lake opened up ahead of them, wide and grey and moving, the Bellamy Islands a smudge of darker grey against the horizon. Nessa trimmed the plane and set her course. Behind her, Isaak Sayer watched the islands come. "Where are we going?" he finally asked. "Larkspur. Smallest of the Bellamys. There is a cabin, a fuel cache, and no one else for twenty kilometers." "For how long?" "Until Tarn says otherwise. Two days. Three, if the storm allows it." She checked the gauges. "It may not. When the north wind shifts, the strait between the islands gets dangerous to land. If that happens, we are staying, and you should know now what staying means." "Tell me." "It means no lights after dark that can be seen from the water, and no radio except on the schedule, and no walking on the shore where a telescope could find you. It means you do not go outside unless I say you can." She glanced back. "It means you do what I tell you, even when it is stupid, even when you think you know better. Especially then." He considered this for the space of a long, slow swell. "You are very good at this," he said. "Giving orders in a voice that does not invite questions." "It comes with the water." "No," he said. "It comes with having done it before. Who did you lose?" The question landed in the small cabin and sat there, and for a while the only sound was the engine and the rain. She could have refused it. She had refused a hundred questions like it. But something about the man's exhausted honesty made refusal feel like the more expensive choice. "My brother," she said. "Sten. A year ago. He went into the water on a call and the water would not give him back." "I am sorry." "Everyone is sorry." She said it flatly and immediately wished she had not, because it was unkind and it was true and he did not deserve the edge of it. "He was the better pilot," she added, more quietly. "They do not tell you that part at the funeral." In the years since Sten died she had flown a hundred times with someone in the back seat, and she had learned to read passengers the way she read weather. Most of them were afraid, and the fear always showed in the hands. They gripped the seat or the door or each other, and they talked too much, or not at all in a way that was itself a kind of talking. Isaak Sayer did none of it. He sat with his hands loose in his lap and his eyes moving, and when he was quiet it was the quiet of a man taking inventory, not the quiet of a man holding himself still. She did not yet know what to make of him, and she did not like not knowing. It had been a long time since a passenger had interested her, and interest, on a flight like this one, was a weight she could not afford. Isaak Sayer said nothing more. He did not offer comfort and he did not retreat, and she found that she preferred his silence to the words people usually spent on her grief. They flew on into the north, over black water moving under a low grey ceiling, toward an island nobody else could find. ---