Page 84 of Crosscurrent

She didn't answer. But she didn't close it either. Standing there, three feet from her in that endless light, Gabe held onto that like the only warm thing for a thousand miles.

Then she went back inside to become the plan, and he stayed a moment in the cold with the shape of tomorrow sitting in his chest and no power on earth to move it.

Lord, I don't have a better idea. I've turned it every way I know and there isn't one. He watched her through the window, small and certain among the others. So get her through the water. The part I can't carry — that one's Yours.

It was set. Every margin built, every role walked twice, every contingency named out loud.

And the thinnest part of all of it, the one seam where the whole thing could come apart, was a woman about to drop into the sea pretending to be a dead man.

32

In a few hours, Cara was going to fall into the sea and let her found family watch her die. For now, they were still working out how.

What got her wasn't the plan spread across the guesthouse table. It was that almost every person bent over it was hurt. Wade with one eye swelling toward purple, laying out the ground, giving nothing away. Gabe beside him, a split knuckle and a jaw bruise he hadn't mentioned, marking sightlines on a coast map. Skye flat on the couch where Reagan had put her, color still wrong, running it from her back. Tom at his screens. Reagan with one hand never quite leaving Skye's wrist.

It should have felt like a wake. Instead, and she didn't love what that said about her, it was the most alive the room had been in days.

"Run it again," she said.

Wade had the route: out past the last cabins on the coast track to a shelf of black ice where the land quit and the water started. Gabe had the angles — where a watcher would have to stand to see it clean, and where every other eye on the island would be blind. Tom had the timing down to the thinnest hour the sun allowed, when the light went long and gold and low and a face at fifty yards became a coat, a build, a man you could swear to.

"The Neptune observers have to be close enough to be sure," Cara said. "And far enough that sure is all they get."

"Forty yards," Wade said. "Forty-five. Past that the cold eats the detail. Closer than thirty and he sees your hands are wrong."

"Then forty." Tom marked it, and the thing took one more step from idea toward true.

Reagan eyed Owen thoughtfully. "I’ll need some of your blood.”

His jaw dropped, but he didn’t protest. “Uh, sure.”

“Whatever blood we leave on the ice has to be Owen’s," Reagan explained. "We have to assume whoever gets to the murder site will take a sample. I'll draw Owen tonight."

"And after Wade tosses me in the water, I come out where?" It was the one piece of this Cara didn't get to design, because it wasn't a con. It was physics, and freezing water didn't bluff.

"Below the lip." Gabe shook his head, cupping the back of his neck and squeezing. “What am I saying? This is crazy. We need to find another way.”

She smiled softly, touched beyond measure. But there wasn’t another way. They were out of time, and out of options.

Before she could voice her thoughts, Gabe raised his arms. “I know. I know. But I don’t have to like it.”

“I’m glad you don’t,” she added.

Gabe exhaled, nodded, and continued. "The shelf drops straight into a channel. From an observer’s angle the body goes into the current and that's the last anyone sees of it — which is the point. You’ll drift immediately out of their sightline, and I’ll be in the water around the corner. We’ll have a ladder ready, and Reagan to help us get into the crevasse where she’ll have the warming tent ready."

Cara looked at Gabe. He looked back and said nothing about the part where he'd be chest-deep in killing water, waiting to catch her.

"The drysuits buy us the margin," Skye added. "You need the bulk anyway, if you’re going to fool anyone. The gold light won't show it."

"And you won't be holding your breath." Reagan set a compact rebreather on the table — mouthpiece, a small canister, sized to ride inside the coat. "You'll be face-down longer than anyone can hold air. You breathe off this the whole time."

"Wouldn't a tank bubble?" Owen asked. "They'd see it break the surface."

"That's why it's a rebreather, not a regulator." Skye didn't open her eyes. "Closed loop. Nothing comes up. But it won’t work long. Things freeze up in water that cold."

Nobody said the rest, because nobody had to. The plan died the instant anyone found Owen alive, so no one ever would. Cara would go into the sea as Owen, and the sea would keep him, and that was the only version Neptune could ever be allowed to see.

She'd built a thousand lies in her life. She had never built one with herself as the body in the water.