Page 87 of Crosscurrent

You are dead. Dead people don't move.

The earbud still lived, barely — a thread of voices coming down to her through the water and the cold.

"—he's lowering the phone." Tom, and his voice did a thing it almost never did. It lifted. "He's making a call. He's reporting it up the chain. Cara — he bought it. He bought the whole thing."

Then the voice she'd been most afraid to need.

"Traffic's shifting." Gabe, hoarse, like the words cost him something. "They're standing people down. Tom, they're calling it off. It's working. It's actually⁠—"

And for one breath, down in the dark and the cold, Cara let herself have it. It worked. Owen Harney was dead. The list had died with him, and Neptune was already turning away, and her family, every battered one of them, was going to walk off this island alive.

Diane would keep the bakery. Piper would get her impossible schools. Somewhere on the far side of all this cold there was an after, and maybe, if she was lucky and very still, she would be alive to stand in it.

She'd done it.

Then the water found the last of the earbud.

The sound thinned, and stretched, and went to a high small whine — and then to nothing at all. Gabe's voice broke off in the middle of her name and didn't come back. The thread snapped. There was no team. No slope, no Feld, no plan, no Gabe. There was only black water and a cold that had stopped hurting, which she knew, somewhere far off, was the worst thing it could do, and her own heart going slow, and slower, a long way below her.

Lord. Hold me down here. Don't let me come up.

The light went last.

34

Black water held Gabe chest-deep in the fissure. He'd stopped feeling the cold a while back, which couldn't be good. What he felt instead was every muscle in him begging to move, and the order he kept giving them not to.

The ice walls rose close on both sides, a crack in the world barely wider than his shoulders, the current running through it slow and patient toward the open channel at his back. Somewhere up that crack, around a corner he couldn't see past, Cara was in the water.

He couldn't go to her. Swim up the channel and the watcher on the slope would see two men in the water where there was supposed to be one dead one. So he held at the corner and waited for the current to bring her to him, seconds eating him alive a heartbeat at a time.

Every instinct screamed at him to close the distance. He'd argued this insane plan from every side and lost. And the worst of it, the part he'd still be hearing years from now if they were lucky enough to get years, was that the plan was good. It was working perfectly. All he had to do was wait, shoulder-deep in the killing cold and let it.

The water worked on him the way it had to be working on her — a little slower thanks to his thicker suit, but the same killing water, chilled below freezing. He kept his eyes on the corner. He counted breaths he couldn't hear her take. He ran the math Reagan had walked him through a dozen times, how long a person could be submerged and survive.

"Wade's clear." Tom’s voice came over the comlink. "Snow cat is headed back to town. He sold it, Gabe. He sold all of it."

The team kept his ear full on purpose. Gabe knew the trick because he'd run it himself, on long bad nights. Crowd the channel so the man alone in the dark isn't alone. Reagan was two steps up the ice in the tent they’d crammed into yet another ice fissure, this one on what passed for dry land out here.

And from the hotel, a world away in the warm and the light, his brother and Sophie.

"You're doing great, both of you." David, working to keep something out of his voice and not quite managing it — that his big bro was bobbing in freezing water and he was watching people sip lattes and discuss the fluctuating price of pearls along the Silk Road trade route in the early thirteen hundreds. "Sophie's got eyes on the cardigan. You just hold on."

"Holding." The words came out through chattering teeth.

"Wait." Tom's voice changed. "This is awesome. Traffic's moving. They're standing down. Watchers are folding up all over the board. I bet Feld phoned the kill up his chain and everything's going quiet." A short, disbelieving breath. "It worked. Gabe, it actually⁠—"

For one breath he let it land. It worked. She'd done it. Any second now, she'd come around that corner, and he'd have her and they'd be out of this water.

One breath. That was all he got.

"She's not standing down." Sophie, sharp, from the reception. "Cartwright. She set her cup down and made a call. She's giving orders, Tom. She is not happy."

"One channel's still live." The laugh was gone out of Tom now. "Everybody else went dark and one thread didn't. And it's moving Feld. It's sending him back."

Then Skye groaned. "Feld's up. Off the crates. Gabe, he's heading back down toward the water⁠—"

Under the slope, an engine coughed, caught, and dropped into a low mechanical growl. A snowmobile. Heading their way.