Page 88 of Crosscurrent

"Why." Gabe forced the word out. "They bought it. Why is Cartwright sending him⁠—"

"She wants him to retrieve the cipher ashes," Skye, flat, certain, from wherever she lay. "She wants the list working. She wants to finish hunting the names on it."

Then Cara floated around the corner, head down, body splayed in a sickening parody of death.

She drifted out of the dark on the current, arms loose, the coat spread on the black water, utterly and perfectly still. A dead man, exactly as built. She was close enough now that he could see the cap had slipped under the wig, see a strand of her own dark hair loose at the temple where no one but him would ever think to look. Close enough, almost, to touch. Everything in Gabe's chest tore loose at the sight of her, the wrongness of it, how good she was at it, how cold she had to be by now. He moved. Low, quiet, no splash, the blind spot intact, the last yards of current between them closing, his hand already coming up to reach⁠—

The water beside her erupted.

It came up out of the channel in one surge, enormous, white-yellow and streaming, a head the size of his whole chest and small black eyes. A bear, surfacing an arm's length from Cara's floating body, where the blood had led it up the crack.

No! Dear Lord, help her!

The prayer tore from his throat.

The world froze: the bear, Cara, the small black eyes finding the dark shape in the water that smelled of blood. Gabe's hand was still up, still reaching, frozen halfway across water he was never going to cross in time.

And at the lip up-channel, a light swung across the ice and stopped. A figure leapt off the snowmobile, weapon in hand.

Gabe thrashed through the frigid water. He was ten yards out in black water, the whole cold weight of the sea between him and the only thing in the world that mattered.

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Gabe lunged.

His legs were two cold dead things that wouldn't drive the way he screamed at them to, and the ten yards of black water between him and Cara might as well have been the whole width of the fjord.

He keyed the comm and his voice came apart in his mouth. "Abort. Everybody in. Get her out of the water. Forget the op, go. Go! Go! Go!"

For a second the channel was nothing but breathing. Then it broke open.

"Copy. Moving." Tom, instant.

"Keep her face up." Reagan, every word jolting with her stride as she came up out of the cave on foot. "Keep her face up if you can, Gabe⁠—"

He couldn't. Not until he got to her. Cara!

She was face-down. Ten yards away, a wall of black water between his hands and her. His brother was saying his name out of a warm bright room three thousand miles off, helpless as all of them. And under everything, climbing, the snowcat: Wade just visible above the ice rim, but still too far away.

All of them moving. None of them close.

The bear had turned in the water and put that vast flat head down toward the dark shape that smelled of blood, and sniffed, unhurried, the way a thing that has never been afraid of anything in its life moves toward a meal.

A figure––Feld––ran closer, skidding to a stop at the very edge of the ice where Wade had dumped Cara. He raised a hand, weapon in hand.

Gabe’s strangled cry drew the man’s attention, but he quickly took aim… not at Cara or him. At the bear.

Gabe shook the water out of his eyes. The bright orange shape coalesced into something more meaningful. And less deadly. A flare gun.

Now Feld yelled, drawing the creature’s attention. The flare angled toward the beast, a hard red star, spitting fire.

The bear flinched. The enormous head jerked away, from the light. Away from Cara.

The white streaming bulk of it rolled, and the thing slid back under the black water and was gone.

Cara rose up now, arms flailing, her rebreather gone. Feld dropped to one knee at the rim of the ice, reached down into the water, and hauled her out.

Arms windmilling as hard as he could make the numb muscles work, Gabe drove toward them, but he could only watch as Feld pulled Cara up out of the water.