nose.
Fingers brushed a rubber-covered cable. The hand closed on the cable, traced it to the helmet and backpack, then to the body of the drowned man still attached to them. Both hands grabbed the body under the arms and heaved it out of the muck. The shore.
Lew’s body held on to the man with one arm and beat upward, angling toward land. A few moments more and its head broke the surface, gulped automatically for air. It ducked again and lifted Del’s body out of the water. It strode out of the lake, carrying the drowned man like a bride.
O’Connell was there at the shoreline, and Bertram appeared a moment later, breathing heavily. He’d removed the helmet and pack, and his bald head was damp with sweat.
“Set him down,” O’Connell said.
Its head tilted down, looked down at the ground. Blood spattered onto the drowned man’s chest. It was Lew’s blood, gushing from his nose. A moment’s concentration stopped the flow.
“Listen to me!” she shouted.
Its head rose again.
O’Connell jumped down a short ledge, her eyes on Lew’s, and began to pull off her jacket. “Set him down. Set the body down. He’s not breathing. Let me help.”
Set it down.
Arms and legs and back muscles coordinated to lay the man on the jacket O’Connell had stretched out. The drowned man’s face
—my face—
was white and translucent as rice paper, tinged with blue: blue eyelids, blue lips. He wasn’t breathing. O’Connell bent over him, delicately pulled the helmet from his head. She pushed up the soaked sweatshirt and T- shirt to his armpits—his arms were still bound behind him—and laid her cheek on his chest. She stayed in that position for a very long time. “I can’t hear anything,” she said, almost to herself. She tilted his head and ran a finger deep inside his mouth, spooned out a wad of oily black that might have been mud, mucous, blood, or a mix of all those things. She adjusted his head, breathed into him, one hand pinching his nose. Moments later she switched and compressed his chest, three times quickly, then moved back to his face.
“He’s too cold,” she said without pausing. “We’ve got to strip him.”
She gestured at Bertram. “You. Give me that sweater.”
Bertram obeyed. O’Connell paused in her CPR to unbelt the drowned man and yank down his pants. “We need blankets, lots of them. Find Louise. Go!”
Bertram turned to go just as one of the Human League guards—
the one who had been thrown back into the wall by Lew’s punch—
came through the bushes at the shoreline. His beefy face was sweaty and flushed. He stared at the big man at the edge of the water, then down at O’Connell busy on the ground over the naked man. “They’re all dead,” he said to Bertram. “Harp, Torrence, Parrish. We’ve got to find the commander. We’ve got to get—”
Bertram nodded toward the pier, at the mass of cloth and flesh and wire. The Leaguer took a step forward before registering what he was seeing. He made a whining, despairing sound, then turned to Bertram in confusion.
“Go!” O’Connell ordered.
Bertram hustled toward the woods. The Leaguer hesitated, then bolted after him.
O’Connell resumed CPR, alternating breaths with compressions. In a few minutes she was panting with the effort. She sat up. “This isn’t working,” she said, trying to catch her breath. She looked at Lew’s body. It listed to the right because of the damaged leg but remained standing. It was shivering, but otherwise unmoving. Awaiting commands.
“Del, you’ve got to go back in.”
Lew’s body didn’t respond.
“You’ve done this before. The pool, Del. You saved yourself before. You have to go back in.”
How?
“I don’t know how,” Lew’s voice said.
“Dammit, you got out, you can get back in.” She got to her feet.
“You can’t stay—” She made a slashing gesture, aimed at Lew’s chest.
“In there. In someone else. Get back in your body, Del.”
My body.
A rumble of big engines. The rumble grew louder, then was joined by a rising whine. The helicopter lifted over the treetops in a ring of lights. It turned on its axis, tilted toward the lake, and zoomed away. In Lew’s vision, where the vehicle had disappeared was an absence, a dot of deeper black. The mouth of the well opened, edges fitfully expanding, eating the sky. The twisting shaft like a gullet, dropping, or rising, until it exploded into an infinity of tributaries that divided and divided again: black fireworks.
The well tugged at me, but less forcefully than it had under the water. I could resist it, or I could fall into it. All that was required was that I be willing to die, again.
Somehow O’Connell got us to the hospital in Louise’s ’92 Taurus station wagon, the only car big enough for all of us. Bertram rode with O’Connell up front. I lay diagonally in the back, covered with blankets. Lew rode in the middle seat, leaning against the window, Louise next to him holding towels to his nose. The muscles of Lew’s triceps were torn, and he couldn’t lift his arms. I was conscious, my eyes open. I could hear everything that was said, but couldn’t make myself move or talk. Just as well.
The hospital was an underfunded, fifties-era county institution forty-five minutes from Harmonia Lake. When I arrived in the ER my core temperature was 83 degrees, my heart rate somewhere near twenty beats per minute. I was breathing slowly but regularly, which surprised them. At that temperature, my central nervous system should have shut down like a carnival in winter. The staff was small, but they knew hypothermia; plenty of drunk fishermen falling out of their boats. They fastened a mask over me that hissed hot, humidified oxygen into my lungs, and set up an IV of warmed saline.
They didn’t know what to make of Lew’s injuries, though. O’Connell told them that he’d dived in to rescue me from drowning, but he looked as if he’d been in a car accident. He’d burst dozens of arteries in his nose and cheeks, creating a full-faucet nosebleed that was surprisingly hard to stop. His face had swelled with blood, turning his eyes into piggy slits. As well as the torn triceps, several muscles in his back were pulled. His right kneecap had popped loose from the tendons, floating under the skin, and would require orthopedic surgery. Worse, blood tests showed that he’d suffered a heart attack. Only the massive amounts of adrenaline in his system had kept him from dying on the spot.
My shiver reaction came back online after thirty minutes of oxygen and IVs, and my core temp started to rise. This seemed to make the ER doctor very relieved. By morning I was breathing without the mask, and the rectal thermometer pegged me at a toasty 94.2. My first visitor was Bertram. He wouldn’t stop apologizing. “I swear to God, Del, that was never part of the plan! It’s—it’s—completely against the League philosophy! We use only humane, nonlethal weapons.”
“Humane? Have you ever been shot by a Taser?”
“But we’d never hurt you. ‘The use of force is a black crime.’ It’s one of our core beliefs. Killing you was never in the plan.”
“Bertram, you weren’t in on the plan, you were part of the plan.”
He was crushed, and for a moment I felt sorry for him. A moment. I got him out of the room by telling him I was tired. If you’re in a hospital bed, you’re entitled to a range of efficient social tactics. Later in the morning O’Connell appeared in my doorway looking like Super Exorcist. She was back in her voluminous black cassock, which
