There was no time for propriety. I gripped the rope with one hand and wrapped my other arm around his thigh, trying to offer him some leverage as he used both arms to maneuver the pole. The turbulence of the river was changing, the flow kicking white froth like lace around us. Slick black rocks emerged from the water like great turtles.
We spun.
“Is this bad?” I shouted.
“Yes.”
“Are we going to tip over?”
He didn’t answer. I swallowed back a startled scream as we struck a rock, I tightened my grip as best I could. My arms ached. My knees hurt where they were jammed against bristly wood. We stopped moving for a long moment, the raft giving a sickening tilt before the current spun us again and we skirted the large rock we’d hit.
The river was louder now—roaring. The darkness amplified it, made it all that I knew as I held Ezra and icy water splashed up and soaked us both.
“Your hair looks like blood when it’s wet,” he said.
“Pay attention!” I would have pinched his leg if my fingers had any feeling left in them.
I thought I heard him laugh, but by the time I looked up at his shadowed face, it was bone pale and tight with the effort of keeping us afloat.
His eyes held a resigned sort of fear and something worse—a dazed exhaustion I hadn’t seen there before. When he looked down at me with an apology in his eyes, I knew we wouldn’t make it to shore.
“Hold on to me,” he said. I could barely make the words out. We hit another rock, and he pitched forward, losing his balance. The pole jammed in the rocks, spinning him out of my grip as the raft and I continued moving, and he stubbornly gripped the slick wood. He let go too late and crashed onto his stomach at the edge of the raft. Water rolled over his torso, muffling his pained scream, and I grabbed at his arms, trying to keep him from sliding off into the darkness and leaving me alone on this stars-forsaken excuse for a watercraft.
Together, we managed to wriggle back to the center of the raft. There was something dark on my hands, but the next rolling crash of water washed it away. “Hold the line,” I tried to call out, wrenching his hand to where I’d been gripping the loop of hemp to stay on the raft.
His fingers fumbled once, twice, before he grabbed it and grabbed me, eyes widening. “Jo—”
I expected us to hit something. Instead we hit … nothing.
The downriver edge of the raft dropped, tilting over a massive rapid. Like a cat trying to claw its way out of a barrel of water, I fumbled and grasped. Yet there was nothing to reach for but the black sky above, and the water sucked us into its dark embrace.
It immediately became clear that no amount of swimming practice mattered in an angry river. Kicking out, I tried to find a rock to stop myself on. The force of the water jammed my knee against my chin. My arms jerked out senselessly, reaching for something I was supposed to be holding, something I wasn’t supposed to let go of.
Ezra.
He was nowhere. All I knew was the cold and the loud rage of the water that carried me too fast to gain purchase on anything. The current pulled me under, and I foolishly screamed, my lungs screaming in turn as I tried to find my way back to the air. Breaking the frothy surface, I gasped, swallowed water, and tried kicking my feet and arms again in the best approximation of strong swimming I could manage.
It was too hard. My clothes were heavy. My limbs were heavy.
A voice cut through the rush of water. For a moment, I saw a sliver of Ezra’s pale face. He was much farther downriver and closer to the edge. Of course. He understood the mechanics of the forceful water. I had to treat it like a machine. I couldn’t fight the current. I had to work with it, allow it to slowly divert me toward the calmer eddies along the shore.
Only … I was so cold. And my boots were leaden. And Ezra was so far away.
“Swim!” he screamed raggedly, finding water shallow enough to stand in and reaching for me with a wild look on his face. “This way!”
In the darkness, another figure emerged from the thick brush at the low bank. I could only manage a glance every few moments as I carved at the water uselessly, unable to make headway to the shore. I couldn’t draw enough breath to shout a warning. Water flooded my nose and mouth. My vision was going starry and gray.
It was a man. More slender than Ezra, but tall. Not as pale. He was shouting, too, but I couldn’t make out his words over the screaming fuzzy sound of rapidly losing consciousness. I rolled onto my back, fighting for another breath—and a cold, wet thing landed on my face hard enough to split my lip. In a blaze of indignant anger, I grabbed it, intending to kill it—and then I recognized the texture of rope in my swollen fingers. Rope. Rope!
I held it with the last of my strength and will, then found that all I had to do was hold on, try to angle my face up for a breath, and let the rope pull me out of the grasp of the rapids. This was better than swimming, I observed. The water softened around me, still violently cold, but welcoming now. I could nap in it. I could close my eyes here and sink into a bed of night.
“Josephine!” Hands slapped my face.
I tried to slap back, but my arms didn’t work right.
Angry jewel-toned eyes and light-brown skin appeared in my woozy field of vision. “You were supposed to leave!”
I grunted what was meant to be a laugh. “That’s what Ezra said.”
