Episode 196 · The Same Raft

He took a step forward. Soles took one back. His heel came down on ice that rang hollow under it, and he stopped. There was no hum left in it there. Only a thin, high note, like a glass about to go.

There was a sound under them.

Not the man. Not the river pulling at the underside of the shelf. A long, tearing groan, deep, low, from the direction of the bank, and the whole surface they stood on moved.

It moved sideways. Gently, almost politely, the way a moored boat moves when the rope is cut.

Soles looked past the man toward the ferry steps.

The crack that had run from the man’s heel toward the bank had finished running. It had gone the whole way. Between the shelf they were standing on and the ice still fixed to the shore there was a line of black water, a hand wide.

Then two hands.

Then a meter.

The broken shelf was drifting free, one plate of ice ten meters across. Behind the Hunter, the gap to the ferry steps widened beyond jumping distance. Ahead, the current would carry them around the bend to the old dam, a low concrete wall across the river where the water dropped.

The Hunter glanced at the gap, then at Soles.

Four hundred meters to the drop. Only a few minutes at this pace, a little longer if they caught on something. Soles had seen the near concrete pier that afternoon: an iron ladder up its side, a keeper’s hut at the end of the walkway. It was the only fixed way out he could put a hand on.

The man could go into ice. He had stepped over the gap between the shelves instead of entering the water. Perhaps whatever let him through stone needed something solid. Soles had no proof, only that choice of footing and the river now surrounding them.

If the water stops him, we’re both stupid on the same raft. Find out before he does.

— Well, the man said. Now neither of us has anywhere to go.

The plate of ice turned slowly as it went, the way a leaf turns on a stream, and the town’s dark bank swung past behind the man’s shoulder and was replaced by reeds, and then by nothing but black water and the far shore.

— Give it to me, the man said, and I’ll get us both off.

— How?

— I’ll think of something. I’m older than you. I’ve had longer to think.

— No.

The man sighed, a small, almost fond sound, and came again.

Soles did not meet him.

That was the first thing he had learned from Tesa and the last thing his body wanted to do now: not to stand and trade. Every muscle he owned remembered the ring, the flat smack of glove on glove, the joy of finally hitting back. And the strength under his ribs was awake now, sullen and huge, wanting to be asked again. He did not ask it. He gave ground.

— You were braver five minutes ago, the man said, following.

— I was stupider five minutes ago.

— Those are often the same thing.

Keep talking. Talk while you walk where I want you.

He gave it the way Phenom had given it, a long time ago, on a path in the snow with a wire hidden under the frost: slowly, as if it cost him, backing away from the man’s hands with his guard up and his breath coming harder than it needed to, letting the man see uncertainty. He let the man drive him toward the middle of the plate.

Toward the star.

The broken place where his fist had gone into the ice lay a little off the center of the plate, a broad white wound, threaded with black lines where the river had come up through the cracks and frozen again, thinly, a skin over a hole. He could feel it through his boots as he came near it. The hum of the ice changed there, the way a wall sounds different where a pipe has been chased into it and plastered over. It was carrying weight, but only just.

There. That’s the only place on this river he doesn’t know as well as I do.

He let the left hand graze his cheek and gave ground toward the star. When the right came for his ribs, he flinched; the Hunter saw it and stepped in to finish the attack.

Soles caught the forearm with his left palm and turned aside. The man’s step carried on where Soles had been, putting his weight over the thin ice. Soles added no punch. The Hunter’s own momentum was enough to make the star crack beneath his boot.

And held.

It held. The black lines went white, and a sheet of water came up over the man’s boot to the ankle, and the whole star sagged, sickeningly, under him. But it did not open. The man stood in it for a heartbeat with his arms out and his face, for once, holding perfectly still, and then he did the thing Soles had forgotten he could do.

He sank.

Not through the hole. Into the ice beside it, the solid gray ice at the edge of the star, the way a man steps out of a bath. His legs went in, his body, his head, and the surface closed over him without a sound, and Soles was alone on the plate again with a sheet of black water spreading around his own boots.

Half. The trap worked by half. He’s under me again, and now he knows I know where it’s thin.

He took one step back from the star, and the star took him.

The skin of new ice under his left boot let go all at once. He went through it to the waist, then the chest, and the cold closed over his heart like a fist, and his mouth opened by itself to drag in air that was not there. Then the current had his legs and pulled them flat under the plate, and his head went under.

Black. Not dark. Black, and a roar that was the whole river, and above his face a ceiling of ice he could feel with his palms and could not see.

Don’t breathe. Don’t breathe.

His chest wanted to. It wanted to so badly that the wanting was the only thing he could hear. The current dragged him along the underside of the plate, away from the hole, his fingers sliding on ice as smooth as a bottle.

Not the strength. Break the ceiling and the plate goes with it.

He stopped clawing and listened with his hands. The ice hummed against his palms the way it had through his boots, thick and steady, thick, and then thin: the high wrong note of the star, a meter behind him. He pulled himself back toward it along the underside, palm over palm, the way a man goes hand over hand along a rope in the dark, and his head came up through the broken skin of the hole into spray and air, and he breathed in so hard it hurt.

He did not stand. He spread himself flat, the way you cross a pond in March, slid out of the hole on his belly and lay there with his cheek on the ice, coughing river.

He was wet to the shoulders, and the wind off the river found every part of it. He could not feel his toes, or now his fingers, which was going to matter soon. His back, where the hand had hit him, was one long bruise. He counted it the way he counted parts on a bench: what still worked, what would fail first. The answer was his hands and feet, and not for long.