The ice did not flip, dumping her like a man in a ducking booth, the way Anna had seen it in her mind’s eye. The lake chose to savor her rather than swallow her whole. The ice slab fell away with terrifying slowness, a grinning maw opening at her heels.
She thrust the metal trap from her and threw her arms wide, trying to catch the beast’s throat. The island of ice was too wide, and only one mittened hand reached the serrated edge. On her back, a beetle with a backpack as a carapace, helpless to save herself, she was sliding, sliding down, under the ice, pulled by her own weight and the hunger of the lake. Then the lake couldn’t wait. The slab under her gave all at once.
Light flashed past, a white streak four inches wide; the edge of the break. Fighting the drag of her pack, she kicked and pawed her way upright and clutched at the surface ice. In sodden mittens, her hands were pulpy, worthless.
Clutching at straws.
A burst of energy that drove a scream from her lips lifted her enough that she managed to get her right arm as far as the elbow onto the surface. Balling her mittened hand into a fist, she drove it hard into the shallow snow and pressed her sodden sleeve against the ice.
Freeze, God dammit. If her sleeve, her glove – any part of her – would adhere to the ice, she might be able to pull herself out. Grabbing the end of the other mitten with her teeth, she pulled. Freezing water crashed against her teeth with the subtlety of brass knuckles. Biting down, she pulled her hand free of the mitten and reached through the fractured water to press it to the ice by her elbow. Flesh might freeze faster than fabric.
“Bob!” she screamed. “Where the fuck are you?”
Hell would freeze over.
The sleeve of her coat was sticking, freezing to the good ice.
Carefully she dragged on the arm. She could see herself moving infinitesimally closer to the edge but was losing feeling. Cold was killing her body while her mind watched. A quarter of an inch; an eternity.
Ice canted steeply toward a white sky. Flakes of snow, scarcely differentiated from the universe they fell through, showed clear for an instant, like magic, like the pictures in the mall that flashed from two dimensions to three with a flash of the mind. Then the sky grew too steep. Her hand was not in front but above her. She hadn’t grabbed the solid ice; she’d grabbed onto the edge of the floating island and it was rotating with her weight. Through frost-rimed eyelashes, she watched each thread of her sleeve as it pulled free of the ice. Her pack was battened on her back, dragging her down, hungry like the lake was hungry. Sentient and indifferent.
Frantically she wrenched her gloved hand from its last tenuous connection with the ice and pounded on the buckle of her chest strap. The push-button release opened and the strap came free. The pack lifted, drifted from her.
She had won; she would make it.
Straps followed the pack toward the bottom of the lake, tugging down her arms, pinioning her elbows to her side, prying the end of her sleeve from its tenuous marriage with the ice, her hand from where it battered ineffectually at the buckle of her hip belt. Water closed over her. The narrow margin of sky receded as she sank. She forced her eyes wide to keep the light in them. Cold burned her sclera like acid.
Kicking with more force than she’d believed she had in her, she moved upward. Half a foot, a foot, the light grew stronger.
The Sorel boots filled with water. Her feet moved as if through freezing mud. Then she couldn’t move them at all. Wriggling eel-like, she tried to struggle out of the bondage of the shoulder straps, but her coat had swelled with water, the fabric stuck to the webbing. Desperately she pummeled at the release on her hip. Anna fought till her last gasp of air put the last of its oxygen into her blood and her lungs began to push against her rib cage, shoving the panic of their need through her bones and into her heart.
The hip belt released, and she used the last of her air to kick for the surface. Then she stopped. Fell back and down and back. The drag on her hips gone, but the pack still holding her fast to her upper arms, pulling her headfirst toward the bottom of the lake.
The light grew watery and faint. Anna watched as her feet floated up past her eyes.
The cold that had hammered into her face and neck soaked through the layers of clothing. At first, it seared her flesh, then it didn’t. Icy fingers crept up her legs, down the neck of her parka. Her feet were gone to it already, she couldn’t feel them.
One arm came free of the confining straps, the hand with the bloated mitten. Anna watched it as it drifted out from her body. Above it, the irregular half-moon shape of light was no bigger than the palm of her hand.
Oddly detached, she watched it shrink to the size of a half-dollar. A gentle bump stopped her fall. She rested on the bottom of the lake, the moon of light feeble in the liquid sky. Quiet surrounded her. Her breathing stopped, her heart starved and pounded throughout her body, a frenetic drumbeat in a deaf world. The water was so clear she could see gravel on the lake bed, a vestige of weeds as unmoving as if sculpted in stone.
Dropping arrow straight from the world above was a single line, inked black against the gray of the water. At its end, a D was written in crushed script. The foothold trap on the line of kinkless chain. She had wanted to trap a wolf with it, wanted to stroke its living fur and feel its breath. Cruel to want that, she thought. To frighten such a grand creature that she might be close to it.
Water was clearer than air; she could see each individual link in the chain she had carried so far. She marveled that an entity as fierce as the lake could be so completely still; not a ripple showed its power yet it had swallowed Anna as neatly as a trout swallowing a fly. The lake had slipped away into silence. And the water was so clear, soon, Anna believed, soon she would be able to breathe it.
The trap was an ugly thing, a reminder of the metal rampage humanity with its mines and forges and industry had loosed on the world. Anna didn’t want it to be in her eyes when she drew the lake into her lungs and took her first breath in this new world. As she mustered the energy to turn her head away, the foothold trap leapt; a quick jerk upward, then fell again, the way an angler’s bait pretended life to lure greedy fish.
Anna wondered if she was a fish yet.
The line jerked again. Lazily she reached for it, wanting to make it be still, make it part of the lake with her. Her fingers fumbled. The trap swayed away. Slowly it drifted back. She threaded her hand and wrist through it and pulled, a tiny pull, maybe not a pull at all.
The crescent of light dimmed. Her brain was shutting down. The pounding from her heart eased to a soft rush, waves breaking lazily against sandy beaches. Bands of pressure within her lungs pressed outward, attempting to break through to the air.
When she was asleep, she would breathe in the lake.
Ophelia.
HOOKS CAUGHT IN HER MERMAID MOUTH, cutting the flesh and trying to drag her from the sea. Anna tossed her head from side to side. Fishes chewed at her face; she felt the ripping but not the pain. A hammerhead shark rammed into her chest and the air blasted out of her.
And in again.
“Annnhhh. Annnh.”
Breath out and in and vomiting, her lungs caught fire, her throat burned with charred flesh.
“Annh. Annnh.”
Hot lead spewed from her scalding her tongue, blistering her lips.
“Annhh. Anhhh.”
The noise maddened her, and she knew she was crying as she descended to hell in fire and ice. Her eyes would not open, as in dreams of blindness they had been sewn shut. Screaming, she forced her lids wide.
She was out. She was on her side, one arm stretched over her head. Her right eyeball was so close to the ice, she could see crystals moving by in fits and starts. The endless embrace of the lake was being scraped off. A machine gun battered through her head. Her teeth were chattering.
“Annnh.”
Anna had not made that sound. Fish did not speak. Fish got fried over hot coals. She was looking forward to that.
“I’ve landed four-hundred-pound marlin that were easier to reel in than you.” This was grunted. Anna had been caught by a bear. Too bad. Bears ate their fish raw.
“Are you alive?” The bear pawed at her and she was rolled onto her back.
“Hey, Bob,” she said when she saw his red, sweating face.
“Are we going to have to get naked in a sleeping bag together?” he asked.
“Throw me back in,” Anna croaked.