After two days of searching they came to the village of Gulfport, more under the water than over it. Heavy stone pylons marked where a bridge had once stretched across to the much larger city on the far side, but except for some girders peeking forlornly from the surging river currents, nothing but the pylons remained. Kira swore, and Afa slumped painfully in his saddle. Even Oddjob, usually eager to wander during their pauses in search of green shoots to munch on, seemed too depressed to move.
“It’s got to be the river that took out the bridge,” said Samm. “These cities were too small to be a factor in the war, and none of them are military targets. I think the river’s just too . . . big for its own good.”
“Two big for our own good, too,” said Heron.
“Somebody had to cross it first, right?” asked Kira. She nudged Bobo’s flanks and walked him farther toward the water’s edge, peering around the bend in the trees as far south as she could see. “I mean, somebody had to build the bridges, and somebody had to cross before that.”
“Not with Afa they didn’t,” said Heron. Her tone of voice seemed to imply that they should leave him behind for the sake of the mission, but Kira didn’t even bother to glare at her. She did shoot a glance at Afa, though, mostly asleep tied into his saddle, head bobbing in and out of consciousness as the painkillers warred with uncomfortable sitting position.
“We could build a raft,” Kira said. “There are plenty of trees, and if we want to brave that sunken city, we could find planks and boards all over the place. If we build a raft big enough, we could ferry the horses across, and Afa with them.”
“The current’s a lot stronger than it looks,” said Samm, but Kira cut him off.
“I know,” she snapped, more harshly than she intended. “That’s why we haven’t tried crossing it before now, but what are our options? We’re on a tight schedule as it is, even before we took a two-day detour in the wrong direction. We need to go west, so let’s . . . go west. It’s that or head south for another couple of weeks.”
“You’re right,” said Samm, “but we don’t build our own raft unless we have to, and if we get to the point where we have to, we’ll know we’re essentially doomed. Look at that town over there—these were all shipping towns, using the river to haul freight back and forth in the old world. All we have to do is find a boat that still floats and use that.”
“So far all the big towns have been on the far side,” said Heron. “Unless you want to head back north two days to Moline. I don’t remember any convenient barges lying around up there.”
“Then we keep going south,” said Samm, and angled Buddy farther down the road. “We’ve come this far, we may as well keep going.”
“Is that a good reason to keep going?” asked Heron. “‘We’re getting really good at failure, we may as well stick with it?’”
“You know I’m not very good at sarcasm,” said Samm.
Heron snarled. “Then I’ll put it more plainly: This is stupid. Kira has her own reasons for coming out here, but I’m here because of you. I trusted you, and I’m trying as hard as I can to keep that trust alive, but look at us. We’re in a swamp, lost in a dead country, just waiting for the next attack, or the next injury, or the next little stretch of muddy road to just fall off into the river and drown us.”
“You’re the best one of us,” said Samm. “You can survive anything.”
“I survive because I’m smart,” said Heron. “Because I don’t get myself into the kinds of situations that could kill me, and frankly, that’s the only situation we’ve even been in for weeks.”
“We can do this,” said Kira. “We just need to calm down a little.”
“I know we can do it,” said Heron. “As much as I complain, I’m not an idiot—I know we can cross the damn river. I just want you to assure me that we should.”
Kira started to speak, but Heron cut her off. “Not you. Samm. And please tell me it’s not because of this”—she waved her hand angrily at Kira—“whatever-the-hell-she-is.”
Samm looked at Heron, then out across the river. “It’s not enough, is it? Just to follow; just to have faith in someone bigger and smarter and better informed. That’s how we’re built, that’s how every Partial is wired—to follow orders and trust in our leaders—but it’s not enough. It never has been.” He looked back at Heron. “We’ve followed our leaders, and sometimes they win and sometimes they lose; we do what they say and we play our part. But this is our decision. Our mission. And when we’re done, it will be our victory, or our defeat. I don’t want to fail, but if I do, I want to be able to look back and say, ‘I did that. I failed. That was all me.’”
Kira listened in silence, marveling at the strength of his words and the force of his conviction. It was the first time he’d really explained himself—beyond the simple “I trust Kira” statements—and the sentiment was the opposite of “I trust anyone.” He was here because he wanted to make his own decision. Was that really so important to him? Was that really so rare? And how could it possibly sway Heron, who was already so fiercely independent? She might have been a Partial, like them, but Samm was appealing to something in his and Heron’s collective experience that Kira was realizing she didn’t understand. Samm and Heron stared at each other, and she could only guess at the link data flowing between them.
“Okay,” said Heron, and turned her horse to follow him. They started south, and Oddjob followed, and Kira brought up the end of the line, lost in thought.
The Mississippi led them to more flooded towns, most even smaller than Gulfport: Dallas City, Pontoosuc, Niota. Niota held another former bridge, reaching across to the first major hills they’d seen in weeks, a promontory bluff and a town called Fort Madison. Niota was in better condition than the last three villages had been, and they waded in as far as they dared, searching for anything they could use to float across. Samm found one end of a barge tipping up from the river at an angle, but nothing still holding to the surface. The current was, indeed, stronger than Kira had expected, and she waded back out of the eerie, underwater town as soon she as she could.
“Well,” said Heron, flopping down beside her on the grass. “We’re still stuck, but we’re soaking wet. Remind me again how that’s an improvement.”
“Don’t worry,” said Kira. “As hot and muggy as it is here, you’ll have something new to complain about any minute now.”
“Let’s get back to Afa and the horses,” said Samm. “We can make it another ten miles today if we keep moving.”
“Wait,” said Kira, staring at the sunken city. Something had moved. She scanned it carefully, shielding her eyes from the bright glares and flashes reflecting up from the surface of the water. A wave surged, and it moved again, big and black against the glimmering water beyond. “The barge is moving.”
Samm and Heron looked out, and Kira whispered to wait, wait, wait . . . and then another wave sloshed against it and it moved, almost lightly. “It’s still buoyant,” said Samm. “I thought it was sunken.”
“It’s moving too freely to be pinned,” said Heron. “Maybe tied down?”
“And if we untie it,” said Kira, “maybe we can use it.”
They shucked their guns and heavy gear and waded back into the city, this time kicking off and swimming when the river grew too deep to stand in. The river was strong, but they kept to the lee side of the buildings, moving hand over hand along the roofs as they picked their way toward the barge. It flapped faintly against the current, nearly the farthest object from the shore. They hoisted themselves onto the last building out, watching the trapped barge from the roof.
“It’s definitely moving,” said Kira. “As soon as we cut it loose, it’s going to pop right up and float away.”
“We’ll have to tie it to something else on a longer line,” said Samm. “We’ll want a safety line on whoever goes out there anyway.”
“One-two-three not it,” said Heron. “But I will get you a rope. The last building we passed was a hardware store.?
?? She slipped back into the water and Kira followed, not wanting to let anyone—even someone she vaguely mistrusted—enter a ruined, flooded building alone. They touched off from the wall and felt the current catch them, carrying them south between the buildings even as they tried to swim east to catch the next one. Heron caught hold of the rusted rain pipe with one hand and reached for Kira with the other, grabbing her as she rushed by. Kira felt something solid beneath her feet, probably a car or the cab of a truck, and pushed off from it as Heron pulled her toward the hardware store. Kira caught the windowsill, grateful there were no shards of glass poking out from it, and ducked her head below the surface to swim inside.
There was a foot or so of air in the building, trapped between the ceiling and the top of the river, though a faint breeze and a shaft of light showed that the air was kept fresh by at least one hole in the roof above. The damp atmosphere had covered the ceiling and the visible portion of the walls with moss, and Kira brushed some from her hair as Heron surfaced beside her. “Looks pretty well scoured out by the river,” Kira told her, for most of the Sheetrock on the walls, and anything once attached to it, had long ago been washed away.
“There’s bound to be something lower,” said Heron, and they maneuvered to the widest stretch of southern wall—it was less likely here that the objects they needed, and indeed the swimmers themselves, would be swept out to the river beyond. Heron dove first, staying down long enough that Kira began to get seriously worried, before popping to the surface and brushing her coal-black hair from her face. “No rope,” she said, “but I think I found some chain.”
“Let me look,” said Kira, and tucked herself into a duck dive down against the wall. She tried to open her eyes and found the water too dark and muddy to see in. She felt something heavy and coiled, slicker than rope but smoother than chain, and tried to lift it. It budged slightly, but was too heavy to move. She jumped up, breaking the surface and grabbing the wall for support. “I think I found a hose.”
“Is that strong enough?”
“It should be, if it’s long enough.”
Heron pulled her knife from its sheath, popped it open, and bit it in her teeth before diving down. Almost a minute later she bobbed up with the knife in one hand and an end of the hose in the other.
“How long can you hold your breath?” Kira asked.
“Biologically superior,” said Heron. “I keep telling you. Take this, the other end is still stuck to the shelf with a zip tie.”
“Probably why it’s still in here,” said Kira, but Heron was already gone. She surfaced a while later and nodded: success. Kira began coiling the hose as well as she could, and stopped after the first twenty coils. “This has got to be at least a hundred feet.”
“Then let’s do it,” said Heron, and gripped a portion of the hose as Kira ducked back out of the open window. Kira bobbed up farther south than she’d intended, looking up to see Samm watching from his roof. Was he smiling to see her? Of course he’d been worried with them gone so long, but Kira found herself hoping that he was worried about her, specifically, rather than just the success or failure of the search for rope.
She pushed the thought away and held up one end of the hose. “Hose,” she said simply, short of breath as she struggled against the current. She worked her way back to Samm’s roof, and he pulled her up. Heron clambered up behind her, not looking nearly as exhausted as Kira felt. Samm pulled up the looping lengths of hose and coiled them on the mossy shingles. He pointed back through the sunken city to the shore, where Heron’s horse Dug was watching them solemnly.
“I think that’s the best place to try to land it,” he said. “We’ve got a pretty clear shot, depending on how deep it rides, but it looks like a pretty shallow barge. If we head back that way and tie off one end of this to . . .” He paused, studying the bits of architecture that poked up above the water. “That light pole. I can swim out from here, tie this off, cut whatever’s holding it, and then we can tow it in to shore.”
“Just that easy, huh?” asked Kira.
“Unless the barge is tied down with metal chains,” said Samm, “yes. The hard part’s going to be getting it back out again laden with horses without foundering against those buildings.”
“I’m assuming we’re the first people to try to dock a boat at that end of Main Street,” said Heron. “I don’t think they designed the city with ‘barge maneuverability’ in mind.”
“We’ll just use poles to push ourselves away,” said Kira. “Against the pounding, bridge-destroying current of the mighty Mississippi River.”
“Just that easy?” asked Samm. Kira looked up and saw that he was smiling—a tentative smile, as if he was trying it out. She smiled back.
“Yeah,” she said. “Just that easy.”
It wasn’t. Samm could barely reach the barge with the hose tied off on the light post, and even after they moved it, he found the current almost too strong to work with as he dove for the docking ropes—not one, as they’d hoped, but five. He tied off the hose and spent nearly half an hour under the water, hacking on the series of ropes and coming up only briefly for air. Kira couldn’t see him well, but he had lost most of his color and was shivering against the cold. Each time he dove back down she found herself holding her breath in sympathy, seeing how long she could last, and each time he seemed to stay down longer, dragging the time out impossibly, until at last she was certain he had drowned. With a sudden lurch the barge shifted, the cut ties making it less stable, and still Samm didn’t come up. Kira counted to ten. Nothing. She waded in, counting to ten again, to twenty, and soon Heron was swimming with her, using the taut garden hose for balance as it stretched toward the breaking point. The barge moved again, spinning and slamming into the buildings downstream, and Samm erupted from the river, gasping desperately for breath. Kira caught him, holding his head above water as gulped down air.
“Got it,” he said, his teeth clacking together. “Let’s pull it in.”
“We need to warm you up first,” said Kira, “You could get hypothermia.”
“This hose is going to snap if we wait any longer,” said Heron.
“He could die,” insisted Kira.
“I’ll be fine,” Samm said, shivering. “I’m a Partial.”
“Back to the shallows,” said Heron, “or it’s all for nothing.”
They worked their back along the hose, Kira watching Samm and praying he didn’t shiver himself into a seizure. When they reached land shallow enough to stand on, she rubbed his back and chest, a quick furious burst of movement that probably soothed her conscience more than it did his condition. She felt a small thrill to be touching him—to feel the firm contours of his muscled chest—which seemed so enormously out of place she dropped her hands almost instantly, recoiling at the incongruity. She was a medic, not a schoolgirl; she could touch a man’s chest without going all gooey. He was still shaking, his teeth chattering with the cold, and she rubbed him again, working her hands up and down his pecs and sternum to force some warmth back into his body. A moment later the three of them seized the rope and started dragging the barge up the flooded street. Afa watched listlessly from the shore, almost too doped on painkillers to stand. The barge drifted toward them slowly, and when they gained about twenty feet of slack, Kira untied the hose and waded back to the next secure point, tying it off and then starting over. The barge scraped along the houses, catching on one of them so firmly Heron had to swim out and dislodge it with a plank of driftwood. After more than two hours they’d moved the barge close enough to shore for the horses to board it. It was barely three hundred feet.
They tied it off again, snapping the hose and almost losing it; Samm wrapped the trailing end around his arm and grabbed a brick wall with his other, straining red-faced at the pain as Kira and Heron scrambled to secure the barge more firmly. A heavy wooden door ripped from a nearby frame served as a steep boarding plank, and they walked the horses up one by one, Kira leading them with soft words while Samm and Heron
guided them from the sides to keep them in line. Samm was still shivering, and his horse Buddy seemed more spooked in response, shuffling and backtracking so nervously that the door cracked. They coaxed him onto the barge before it broke completely, and then had to find a new one to get Oddjob on board at the end. Afa came last, his face slack, his massive arms wrapped around his backpack like an overstuffed life preserver.
“I can’t leave my backpack,” he said. “I can’t leave my backpack.”
“We won’t,” said Kira. “Just sit here, and don’t move, and you’ll be safe.”
Heron cut the lines and hurried to her place on the leading edge of the boat, reaching it just in time to pick up a board and push off against the row of buildings the current tried to carry them into. Samm was on the same side, his hands and arms still pale from the cold. Kira stood in the center, trying to soothe the horses; they whinnied in agitation at the instability of the barge, dipping and shifting exactly the way ground shouldn’t, and became even more spooked as the barge slammed into the small hardware store.
“Watch the buildings!” cried Kira, trying to keep Bobo from rearing up and breaking away from her.
“Go to hell!” Heron shot back, her teeth tightly clenched as she tried to keep the unwieldy barge, now firmly caught in the river’s sweeping current, from slamming into the building again. The river pulled them both into the buildings and out into the center, not quickly but powerfully; it was not a white-water river, but Kira was realizing that even a lazy river, when it got this big, had an immense amount of strength. Samm joined Heron at the back, and together they managed to keep the trailing edge of the barge from clipping the last building in the line, and suddenly they were out: free of the sunken city, free of the debris that cluttered the shores, free of the limited stability the buildings had granted. The barge spun slowly in the water, and the horses chomped and snapped in fear. Samm ran to help Kira control them, but Heron walked the edge, trying to keep herself at whatever part of the barge was the front.