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YOU?”
    “Here!”
    To my left.
    I veered blindly.
    A moment later, my arm hit something solid.
    “Rachel! Hold on to me!”
    I grabbed Colin’s arm. Now I could see him. Faintly, like an apparition. He was pulling me forward.
    “You’re going the wrong way!” I cried, pulling against him.
    “No!” he shouted back. “It’s this way!”
    What’s he doing?
    In the blankness, there was no telling direction at all. I tried to swim, holding on to Colin. Coughing up salt water. We hit a cold spot and my right leg seized up.
    “DON’T FIGHT ME, RACHEL!”
    “I HAVE A CRAMP!”
    “WHERE?”
    “RIGHT CALF!”
    He was holding me now. Lifting me higher. Above the water. Turning me horizontal. Massaging my calf.
    I saw him gulping water, floundering.
    Swim.
    Swim now or he’ll drown.
    I flexed my foot. I kicked. My leg was usable again. “I’M OKAY!”
    I took his arm and swam forward, but a wave welled up between us, and he slipped out of my grip.
    “WHERE ARE YOU?” I yelled.
    No answer.
    I looked around frantically.
    There.
    Through a momentary break in the clouds.
    He was swimming.
    In the opposite direction.
    “NO-O-O!”
    My cry was swallowed up in the mist.
    With each breath, water flooded my mouth. Seared my lungs.
    Don’t drown.
    I thrust my arms into the water. Pushing. Keeping my head up. Anything that worked.
    But I was losing.
    Losing oxygen.
    Losing strength.
    Losing the battle.
    I turned my head upward and tried to gulp air.
    And that was when I heard the roar.
    It rose behind me like the sound of a caged beast. Only it wasn’t animal or human.
    I felt something pulling me back. A force in the water.
    Undertow.
    I knew about undertows.
    I knew you couldn’t resist them.
    They took you wherever they wanted.
    Usually to the bottom of the sea.
    Fight it.
    FIGHT IT, RACHEL.
    I tried. But I felt myself falling into a hole.
    A hole in the water.
    The white was fading to black.
    My tense muscles went limp. My thoughts — an entire life condensed into fast-forward images — eddied upward and out of my body.
    And I knew I could fight no more.

It is done.
    We do not kill.
    I didn’t mean to do that. I meant to save lives.

6
    I WAS UNCONSCIOUS WHEN the jolt came.
    But I felt it.
    In a dim flicker of awareness, I felt my body lurch upward with a force so sudden it threatened to rip me apart.
    My head tore through the surface of the water. Air exploded out of me.
    Air.
    I pulled it in. I devoured it, in racking gulps. I felt nothing but the action of my lungs, pumping. My arms thrashed in the water, my legs kicked wildly.
    Alive. I’m alive.
    I was bouncing, moving forward on violent swells.
    Before me, the mist was thinning.
    A dark form floated in the distance.
    Land.
    Just a glimpse. As quickly as it appeared, it was engulfed by the cloud.
    I took control of my body. Steady arm movements. Lifting myself with the rhythm of the wave. Pushing toward the landmass.
    There.
    Its shape was still dark. Still vague.
    But closer.
    I’d turned around. I was heading home.
    Just keep yourself afloat.
    Then, with a barely audible pop, the hiss stopped. The silence was so sudden, so total, it felt physical — like pitching forward into a ditch.
    The mist had lifted.
    I was floating on calm water.
    The landmass was clear.
    It was a cove, ringed by rocky outcroppings. The sand was bright pink in the sunlight.
    Sunlight. Calm.
    As if the clouds didn’t exist.
    I swam toward the shore — slowly, favoring my aching muscles.
    Soon I was bodysurfing on a long, low wave that took me into the shallows.
    My legs were shaky and weak as I staggered onto the beach. I scanned the short coastline and the expanse of water, hoping to see Colin. Or the yacht.
    No sign of either.
    The clouds were sitting on the water, pillowlike. Looking so harmless, so …
    Distant.
    Strange. I couldn’t have swum that far. The clouds seemed miles away — exactly the way they’d appeared back home.
    But this isn’t home.
    I gazed around the