Sect Year 3 · eleventh month · night of day 11 · the thirty-third life: Ammel Gorge, her seventy-first year
The river kept her under for longer than she could count, and she didn’t try to count. She had the fist, and she kept the fist closed. Meanwhile, the cold went through her coat and her skin and into the bones of her hands, until she couldn’t feel the chip or the fingers around it. Something struck her side. It might have been a stone or a broken beam. She turned with it and came up coughing, and the lamplight was gone, and the dark roared at her from every side.
“Here!”
A pole came across the current, a long ash sweep with a hook bound to one end. It struck the water an arm’s length from her face and slid, and she caught it with her right hand, the left still shut. Far off, at the other end, a boy was shouting something she couldn’t hear over the water. Then the pole pulled, slowly, and she moved with it.
“Come on,” the boy called when she was near enough to hear him. He sounded about twelve. He was braced on a flat stone at the edge of the new bank, with his heels dug into the gravel and the butt of the sweep wedged under one foot. “I’ve got you. Keep coming.”
