"Ease up!" I scream at Nash. "Give me an inch of slack!"
"I can't!"
"You have to! On three! Push forward! One! Two! Three!"
Nash roars and shoves the machine forward. It moves maybe half an inch.
It's enough.
I lever the shovel down with everything I have. The pressure releases for a microsecond. I reach down with my other hand—stupid, dangerous, necessary—and rip the pin free.
Clang.
The hitch separates.
The snowmobile, suddenly freed from the anchor, lurches forward. Nash falls face-first onto the ice.
The sled, no longer tethered, tips backward and starts its slide.
That's when I see the gray case. The field case, the one holding the tranquilizing darts and three months of collection vials, tears loose from the cargo netting and skids across the tilting deck toward the water.
I'm moving before I finish deciding to move.
I throw myself flat, lunge across the ice, and hook two fingers through the handle. I sling the case behind me toward solid footing, and it spins away across the surface, safe. I have half a second to feel like I've won before the shelf drops out from under my knees.
The river takes me to the waist.
The cold hits like a full-body electric shock. My lungs seize and pull in air I didn't ask for, one huge involuntary gasp, the same reflex I've read about in every cold-water immersion study, and the only reason I'm not breathing river is that my face stayed above the surface.
"Nash!" My voice comes out wrong, high and thin, squeezed flat by the clamp of cold around my ribs.
The current finds my legs. It's a steady, patient drag, hauling my boots downstream and under the shelf, where the ice becomes a ceiling. My fingers claw at the edge and slide off. They're clumsy already, slowing already, and I know thenumbers because the numbers are my job. I have ten seconds of useful grip, maybe fifteen, and then my hands stop being hands.
I make myself think past the screaming in my nerves. Vertical bodies get pulled under. Horizontal bodies float.
I kick hard with both legs, driving myself flat against the current until I'm lying on the water instead of hanging in it. My elbows go wide onto the shelf, forearms pressing down, spreading the load across the ice the way you'd spread weight anywhere it might break. It's load per square inch, and physics doesn't care that I'm terrified.
The shovel is still lying where I dropped it. I drag it across the lip of the hole with one forearm and shove it crosswise, a brace that won't crumble under me.
"Aris!" Nash hits the ice beside me on his belly, arms spread, and his hand closes around the shoulder strap of my parka. His face is six inches from mine, and his eyes are the steadiest thing on this river. "I've got you. Don't climb. You'll break the edge."
"Kick," I gasp. The word costs me half a breath. "On three. I kick, you pull."
"On three," he repeats. "One. Two. Three."
I kick like the water is trying to take me. He hauls back on the strap with his whole body, boots scraping for purchase, and the shovel takes my weight for the one second the edge needs to hold. Then I'm sliding out of the water on my stomach, over the brace, onto ice that holds me.
"Roll," Nash orders. "Don't stand. Roll."
I roll. The ice stays solid under my back, my shoulder, my back again, until his hands stop me and we're both ten feet from the hole, tangled together, breathing in ragged white bursts.
Behind us, the sled slips silently and completely under. I watch it go: the generator, the extra fuel, the backup tents. Gone.
But the snowmobile is safe, and the samples with it. Nash is safe.
I try to say so, and my jaw refuses to cooperate. My teeth slam together hard enough to hurt. Below the waist there's no pain at all, only a distant report that my legs still exist.
Nash gets an arm under me and hauls me upright. My legs hold, barely, wobbling like the bones have gone soft.
