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The officer moved as much as he could, which was not far. Tomasz hoisted him easily, his enormous hands finding purchase beneath Alistair's armpits. Alistair's arms shot up and wrapped around Tomasz's neck. He would need a secure grip to make it through the water, the current, and whatever lay ahead.

The officer pulled himself closer in, his face nearly touching Tomasz's shoulder muscles. His ear almost brushed against the scarred skin of the larger man's upper arm. He felt the pulse nearby, steady against his cheek. He sensed the blood moving through the tissue. This man’s heart was steady. Fear had not quickened it.

The straps wound over Tomasz's shoulders, over his chest, across his back. The harness took shape around them both, binding them into a unit. The larger man tightened a strap around them both. He made sure Alistair’s body stayed secure, would not shift, slip, or separate from Tomasz’s frame. Alistair's face rested against Tomasz's shoulder blade. It pressed into the strong muscle that would help them move through the water. He felt every breath the larger man took, sensed the rise and fall of the chest beneath him. Above him, above them both, the flat afternoon light continued its work of revealing without mercy.

"Teins," Tomasz said again, dead serious. Hold.

Tomasz pulled off his boots and tied them together, then folded the heavy tunic and greatcoat around them, and slung them across his chest. Only then did he step into the river. When his bare foot touched the icy water, he gasped. The sound was involuntary, an almost primitive response to the numbing cold that seized his legs immediately, climbing with vicious speed up his calves and thighs. They had crossed water before—streams, drainage ditches, flooded fields—but this was different. It pounded against them with a fury of a creature released from its winter prison, something frozen for months that had finally recognized its purpose.

Dark clouds of silt swirled up around Tomasz’s ankles like a living thing that wanted to consume them. It swirled and resettled with each footfall, obscuring the riverbed so that every step required him to feel downward through the murk for ground that might or might not hold. His enormous frame moved tentatively. The river did not know his size and did not care about it. Each foot descended slowly, testing, before accepting his weight.

Behind him, pressed flat against his back, Alistair went rigid, bracing himself for an unknown impact, every muscle locked. His arms cinched around Tomasz's neck with a force that was breathless, the physical shape of a terror so complete it had become indistinguishable from devotion.

The water rose. It reached Tomasz’s knees. It continued past them, climbing his thighs. With each increment of rise, the current grew stronger, began to pull at him with increasing force. The river pulled him away from the ground. It pushed not just down but also sideways, trying to carry him downstream. Tomasz staggered slightly. His foot slipped on something smooth under the silt—a rock or a piece of wood. He caught himself with his big hand, pushing forward into the water. He regained his footing and prevented both of them from being swept downstream.

Alistair made a sound, like a scream if it was inhaled rather than exhaled. The vocalization was one of pure animal terror at feeling the moment of potential catastrophe. His legs, now useless, wrapped around Tomasz's hips, striving to gain a better grip and increase the contact between their bodies. His breaths came quick and shallow against the back of Tomasz’s neck. It was like hyperventilation, as if his body were preparing for the drowning that felt inevitable.

The water rose to Tomasz's waist, and it was ice cold. His muscles were already slowing down, losing their efficiency, and starting to give in. But he kept moving forward. Each step was physically agonizing. Alistair could feel the tension, as Tomasz's muscles worked hard against the water's resistance. The current was stronger now, pulling him with real force. More than once, Tomasz’s feet slipped, as if the river were trying to sweep them away.

"Teins," he yelled. His strained voice barely rose above the sound of the rushing water, coming out as little more than a rasp. "Ne lâche pas." Do not let go.

The larger man reached behind him until his palm found Alistair’s hair. He rubbed it once, then gently squeezed the back of the smaller man’s skull. The gesture was impossible to read. It might have been practical, making certain Alistair was ready before stepping into the current. It might have been reassurance. Whatever Tomasz had intended, Alistair closed his eyes and accepted it.

Alistair's arms stayed where they were, locked around the big man’s trapezius muscles. His face was pressed against the nape of his thick, corded neck. He could have kissed him there. The officer’s quick, shallow breaths matched Tomasz's. They inhaled together and exhaled together, becoming a single organism, one breathing unit.

The water was at Tomasz's chest now. It was climbing toward his collarbone. Alistair was now drenched in the river’s fury, as well. The unyielding current pummeled his back and shoulders, carrying away any trace of warmth or equilibrium. The cold moved past the point of mere discomfort and into the realm of genuine threat. His fingers were beginning to lose sensation and grip. The pain in his legs had even started to go numb. But Tomasz’s skin was hot. It retained heat from the labor of carrying, from the exertion, from the work of moving through the thrashing water.

This was all a mistake. He knew it before they had even stepped into the water; he knew it even as his mouth failed to form the words. It was too late now.

He was aware, in a strange, abstract way, of his own uselessness. He was strapped like a child or a burden to the back of a man who should never have been required to carry any weight but his own. He had once been the officer—responsible, accountable. Now he was ballast, his arms tightened around Tomasz’s neck like a child clinging to his father’s back in the village pond. He tried to shift his grip; to ease the strangling pressure he was creating with his panic, but the harness cinched him tight. The canvas cut into his armpits. The straps pulled across the healing break in his thigh, a pain so sharp that it cleaved the cold for a moment, only to be swallowed again.

Alistair was almost entirely submerged now. His head barely stayed above water thanks to Tomasz's wide shoulders. The officer was able to balance on them while keeping his head above water. But it was close. Remarkably close. Any further rise in the river level or any added pressure from the current, and Alistair would go under. He was completely dependent on Tomasz's ability to keep them afloat.

They reached the middle of the river. Alistair understood this not by any landmark, but by what the current did to his body. It stopped pulling in one direction and began pulling in all of them at once, a force that had no single axis, that came from everywhere and nowhere, that made forward progress feel less like walking and more like an argument. Tomasz’s feet, when he pressed them downward, found nothing reliable. The riverbed was there and then it was not. The water was beginning to lift them, was beginning to make the case that the ground was a fiction, that there was no longer any surface to stand on. The only honest way forward was to swim.

Tomasz spoke. The words came out in Polish, automatically, older than the war. A woman's name, a mother's name. The he pushed off the rock and into the river’s churning torrent.

His bearing shifted. The harness supporting Alistair's lower half stayed in place, but Tomasz's arms began to move in a new way. They reached forward into the water, began to move in strokes. His body went from vertical to horizontal as he began to use his legs to propel himself instead of keeping his equilibrium. He was swimming.

The buoyancy of water began to do some of the work of supporting the smaller man's frame. The harness loosened a bit with the change in gravity. Alistair adjusted his body to this new position. He could feel Tomasz’s lats extend and his deltoids rotate underneath him with each powerful stroke. He clasped his hands together and tried to slide himself higher onto Tomasz’s neck. He tried, as much as he could, to find the rhythm in Tomasz’s movements and shift his own weight accordingly.

The current was relentless. It pushed at them with a force that was almost conscious, almost malevolent. Alistair's breath was ragged once more. It sounded like someone drowning, full of pure terror. The officer's face was pushed hard against Tomasz's neck. He felt like he was choking on his own hair. He was almost buried in the larger man's shoulder, struggling just to stay connected.

Each stroke of Tomasz's arms pulled them forward. The motion was slow but required an enormous amount of effort. The water posed a resistance that one could not overcome, only negotiate with. The river was not an obstacle to conquer but instead a force to accept. They had to move through it with the understanding that it would always be stronger. Their survival depended not on overcoming it but on outlasting it.

Tomasz's teeth clenched with effort. His muscles were burning now. The muscles of his arms, the muscles of his chest, his shoulders, his back, all of them needed to work together, moving them through the water. The cold progressed past pain and into a kind of numbness. His fingers, when he tried to curl them to direct the strokes, were less elastic, and his legs lost a degree of strength.

Alistair's breath rasped against his neck. The officer's body went stiff with cold and fear. He realized they were no longer on solid ground, no longer in a stable position, and survival was now just a distant idea that might not be within reach.

Every reflex in his body screamed let go, to scramble, but the harness held him firm. He was dead weight. He could only cling on like a parasite. Tomasz’s arms churned in the water, seeking purchase, but Alistair could feel the drag he was creating, the way his own small mass multiplied with every sodden inch of wool, every ounce of river water absorbed into canvas, cotton, and flesh. The straps cut into his chest and thighs. Where his hands gripped at Tomasz’s collar, the man’s skin was clammy, slick with river and cold. There was no sound but the river and Tomasz’s breath, and the river was winning.

For a single, glassy instant, air, water, flesh, and harness all blurred. An eddy seized them and drew both bodies underwater. The river’s surface snapped overhead, cold light replaced by green-black murk. Alistair’s senses compressed to a pinhole. Tomasz’s bellow muffled to a bass vibration, the knife-cold of the river, the frantic pulse in his ears, the taste of silt and river-brine.

Alistair’s left leg slipped free of the harness. He felt it go. At first, it was a slackening, then a sudden, total absence, his boot spinning weightlessly behind them. He could end it here. The thought arrived, unbidden and perfect, like the sharpest flash of artillery: If he let go, if he just uncoiled his arms, Tomasz might have a chance.

All his life Alistair prided himself on his discipline, his powers of refusal. But the urge now, to surrender—so easily done, just a slow opening of his fists, a slackening around Tomasz’s neck—came with crystalline clarity. They would list in different directions, the two bodies. Tomasz, all muscle and mass, would claw upwards, find air, find shore, and Alistair would slide down into soft dark, a burden released, a promise kept.

But the body had its own arguments. His mouth, despite every rational impulse, opened for air and filled with river. His hands, traitors, dug harder into Tomasz’s collarbone. The world contracted to a chaos of limbs and straps and blinding cold. He thought, for a moment, of every man he failed, every boy he sent over the top, all of it converging in the animal fight to live.