It was happening. Again. She was practically a child again, trapped under the dock by her hair, feeling someone else’s memory closing in around her, and she couldn’t understand why it was happening now.

  Outside, Mitch’s truck was faithfully crouched in the driveway. He was still in the RV. She could return to him, curl into his warm side, and fall back asleep with him. She could leave the nightmare. If she could just withstand it long enough to get out of the house.

  The kitchen light burst on. Between her and escape. Heart lodged like a fish bone in her throat, Cassie followed the hallway to the kitchen, dreading every step. But it was as if the walls of the double-wide had collapsed, folding apart like a cardboard box, and around her now stood the dinky town square of Old Prosper. It was too much, her senses overloading, the past crashing in, crushing the present into rubble to make room for itself, expanding. The town was stripped, a blank face, and nearly empty. The air felt too still and full of water. Somewhere concealed, a baby was hacking.

  She didn’t see the couple again until they met below a half-collapsed awning. The market was abandoned, the sky gray. “I’m sorry,” Catfish said. She was wrapped in a heavy coat that pooled at her knees, and she looked exhausted.

  Tobias had his cap pulled lower than ever to hide the tears on his cheeks. He nodded once, sharply. “Not your fault.” He reached for her, squeezed her fingers. “Please don’t go to the schoolhouse. Not now. Not with—let’s go on, now.”

  The schoolhouse. A blackboard. A row of beds. Desks pushed against the walls. A sight Cassie’s young mind hadn’t been able to fully fathom, her hair caught in the underside of the dock.

  “Don’t go, Catfish,” she whispered, but there was no sound to her own voice; here she was the ghost. “Don’t go to the schoolhouse.”

  But Catfish shook her head. One hand gripped a wall, dug into the grooves of the brick to steady herself. Her face was pinched. “It’ll be for just a few days. Yellow Jack kills you fast if it’s gonna kill you, and I’ve got things to live for.”

  “Then come with me and live, damn it,” Tobias managed, his voice almost too gruff to understand. “Let’s hit the road, Kat. We’ll never tell anyone we came from here. And no one’ll remember this place in a year or two anyway. Not the town, not the sharecroppers. Not the fever. We won’t either. I’ll take care of you.” Two children with two new family names and two new identities each hoping to tie their loose strings together. They would be happy under the name Tobias’s father had chosen. Fairchild. More than just a name with an American ring; it was a prayer, his wish. A fairer world for his children. Bolt’s world, full of bright hope, far from the lake and the Great Damnation.

  “I can’t make the trip sick. It’s going to be hard enough, don’t you see? I need my strength.” She trailed off, but he was already nodding. Her voice was far firmer than his. “Get that last paycheck. And—I want you to do one more thing, all right?”

  He looked at her, those clever eyebrows trembling.

  “You…you know where they are.” She held his eyes, blinking not even once despite the fever shine of her skin. “You go and get them and have them ready, right? For our future.”

  “Right.” He took a breath, and for one moment, just one moment, he brushed his fingers along the buttons on her coat. “Our future.”

  The ground shook. Cassie stood in an immense crowd. Men, women, tripping toddlers, in patched and worn clothes, the best they had for travel, clutching bags and hats, their best things, their only things. They shoved past her, down the road, out of the town. Umbrellas and forearms sheltered them from the rain, but there was no time now to waste. It had been a rainy summer, Cassie did know that.

  They parted around her like a river around a stone. Tobias and Catfish were lost in it, and Cassie fought her way through them to the switch on the kitchen wall and slapped the light off.

  “Stop,” Cassie ground out, clutching her head. It pounded, her blood rushing. “Stop it. Stop—”

  And the porch light turned on. It pooled yellow on the grass, stretching buttery fingers toward the lake. The source of Cassie’s fears. She backed into the refrigerator, already shaking her head.

  The light didn’t flicker. It waited.

  She could just stay here in the kitchen. She could avoid those final steps and stay where Mom had made hair tonics and sweet tea with mint, where Grandad had sat staring out the window over his lunch. Just waiting for the light to change, he’d tell her when she asked him what he was thinking about.

  But hadn’t Cassie tried to hide? Hadn’t she spent years closing her eyes and ears, painting her windows, waiting for it to be safe? And Catfish had waited too. She could wait forever to draw Cassie out, to show her what she had been attempting to communicate all Cassie’s life. She steadied herself, breathed in the familiar scent of her home, her space, her time. There was the aroma of honeycomb wreathing up from a pot on the stove. Rain tapped on the roof that liked to leak. She anchored herself in her own body, in all its panic, in all its weakness, as she crept to the open front door.

  “Catfish,” she whispered. “You were—you were my friend. I loved you. I trusted you. So I have to believe you’re not just doing this to scare me.” There was no response. The light glowed on. “I’m coming out.”

  Cassie stepped outside into deafening rain. Water streamed around her ankles. She ran to the edge of her property, where trees and weeds encroached on the narrow path down the hill to the Destiny. At the top, the resort, the shoreline, and their private winding finger of the lake was laid out before her, perfectly positioned for a crack of lightning that almost brought her to her knees.

  Someone was in the water.

  The path down to the lake from her property was a newborn stream now, mud sluicing as if from an open vein, spilling into the shallows, where a small figure huddled on all fours near the shore.

  Cassie inched closer down the bank.

  “Hello?” Cassie tried, her voice buffeted by the wind.

  There was so much she had never noticed until the day she watched Catfish drown. That Mom never once saw her, that Catfish carried her past the dock and no one ever seemed to notice them gone. That Catfish waved from the water and waited for the five-year-old girl to come to her. That Catfish could float and do the backstroke and dive but never, not once, stepped foot on shore.

  Warm tears shuddered down Cassie’s cheeks as she knelt beside the water and kept her eyes ruthlessly on the sight in front of her.

  Catfish was crying, her shoulders shaking with cold, and though she didn’t look at Cassie, she could feel Catfish tugging at her, pulling at her with some wordless, untamable need.

  “Catfish.” Cassie cleared her throat. “Catfish.”

  Her head lifted. Her neck turned, and she looked at Cassie with dark, angry eyes, lost in time.

  “Do you know me?” Cassie asked her, choked. “We used to play together. A long time ago.”

  Catfish didn’t try to speak, but Cassie could read it in her eyes—horror, desperation and need. A question. Where?

  Cassie pitched forward—

  And fell.

  And felt water tug and pull underneath her, dripping in from the ceiling. She was back in the last place she ever wanted to be.

  It had been dripping in from the ceiling for three days of rain. Prosper’s schoolhouse had been carefully made, but it was poor. Desks, pushed to the sides of the building to make room for pallets on the floor, and people crammed together. After just one day of rain, it began to pool from under the door too. Grady had tried to stop the leak with spare blankets and used to mop, trying to push the water out, but he was too tired now to bother. He floated on his yellow sheets like everyone else, unrecognizable but for his shock of copper hair.

  Catfish had been woken by a fever dream of monsters with hammers knocking on the door in the darkest hours. Under the veil of nighttime, they appeared in the windows, looking in at them. Men or devils.

  “Not sure about this,” one of them had said to another.

  “Stop whining. We talked about this,” another monster whispered. His skin looked like leather. Through the shadows, he looked like he only had one eye. Cyclops, she thought hazily. “We do what needs to be done to save our kin. This sickness can’t spread.”

  Then she had fallen asleep again, but not before getting a strange sense that the ground was being washed out from under her.

  Just a dream. And yet. Later that night, when the night hung like a heavy, warm blanket, Susan, little Susan, had tried to open the door, wanting to use the bathroom outside—but it didn’t budge, didn’t even rattle. It was stuck fast. Water leaked underneath it.

  So cold. It was so cold. And her skin was so hot. She turned her head to the north wall, where water buffeted through, spraying and sloshing with algae and white bubbles. She couldn’t stand up anymore. She was too tired. Just days ago, she had been dreaming of far-off city roads. Why was the water so high?

  The yellow sickness came from the mosquitos in the lake bed, the doctor said, and the school was where sick people were sent—for the town’s peace of mind, see. People were scared it would spread as far as Charlene, that it would become another Memphis. They all knew what had happened when yellow fever came to Memphis.

  Sickness came from the lake bed. Panic came from the town.

  The basin won’t flood, the doctor had said, full of confidence. “As long as the locks are open, the old town of Prosper will be perfectly safe. There’s no better place for the sick to seclude and heal.” But the doctor had not come in three days, since the rain started. The rest of the houses here in the basin were empty. Why was the water so high?

  One of the school’s blackboards had a tired scribble: Gen. 9:11.

  She faded out for a time and woke suddenly and sharply in silence because something was wrong. Her hair was wet. Everything was wet. Water was a hand high, lapping at her face, her blankets beginning to drag and float. She turned, struggled onto her side, and saw Mrs. Grier was on her stomach, very still, a rosary still coiled around her wrist. She was never still. Her fingers were deft, flour-dusted when she fried pancakes for breakfast, her voice sharp as a bell, but she was facedown and water lapped at her ears. Rising.

  Water tickled Catfish’s nose, so she turned back and felt the nauseous pull of her stomach, and blood was on her nightgown again, warmth leaching out into the cold, cold water that soaked her blankets. Around her limbs. There had been a break between the wall and the door, and water swirled in; the building shuddered. Could it hold, if the water didn’t stop? She couldn’t stand, not even when it rose around her where she lay on her back and fell on her from the ceiling. Something in the building’s very structure cracked, and now the water rushed, so cold, already a hand high, and she was so tired, in such pain, and if she couldn’t sit up—

  Cassie fell to her knees in the mud at the lake’s edge. Catfish shuddered. Maybe she was still locked in the memory, still feeling herself slowly drown, crawling for the door that was nailed shut, knowing she was too weak to open it.

  Cassie was seized by the same impulse to save her that she’d felt as a child, watching Catfish sink—the same impulse that drove her to stand vigil on those nights when Mom fished Grandad out of the lake. But the paralyzing helplessness felt the same too. “Come here,” Cassie called to her. “Catfish, get out of the water. I’m here, I’ll help you. Please.”

  Catfish didn’t respond but looked at her with such strength, such power, that Cassie felt her refusal settle like sediment in her bones. No. The storm shuddered, and rain slashed across Cassie’s face, blinding her for a moment. When she rubbed her eyes open, Catfish was leaning in inches from her nose.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The thunder grew loud and animalistic after midnight. Under the sodden tarp, June lay next to Lark, and they didn’t speak. Her skin had been electrified so long, now it was turning numb, bruised from the two of them washing up against each other over and over and over. Every so often, they peeked out. At some point, the lights of the nearby docks had sputtered out, and the perfect darkness was now only broken by the flashing storm.

  They would meet there, eyes seeking eyes in the lightning strikes, and sweat-slicked knees tangling and lips catching and Lark’s pink hair brushing her shoulders, and then they would recede in silence, not sleep, until they would turn again to each other, hands curled, and pull helplessly on.

  “Never seen a storm like this,” Lark murmured at some point. “Thank God this boat drains, or we’d be underwater.”

  “I don’t want to go back out there,” June sighed against her jaw.

  June had always loved the first time with someone. Sex was new again every first time; there was always more, more, and more, as clumsy fumbles turned into rhythm and two figured out how to move as one. The lessons learned while charting a path from navel to hip could only be discovered once. It was fresh falling in love, with the narrowness of Lark’s chin and the dip of her spine, with the feel of soft weight settling over her stomach, and the silent way she huffed out her breath in the aftershocks as they rolled away from each other. Brimming, June couldn’t help but watch Lark from under her eyelids and wait for the tide to draw her back.

  A crack like a falling redwood roused them. It was so loud, the shudder of their little boat so profound, that for a moment June was sure they’d sink. Lark lifted the tarp as she sat up, suddenly alert. “Something’s going on,” she managed, moving to peer over the side toward the closest houseboat dock. Suddenly she gasped, a painful drag of air. It sounded like panic. “That’s him.”

  “What?” June drew up with her, instinct telling her to stay low. On either side of them, the long docks bucked in the water. People raced around their boats, resecuring the riggings with larger, more elaborate knots, flashlights in hand. The houseboats could have been bath toys, they looked so fragile.

  And there, crouched on the shore, where F Dock was anchored, someone was working with bolt cutters. “What’s he doing out there in a storm?” June asked.

  “It’s him. No one else moves that way, no one.” Lark was struggling to get a deep breath in, her eyes darting, her hair plastered to her head. She dragged her clothes on in quick jerks. “Jeff Daley. He almost killed Cassie and I yesterday.”

  “What?” June hooked her arm around Lark’s waist. The clothes she’d put on were completely drenched. “Okay, keep your head down. What’s—”

  Lark lunged back to the wheel and tried to get the boat started up again, twisting the key, trying to intervene somehow. “He’s ripping F Dock loose.” There was a second horrible boom and a metallic tearing that echoed across the whole basin of the lake. “People could die.”

  June scrambled for her soaked clothes, tossing her shirt back over her head.

  “Look.” Lark lifted the little lens she wore around her neck to June so she could see the magnified horror. F Dock was detached, buffeted on the water, ship to iceberg, toward E Dock.

  “Are they going to crash?” June asked. “What’s happening?”

  Lark’s silence and her wrestling with the boat’s engine were a grim answer.

  In the distance, the dam was lit by wild streamers of lightning. The storm seemed to want to pull it up by the roots, and in the flash, June saw them again. Five figures, scurrying fugitives, their destruction sowed long ago, on the distant dam, there—and then gone. She knew them. Just like the night when she’d stood on the edge of the red lake, and those five fishermen told her stories of blood in the Nile—she heard their gravelly whisper from across the water. The dead have a tight grip on this place. Did they even know their world was gone and that they were nothing more than the brutal afterimage left behind after a lightning flash?

  And those people, trapped under the water, awake—were they reliving horrors all over again? They would not rise tonight, she knew that. There was no divine intervention coming to save the docks. The living were on their own.

  Daley stood, leaving the bolt cutters in the grass, and dashed into the water, into a low dive, where he vanished under the frothing waves.

  Finally, Lark got the boat started, the engine’s roar totally eclipsed in the sound of the rising water, the deep booms of wires snapping in the deep. She grabbed the arm of the accelerator, and the boat hauled across the high surf, struck back and forth by waves. It was all June could do to not be thrown off into the water as they careened forward, trying to get out from between the massive wooden jaws of the two docks threatening to snap around them.

  “Can you see Daley?” Lark screamed into the wind. “We’ve got to—” Then her eyes fixed on something, and she screamed again, this time without words. The dock, as large as a highway overpass, heaved over the water. Great white foam was borne ahead of it, boats torn free and skidding in every direction in the dense rain. The houseboats tossed in their slips like stabled horses, desperate faces trapped behind dark windows. The other inhabitants of Echo Dock had noticed; screams rose, one after another, and a small crowd of a dozen or so of Lark’s neighbors rushed to the edge of their dock, huddled together. Through the loupe, June saw two teenage boys with their arms around a woman in a bathrobe. A dog barked hysterically in an older woman’s arms, while another furry creature—a ferret?—wrapped protectively around the neck of a bald man. A little girl with leftover blue and red stars painted on her face watched the adults in horror.

  Lark steered for the ever-narrowing gap between the two dock ends, trying to get them out of the collision zone. “We won’t make it!” June shouted, but her voice was lost in the wind. Two boats crashing on the water would be deadly. But this—twenty, thirty, all at once, hulls splintering, poles cracking, cabins flooding—

  Lark, desperate, gave up on their escape and gave the wheel a savage twist into E Dock. “Jump!”