Chapter 2 Water Rising, Hands Shaking

Yellow, she said. My eyes had gone yellow.

I turned my face away from her and looked at the dam wall, at the crack, at anything that was not a pair of green eyes reading me like a survey report. The wind had come back and it was cold off the water above, and I let it cool the back of my neck and I counted the gate readings in my head the way I counted them every morning. Twenty-two on the eastern sluice. Fourteen on the west. The reservoir was at thirty-one percent and falling, and a woman with a brass compass had just watched my eyes change color in the mud.

"The lamp," I said. "You are looking at the lamp."

"The lamp is in your hand and it is pointing at the ground." Her voice was steady. Steadier than mine. "I have been looking at eyes for six years through a theodolite. They do not go yellow from lamplight."

"The silt in the air down here. It gets in your eyes and they water, and the light catches it." I turned back to her and I made myself look at her the way I looked at the county inspectors, calm and boring and slightly tired. "You should have that seen to. Both of us should. It is why we wear goggles on the crest."

She did not blink. "My eyes are fine. Yours were yellow for two seconds and then they were blue again, and the door at the end of the street banged shut with nobody near it, and I would like to know what is going on in this valley."

The door. Of course she had heard it. I had heard it too, and I had felt it, a pull in my chest like a hook behind the ribs, the pack house calling through fifty years of water. The door had been shut since 1924. I had tried it a hundred times. It did not open. It did not bang.

"There is a pressure void under the eastern quarter," I said. "I told you. When the water drops, the air gets in and the ground shifts, and old doors move. That is all this is. You heard a door move because the ground moved."

"That is not how doors work."

"That is exactly how doors work when the ground under them moves." I stepped between her and the street and spread my hands, and I made my voice the voice I used on the county men when they came up from the town with their clipboards. "Dr. Elin. You are standing in a drained reservoir basin. The mud is unstable, the voids are unmapped, and I have a work crew coming down that stair in forty minutes with a pump and a load of timber. If they find a civilian down here I lose my permit and you lose your inspection. So I am going to ask you one more time to walk up those stairs."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she looked past me at the street, and at the pack house at the end of it, and I saw her make a decision. It was the wrong decision, but she made it without flinching.

"All right," she said. "I will go up. On one condition. You let me take a sample of the crack before I do, and you give me the original gate logs. Not the summaries. The raw logs."

"The raw logs are in the office."

"Then I will read them in the office." She crouched and set the compass on a flat stone and took a small brass trowel and a paper sample bag from her satchel, and I watched her scrape a curl of mortar out of the crack and fold it into the bag. Her hands were quick and sure and there was a smear of gray dust on her wrist. "You can stand there and look at the sky if you like. I am not going to run off into the mud."

I did not look at the sky. I looked at her hands. That was my mistake.

She finished and stood and brushed her palms on her coat, and she picked up the compass and her satchel, and then she held out her right hand to me. "Truce. You get me up the stairs and I do not put the words unstable void in my report until I have read your logs."

I took her hand.

The world went white and then it went very quiet. Her palm was cold from the mud and then it was not cold at all; it was warm, warmer than a hand should be, and where our skin met there was a snap like a struck match, a jolt that ran up my arm and into my chest and set the hook behind my ribs alight. My wolf came up out of the dark of me all at once, ears flat, nose full, and he did not growl. He made a sound I had never heard him make. He made a sound like a wolf greeting something he had waited his whole life to find.

Her scent hit me then, and it was not the smell of mud or wool or the reservoir. It was pine and clean water and something like warm bread, and under that, faint and impossible, the particular smell of the drowned church at midnight, my church, the one I had swum down to every full moon for ten years. She smelled like home. She smelled like the valley before the flood.

Elin made a small sound and pulled her hand back, and she looked at her palm and then at me, and her face had lost all its professional calm. "What was that?"

"Static," I said. My voice came out ruined. "Wool coat. Dry air. It happens."

"That was not static." She was rubbing her palm on her sleeve, and her breath was fast. "That went up my arm. It is still going up my arm."

"Mine too," I said, and then I wished I had not, because it was the first true thing I had said to her all morning and it was the wrong thing to be true.

The dam bell rang.

It was not the alarm bell. The alarm bell was a great iron thing on the crest that we tested at noon every Wednesday and that could be heard in the town. This was the small bell, the old handbell that hung in the gatehouse above the eastern sluice, and nobody had rung it in my lifetime. It was a relic from the building of the dam, kept for the opening ceremony of 1924, and it had been silent for fifty years.

It rang once, and the note went down the valley and came back off the dam wall, and the mud under our boots shivered. The compass in her hand spun wild and then stopped dead, pointing at the stair. At the gatehouse. At the bell.

"Up," I said. "Now. Both of us."

She ran. I will give her that. She did not argue and she did not stop to pack her trowel; she turned and ran for the maintenance stair with her satchel banging on her hip, and I ran behind her with the lantern swinging, and the bell rang again, and a third time, and the mud pulled at us the whole way and the water above the dam made a low grinding sound that I had heard only twice before, both times in nightmares.

We were halfway up the stair when the sluice gate opened.

I heard it. I knew the sound the way I knew my own heartbeat, the long hydraulic groan of the eastern gate lifting when the pressure behind it moved. It should not have lifted. The control handle in the gatehouse was locked with a padlock and the padlock key was in my pocket. But the gate opened, and the water came down the basin in a wall, a brown wall with a white edge, and it hit the drowned street where we had been standing a minute before and filled it to the rooftops.

We reached the crest and I hauled her over the top rail and we fell together onto the grass in the rain, and she lay there on her back looking at the sky with her hair spread out and her green eyes wide, and I lay beside her with my heart hammering against my ribs and my wolf howling in a way I had not let him howl since my father died.

"Your eyes are yellow again," she said, to the sky.

I turned my head. The gatehouse door was open. The padlock was on the hasp, unlocked, hanging by its shackle, and the brass key was still in my pocket. Inside the gatehouse, where nobody was standing, the small bell rocked on its hook.

"I know what I saw," she said. She sat up slowly and pushed her copper hair off her face, and her hands were shaking now, the way they had not shaken in the mud. "I am a scientist. I do not get to unsee things. The door, the compass, the eyes, that bell. I would like to hear your explanation."

"The gate was old," I said. "The bell is old. The pressure found a way through."

"That is not an explanation. That is a sentence with the word pressure in it." She got to her feet and looked down at me, and her jaw was set. "I am going to write my report. I am going to write that the dam is unsound and that the foreman is lying to me about something, and then I am going to come back down here with an engineer from Cardiff and a court order if I have to, and I am going to find out what is in that valley."

She turned and walked toward the site office, and I got up off the grass and stood by the rail with the rain on my face. The basin below was full again, the church gone under, the street gone, the pack house gone, and the water was still rising, brown and patient, and somewhere under it a door was open.

Then the office door banged open and Elin came back out with a paper in her hand and her face white.

"The drawdown schedule," she said. "It is on the wall in your office. The water is not supposed to come back until Thursday. It is Tuesday." She held the paper up against the wind, and the rain spotted it. "Why is the reservoir filling on the wrong day, Mr. Rhys?"

I looked at the sheet, at the dates typed in the county's neat black font, and then at the water, and I felt the hook behind my ribs pull taut toward her again, toward her warm scent and her shaking hands.

"Because somebody opened the gate," I said, "and I do not think it was me."