Chapter 1: Shelter from the Drowned Tide
The tide came in at dusk, as it always did, and the courtyard below the loft filled with a sound like slow applause. Water moving through iron gates. Water pressing at old stone. Béatrice stood at the arrow-slit window with a stub of pencil, marking the height on the masonry, and the new mark was higher than yesterday's by the width of two fingers.
Kirk didn't ask. He'd stopped asking on the sixth day, when the marks stopped being guesses. He crossed the small room instead, ducking under the low beam, and began checking the barricade. Two planks wedged against the iron-bound door, a chair leg cut to length, the tension of it all tested with his shoulder. The door groaned. He groaned back at it, some low note in his chest, and the groaning stopped.
"You'll want to eat before it gets loud," he said.
She marked one more line, then pocketed the pencil. "I'll want to not hear it more."
"You can't have that."
"I know."
They ate by candle stub: tinned peaches split two ways, and hardtack softened in the syrup, which Kirk claimed was a trick from a deckhand out of Natchez and which Béatrice claimed was a crime against peaches. She ate all of hers anyway. Outside, the water reached the level of the courtyard's marble tablets, and the applause grew thicker, and underneath it, faint as a radio between stations, came the whispering.
It was melodic. That was the worst part. Somebody down there had a voice like a choir of wet cloth, and it rose and fell in phrases, patient, almost sweet. Kirk set his tin down and his jaw worked once.
"It's saying something," he said. "Every night it's saying something."
"Don't translate it."
"I don't know how to translate it. That's not the problem." He wiped his hands on the chore coat, slow, like he was wiping off something on the inside of his skin. "The problem is I know my name when I hear it."
She reached across and took the tin out of his hands before he could pick at it further. She set it by the door with the rest of their kit, where everything had a place, because places were the only thing she could still control. Then she crossed to the hammock strung between two iron anchors sunk into the masonry, and she sat, and she looked at him until he came.
He pulled the hammock taut when he swung in beside her, testing the knots out of habit, and the ropes groaned under their combined weight, a long creak that joined the chorus outside. The tide peaked. Against the stone below, the scratching began. Soft fingers, waterlogged, patient, dragging down the vault wall one at a time, like something counting the bricks.
Béatrice lay with her head against Kirk's chest. His heart was a chaotic thing under the flannel, tripping and hammering, nothing like the slow liquid voice from the courtyard. She timed her breathing to it anyway. It was either that or listen to the whispering, and a human heartbeat, even a frightened one, was better company than the drowned.
"Tell me the river," she said. It was their ritual. She asked, he talked, the scratching became background.
"River's down tonight." His voice came through his chest, low and felt more than heard. "Flood's got its own rules. River'd be honest about this. River'd say, here's the current, here's the snag, pick your line. This city..." A finger dragged down the wall below them, and he paused. "This city's lying."
"Keep going."
"You ever see the Mississippi take a barge? It doesn't scratch at it first." She felt his hand move, settle against her shoulder blade. "It just takes it. That's a thing I can respect."
She tipped her head back and looked at him. Candlelight did him no favors; the lines around his slate eyes looked carved rather than worn. He was staring at the ceiling, jaw set, listening to the water say his name in its choir-cloth voice. She put two fingers under his chin and turned his face toward her.
"Kirk."
"I'm here."
"You're here," she agreed, and kissed him.
It started quiet, the way their kisses had started for the first week, careful, almost apologetic. Then the whispering below found a phrase it liked and repeated it, and repeated it, and Kirk's hand came up into her hair, pulled the utilitarian knot loose without asking, and the kiss turned frantic. She pressed closer. The hammock swung, ropes groaning in time with the scratching. She kissed him like she could pack the sound out of the room, like if the two of them made enough noise being alive, the wet voice below would lose the argument. His heart under her palm was still chaotic, but it was chaos aimed somewhere, and she'd take that over melody.
The candles guttered. She had her hand fisted in his collar, his forehead against hers, both of them breathing hard, when he went still.
She felt it before she understood it. His whole body changed under hers, from held to braced, the way a man goes when he hears something wrong in an engine.
"Listen," he said.
She listened. The scratching had stopped. That alone raised the hair on her arms; the fingers never stopped before the tide turned. In the silence the courtyard whispering had narrowed, funneled, moved. It was closer. It was not below anymore.
She lifted her head. The iron-bound door stood in the dark with its two planks and its cut chair leg, and set into it, low, was the great iron lock they'd traded half a pharmacy for on day nine. As she watched, the brass key on her cord swaying with nothing to match it, the lock's shackle began to turn.
Slow. Wet. From the outside.
"That lock doesn't turn from the outside," she said. Her voice came out level, which surprised her. "Tell me that lock doesn't turn from the outside."
Kirk was already sliding out of the hammock, bare feet finding the floor without a sound, one hand reaching for the pry bar by the door. The shackle came around with a grinding click, and something heavy settled against the iron-bound door with the weight of a person leaning, and the whispering began, very gently, to hum.