Jenner ran the length of the dock and dove, swimming out under inky water warm and thick as blood, away from the highway, away from the sea beyond it. He was swimming upstream, to the safety of the mangrove maze. He came up for air, a quick gasp before ducking underneath again. He’d have barely a minute before they reached the dock; the less wake he left, the safer he and Deb would be.

He came up again, now swimming to the shallows of the nearer tributary, the channel he’d told Deb to take. The broad river was fed by many smaller streams through the mangrove forest: in the shadows and smoke haze, the men following would have a tough time tracking them, particularly if their pursuers were in the big airboat.

He wondered how far upstream Deb had gone—she could go anywhere in the swamp with the kayak.

Light jerked out over the water from the dock. Jenner sank back under and pushed into the shallows, hiding among the cascading roots.

The beam skidded across the surface; they seemed to be sizing up the situation at the dock more than looking for him. He recognized Brodie and another man, heard their voices across the water.

“He got the Go-Devil!”

“It’s slow, we’ll catch up. Start up the airboat, and let’s go.”

The engine coughed twice, then rose to a deep, humming roar. The beam of light skittered over the surface toward Jenner, then bounced away, and then the airboat was sliding across the surface; it picked up speed, heading downriver toward the highway bridge and the sea.

Jenner knew they’d soon realize he didn’t have the swamp boat. He moved deeper into the mangroves. The tributary was shallow enough for him to stand, the water reaching his mid-chest. The smell was stale and vegetal, the dark, muddy reek of rotting plants and brackish water, the air humid and sweat-salty under the thick canopy. The banks were not earth, but the hard, tangled roots of the trees, big knots of spindly rootlets leaping off the mangrove trunks to plunge into the water. Under the surface, the roots knit together into a wall as dense as the branches above; the going was slow and hard.

Jenner kept moving. Swimming was no easier—the dark waters looked still but were moving quickly, swollen with the rains; he found himself standing and walking, pushing forward into the stream, holding the mangrove roots like handles. He called out for Deb; by now, Brodie was far enough for it to be safe. In any case, even if they were just a hundred feet away, the cacophonous airboat engine would drown out all sound.

But there was no answer. He was moving deeper and deeper into the mangroves, the branches and leaves and mud and water slowly swallowing him. When he called her, the sound died out within a few feet, stifled by the thick baffle of the low canopy.

He’d kept the river to his right, but had now lost sight of it as he followed the channel. Particularly in her condition, how far could Deb have gone?

Jenner stopped, let his feet down, cupped his hands around his mouth to amplify the sound, and yelled her name again. He didn’t know how far he’d come, how fast he’d been swimming and walking. He couldn’t see the orange light of the burning farm, he couldn’t even smell the fire in the trapped air of the swamp.

He should just stop. Stop and wait in the shadows, wait it out. Eventually the cops would come.

He just needed to find Deb first. The men in the airboat wouldn’t keep looking downstream much longer.