OWEN FELT A SHARP, slanting pain, stabbing him from all sides—no air.

He’d gone spilling and scraping down a rough metal pipe not much bigger than his body, shooting forward on gravity and a glare of ice. It was rough, tearing off scraps of his clothes and skin, and he’d felt little nodules of things clotted to the inside of the pipe as it passed, jagged bones, bits of moldy refuse that hadn’t flushed all the way through. Suddenly the pipe was gone. The knife he’d brought with him had disappeared. In suffocating blackness, he rotated slowly and realized that he had been dumped out in gray, airless space.

He was underwater.

The pond.

He turned his face up, already going numb, and water stung his eyes. Overhead, a semitranslucent slab of ice formed the ceiling of his world. In the dull gray light, he saw vague shadows trampling over him, the muted passage of feet, longer shapes, dogs trundling across the surface, voices fading.

A hand took hold of his ankle.

He looked down. Colette stared up at him, hair floating around her face. Owen bent his leg, pulled her upward. She shook her head, expelling bubbles in a rush through her mouth and nose.

There was no more time. Owen took hold of her arm, kicking toward the ice crust, hitting it with his shoulder. It was like ramming a concrete wall. He struck it again. Adrenaline poured through his system, none of it doing any good. Owen curled downward, bent his legs, and kicked at the surface but only succeeded in driving himself deeper into the water. There was nothing to brace against. Colette looked at him and shook her head again, mouth opening and closing, letting out a few more bubbles, weaker this time.

It wasn’t her fault.

Owen swam at the ice and rammed it headfirst with all his remaining strength. Something cracked—ice, bone, or both. Then a chunk of the bleak sky slipped free and fell on top of him. Thank God. Everything melted into shades of pale gray, and when his vision refocused, the water around his head was clouding red. Owen realized the only reason he could see it was because daylight was filtering down into the water, but that was all right because—

He groped blindly through the scarlet murk, found Colette’s hand. She raised one arm at him, and Owen told himself this might still work out.

All he had to do was lift her up through the hole in the ice.

It should have been easy.

But he suddenly felt very cold, inside and out. He’d been filling his lungs, but not with air. A thick, congested feeling came over him, heavy and indifferent. Up above, in the cloudy light, Colette’s legs scissored through the hole, struggling to pull free. As she disappeared to the surface, one foot caught and her shoe slipped off.

Under the ice, Owen watched it fall and realized that he had begun to sink.

Blackness enveloped him. As it did, the congested feeling in his chest went away, and there was no more pain.

It felt like nothing.

All the weight and pain and tiredness, all the fear that he’d worn around like armor throughout the bulk of his adult life was gone, utterly gone, replaced by a feeling of profound peace.

Twenty feet beneath the frozen surface of the pond, Owen Mast died smiling.