Pandemonium

was white and translucent as rice paper, tinged with blue: blue eyelids, blue lips. He wasn’t breathing. O’Connell bent over him, delicately pulled the helmet from his head. She pushed up the soaked sweatshirt and T-shirt to his armpits—his arms were still bound behind him—and laid her cheek on his chest. She stayed in that position for a very long time. “I can’t hear anything,” she said, almost to herself. She tilted his head and ran a finger deep inside his mouth, spooned out a wad of oily black that might have been mud, mucous, blood, or a mix of all those things. She adjusted his head, breathed into him, one hand pinching his nose. Moments later she switched and compressed his chest, three times quickly, then moved back to his face.

“He’s too cold,” she said without pausing. “We’ve got to strip him.”

She gestured at Bertram. “You. Give me that sweater.”

Bertram obeyed. O’Connell paused in her CPR to unbelt the drowned man and yank down his pants. “We need blankets, lots of them. Find Louise. Go!”

Bertram turned to go just as one of the Human League guards—

the one who had been thrown back into the wall by Lew’s punch—

came through the bushes at the shoreline. His beefy face was sweaty and flushed. He stared at the big man at the edge of the water, then down at O’Connell busy on the ground over the naked man. “They’re all dead,” he said to Bertram. “Harp, Torrence, Parrish. We’ve got to find the commander. We’ve got to get—”

Bertram nodded toward the pier, at the mass of cloth and flesh and wire. The Leaguer took a step forward before registering what he was seeing. He made a whining, despairing sound, then turned to Bertram in confusion.

“Go!” O’Connell ordered.

Bertram hustled toward the woods. The Leaguer hesitated, then bolted after him.

O’Connell resumed CPR, alternating breaths with compressions. In a few minutes she was panting with the effort. She sat up. “This isn’t working,” she said, trying to catch her breath. She looked at Lew’s body. It listed to the right because of the damaged leg but remained standing. It was shivering, but otherwise unmoving. Awaiting commands.

“Del, you’ve got to go back in.”

Lew’s body didn’t respond.

“You’ve done this before. The pool, Del. You saved yourself before. You have to go back in.”

How?

“I don’t know how,” Lew’s voice said.

“Dammit, you got out, you can get back in.” She got to her feet.

“You can’t stay—” She made a slashing gesture, aimed at Lew’s chest.

“In there. In someone else. Get back in your body, Del.”

My body.

A rumble of big engines. The rumble grew louder, then was joined by a rising whine. The helicopter lifted over the treetops in a ring of lights. It turned on its axis, tilted toward the lake, and zoomed away. In Lew’s vision, where the vehicle had disappeared was an absence, a dot of deeper black. The mouth of the well opened, edges fitfully expanding, eating the sky. The twisting shaft like a gullet, dropping, or rising, until it exploded into an infinity of tributaries that divided and divided again: black fireworks.

The well tugged at me, but less forcefully than it had under the water. I could resist it, or I could fall into it. All that was required was that I be willing to die, again.

Somehow O’Connell got us to the hospital in Louise’s ’92 Taurus station wagon, the only car big enough for all of us. Bertram rode with O’Connell up front. I lay diagonally in the back, covered with blankets. Lew rode in the middle seat, leaning against the window, Louise next to him holding towels to his nose. The muscles of Lew’s triceps were torn, and he couldn’t lift his arms. I was conscious, my eyes open. I could hear everything that was said, but couldn’t make myself move or talk. Just as well.