The car went nose-down with a groan of metal that Kim felt in her teeth, and the dome light swung on its little plastic stalk, throwing their shadows across the windshield and back again. Water climbed her thighs in a slow, deliberate crawl. It was colder than the air, colder than anything she'd felt in her life, and it had a smell—mineral, iron, the wet-stone smell of the reservoir bed coming up to meet them. Somewhere behind the rear window the gravel slope was still sliding, a soft avalanche of pebbles chasing them down. Then that stopped too.

The rope around her neck went taut.

It had been slack since Silas tied it—a loop from the headrest, down the back of the seat, cinched somewhere behind her shoulder blades. Now the car tipped forward and the rope found its length, and her chin came up, her throat stretched, the back of her skull pressed hard against the leather headrest. She couldn't turn her head. She could only look at the windshield, at the brown-green dark pressing against the glass, at the silt blooming up in slow clouds where the nose had buried itself.

"Kim—" Elena's voice came out wrong. High. A child's voice. "Kim, it's—the water, it's—"

"I know."

Her hands were still taped to the wheel. The tape had gone soft and gummy in the water, but the wrap was thick—Silas had gone around the spokes and back, around and back, until her palms were mummied to the vinyl. She pulled anyway. The wheel turned maybe an inch and the car answered with a long metallic creak, the whole frame shifting in the silt, and the water came up another half-inch over her belly, and she stopped pulling.

Elena's bound hands were scrabbling at her seat belt. Zip ties, wrists crossed behind her back, and she'd twisted herself half around in the seat, her shoulder jammed against the door, her chin down, fishing blind for the buckle with fingers she couldn't see. Nude tights, dark now to the color of wet sand, clinging to the backs of her plump thighs. Her knees knocked together under the glovebox. "I can't—I can't reach it—Kim, I can't reach the—"

"Stop. Stop moving."

"I have to get—"

"Elena. Stop."

She stopped. Her breath came in fast wet pulls through her nose, and the water was at her collarbone now, lapping at the collar of nothing, at the bare skin of her throat, and her hair floated out around her face in black ribbons. She looked at Kim. Her eyes were huge and wet and she was doing the math, Kim could see her doing it—the water rising, the seat belt she couldn't reach, the doors that wouldn't open against the pressure outside. Doing the math and getting the same answer Kim had gotten.

The dome light flickered.

Once. Twice. It had been on since the car went in—some sealed little circuit, some battery that didn't care about water—and now it stuttered, and in the stutter the car went bright, dark, bright, and Kim saw the whole interior in strobe: the dead dashboard camera with its lens full of water, the glovebox, the gearshift in neutral, Elena's zip-tied hands frozen mid-scrabble, the water itself, brown and clear at once, full of floating silt and a single hair of Elena's drifting past Kim's knee. Then the light held again, steady, and the car was just a car again, sinking.

"It's going to go out," Elena whispered.

"Yeah."

"And then we'll be—"

"Yeah."

The water reached Kim's ribs. It was a pressure now, not just a cold—a band around her chest, squeezing, and every breath she took she had to pull against it. The tights were soaked through and heavy against her legs, the shredded nylon floating up off her thighs in pale strips, and the strap marks Silas had left across her ribs and hips had gone bloodless and white under the water. She pressed her foot down on the brake pedal out of nothing but habit and felt it sink all the way to the floor with no resistance at all, dead, a pedal connected to nothing, and she left her foot there anyway because there was nowhere else to put it.

Her toes curled inside the wet nylon. The cheap drugstore tights had gone loose at the arch—they'd always been loose at the arch, she remembered buying them at a Duane Reade on her way to the courthouse, two pairs for seven dollars, because she'd snagged the first pair on the corner of her desk drawer—and now the fabric peeled away from the sole of her foot and floated, and her bare toes pressed against the dead rubber of the pedal, and she could feel the grit of the floormat through the nylon, the little ridges of the pedal's rubber tread, the cold coming up through the firewall.

"I never learned," Elena said.

"What?"

"To swim. I never—my mother was scared of the water, she wouldn't let us near it, and then I was grown and it was—" She laughed, a horrible wet little laugh, and the water came into her mouth and she spat it out. "It was embarrassing. To be thirty and take lessons. So I never did."

The water was at Kim's armpits. At Elena's chin. Elena had her head tipped back now, her face turned up toward the dome light, her mouth just above the surface, and she was breathing in short sharp sips, and her bound hands had stopped scrabbling at the belt and were just floating behind her, useless, palms up.

"Marco hates the water too," Elena said. "He screams in the bath. Sofia's the fish. She's four and she—she puts her whole face in, she thinks it's funny, she—"

The dome light flickered again. Longer this time. Dark for a full second, and in the dark Kim heard Elena's breathing go ragged, heard the water sloshing against the roof, heard her own heart going hard and stupid in her throat. Then the light came back and Elena's face was right there, inches away, mouth open, eyes streaming, and Kim saw that she was crying without any sound at all, tears running down into the water and vanishing.

"Hey," Kim said.

Elena looked at her.

"Marco and Sofia. Seven and four."

"Seven and four."

"I promised."

"You promised."

The water came over Kim's shoulders. It was at her collarbone, at the base of her throat, and the rope around her neck was wet and heavy and it pulled her chin up so that she was looking at the roof of the car, at the dome light, at the little plastic housing and the bulb inside it burning steady and small and yellow. The water reached her chin and stopped—the car had found its level, or something below had caught, and for a moment nothing moved at all. The car hung there, nose-down, tail-up, in the brown dark, and the two of them breathed the last of the air pocket through their noses, mouths closed, eyes open, and the dome light burned on.

Elena's bound hands floated up and found Kim's arm. Just the fingertips, the zip-tied wrists twisted so the fingers could reach, and they pressed against Kim's forearm through the wet nylon of nothing, through the water, and Kim couldn't move her own hands to take them—taped to the wheel, taped flat—so she just held her arm still and let Elena hold on.

"It's cold," Elena said, mouth barely above the surface, and the words came out wobbling and small.

"I know."

"I'm sorry. About the—about your name. I'm so sorry, Kim, I held out as long as I—"

"I know. I forgave you. I meant it."

"I know you did."

The dome light flickered.

Kim watched it. There was nothing else to watch—the windshield was a brown wall, the windows were brown, the whole world was the color of wet stone and the only thing in it that wasn't was that small yellow light above her head, and she watched it the way you watch a candle when the power's out, the way you watch the last ember in a fire, waiting for it to go. Her toes curled against the dead pedal one more time. The nylon peeled off her arch and floated up in a little pale flag, and she felt the cold water find the bare sole of her foot, the arch, the heel, every inch the tights had been covering.

"Kim," Elena said.

"Yeah."

"If you—if you get out. If there's any way."

"I'll find them."

"Tell them—" Elena's voice broke, and the water came into her mouth, and she coughed it out against the roof, a wet spasm that shook her whole body and sent a wave slapping against the windows. "Tell them I wasn't—tell them I was just—"

"I'll tell them you were brave."

"I wasn't."

"You held out twenty minutes."

"That's not—"

"That's twenty minutes longer than most people."

Elena was quiet. Her fingers pressed harder against Kim's arm, and Kim felt them through the water, five small cold points, and she felt the moment Elena's grip changed—loosened, then tightened again, then loosened for good, not because she'd let go but because her hand had gone slack, the fingers floating open in the water, and Kim couldn't tell if she was still conscious or just holding still, and she couldn't turn her head to look because the rope held her chin up, held her face to the roof, held her looking at the light.

The water was at her lips now. It lapped at the corner of her mouth, at the seam, and she pressed her lips together and breathed through her nose, slow, steady, the way you breathe in a yoga class, the way you breathe when the doctor tells you to breathe, and the air that came in smelled like wet stone and tasted like iron and was the last air she was ever going to breathe, probably, and she took it anyway, one more time, because that was what you did.

The dome light flickered.

Dark. Light. Dark. Light.

And in the last flicker, in the half-second when the car went bright, Kim saw it all one more time—Elena's face turned up, mouth open, eyes closed now, the wet black hair floating, the zip-tied hands drifting in the water like something already drowned. The dashboard. The dead camera. The gearshift. Her own hands taped to the wheel, white knuckled, the tape gone pale and swollen. Her toes, bare through the torn nylon, pressed one last time against the dead pedal.

Then the light died.

The dark was total. Not the gray of the water, not the brown of the silt—black, absolute, the dark of a closed eye, the dark of the inside of a coffin, and Kim floated in it with her chin up and her lips sealed and her heart going hard and stupid and the rope holding her head back against the headrest and the water at her mouth and her nose and the only sound in the world her own breathing and Elena's, two sets of breath in the black, in and out, in and out, the last pocket of air going bad around them, and somewhere above them, somewhere up in the dark, something began to hum.

Faint. Mechanical. A motor, maybe. A winch. A pump. Something with a rhythm to it, turning over and over, and it was coming from above, from the surface, from the world where the air was, and Kim's eyes were wide open in the dark and she couldn't see anything at all but she could hear it, that hum, that small insistent mechanical hum, and she didn't know if it was rescue or the next thing Silas had planned, and she didn't have the air to ask.