The night was cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. The air was wet and still and carried the smell of the drowned valley — wood rot and wet stone and something else, something organic and deep, the smell of soil that had been turned over and left exposed to the sky. The survivors huddled on the ridge in groups, some of them with blankets, some with nothing but the clothes they had been wearing when the water came, some of them holding children who had stopped crying because there was nothing left to cry about. The moon came up and the water reflected it, pale and steady, and the valley below was a lake, and the lake was quiet, and the quiet was worse than the noise had been, because the noise had been happening, and the quiet was waiting.
Luna walked along the ridge in the dark, her boots sinking in the mud, her hands in her pockets, her breath coming in white puffs that rose and vanished. She was looking for something, or someone, and she did not know what or who, and she walked until she reached the place where the road had been, where the landslide had buried the cut, and she stood at the edge of the slide and looked down into the mud and the rock and the shattered trees, and she thought about her father's truck, and the crack in the road, and the way he had driven home, and she thought about whether he had made it, and she knew he had not, not because she had proof, but because she knew the road, and she knew where the slide had come from, and she knew that the truck would have been in the cut when the mountain came down, and she stood at the edge of the slide and she did not cry, because crying would not bring him back, because the slide was a mile wide and fifty feet deep and the truck was under it, and the truck was gone.
Arrax was with the living, as he always was. He moved among the groups on the ridge, checking for injuries, checking for warmth, checking for the particular stillness that meant someone had given up and was not going to fight anymore. He found a man with a broken leg sitting against a tree, his face gray, his eyes open but not seeing, and Arrax knelt beside him and took his hand and said, "You're going to be fine," and the man said, "No, I'm not," and Arrax said, "Yes, you are," and he meant it, because he had said it before, because it was the thing he said, because it was the only thing he could say. He could not save everyone. He knew this. He had known it the day he took the patrol, the day he started walking the boundary with the Whiteclaw sisters, the day he understood that his job was not to prevent catastrophe but to mitigate it, and the mitigation had limits, and the limits were everywhere now.
Heather was making impossible choices. She had a list in her head, written in pencil on a piece of notebook paper that was now wet and smudged and almost illegible, and she was crossing names off the list, one by one, as she confirmed that they were alive, and she was adding names to a different list, a shorter list, of the ones who were not. The choices were not about who to save — everyone who could be saved had been saved, or was being saved, or had died trying — but about who to carry, who to prioritize, who to leave on the slope with a blanket and a bottle of water and the promise that help would come, because help would come, because the roads would be cleared, because the helicopters would come, because people from Missoula and Bozeman and everywhere else would arrive with trucks and cranes and the machinery of rescue, and they would find the bodies, and they would count the dead, and they would rebuild the road, and they would rebuild the bridge, and they would put up new houses where the old ones had been, and it would be fine, and Heather knew it would not be fine, not for a long time, not for some of them, not for the ones who were already gone.
Valerie was counting. She sat on a rock at the edge of the group, her rifle across her knees, her notebook open on her lap, her pencil moving, and she was counting the missing, the ones who had not made it to the ridge, the ones whose houses were underwater, the ones whose names were on the list in Heather's head and the other list in Heather's heart, and she was writing them down, one by one, and she was not crying, because she had made a promise to herself that she would not cry until she had counted them all, because crying would make her pencil slip, and she did not want to miss anyone. She counted the families on Main Street, the ones in the houses near the creek, the ones at the community hall, the ones at the school, and she counted the people she knew by name and the people she knew by face and the people she had seen only from a distance, and she wrote them all down, and the list grew, and the pencil broke, and she sharpened it with her knife, and she kept going.
Coda was keeping watch. Coda sat on a rock at the highest point of the ridge, where the slope leveled into a meadow, and Coda watched the water, and the water was still moving, slow and heavy, pressing against the base of the ridge, seeping into the mud, and Coda could hear it breathing, the way Coda had heard it breathing before, but slower now, deeper, the breath of something that had been running and had stopped, that was gathering itself, that was preparing for what came next. Coda was wet, because Coda had been in the water, because Coda had pulled children from porches and led people through back trails and waded through the millrace to reach the house at the end of Third Street, and Coda was shivering, because the night was cold, because the clothes were wet, because the body was tired, and Coda did not move, because Coda was the watcher, because someone had to watch, because the watcher was the one who saw what others missed, and Coda was not going to miss anything tonight.
Peony shared what little she had. She had a loaf of bread in her pocket, wrapped in cloth, that she had taken from her kitchen before she left, and she had a jar of jam that her mother had given her for Christmas, and she had a bottle of water that she had filled from the spring before the spring went bad, and she divided these things among the children who were cold and hungry, and she gave the bread to the old man whose wife had died in the millrace, and she sat with him while he ate, and she did not speak, because there were no words, because the bread was warm in his hands and that was enough. She thought about her garden, which was gone, the tomatoes and the beans and the roses all under water, and she thought about the soil, which had warned her, which had sweated on her hands, which had tried to tell her, and she had not listened, not really, not in the way that mattered, and she promised herself that if she lived through this, she would listen better, she would pay attention, she would not ignore the small signs again.
Senako was silent. She sat on a rock at the edge of the group, away from the others, her hands on her knees, her head down, her eyes on the water, and she did not speak, because there was nothing to say, because the hall was gone, because the people who had been in the hall were gone, because the forge was gone, because the anvil was under water, because the ironwork she had made for the bridge was twisted and broken and floating in the creek, because the world she had known was gone, and the silence was not empty. It was full. It was full of the sound of the water, and the sound of the wind, and the sound of the people who were alive and the people who were not, and Senako carried all of it in her chest, and she did not speak, because speech would not hold it, and she was a girl who worked with her hands, and her hands were empty now, and she did not know what to do with them.
By midnight, the water had stopped rising. It had reached its peak and it had held, and it was not receding, not yet, not by any amount that mattered, and the valley was a lake, and the lake was still, and the moon was high, and the survivors were cold and hungry and wet and grieving, and they were alive, and they were together, and they were on the ridge, and the ridge was high enough, for now. Someone started a fire with what wood they could find, and the fire burned, and the smoke rose, and the smoke was the only thing in the valley that was moving upward, and it was seen, eventually, by a helicopter from Missoula, and the helicopter circled, and the pilot radioed the coordinates, and help was coming, and help would arrive at dawn, and dawn would bring food and water and blankets and the machinery of rescue, and it would bring the count, and it would bring the names, and it would bring the beginning of the end of the worst day any of them had ever lived.
But dawn was still hours away. The night was long, and the dark was absolute, and the water was black, and the only sound was the wind and the crackle of the fire and the quiet breathing of people who had stopped believing that the morning would come, and who were waiting, in the cold, for proof that it would.