The helicopters came at dawn. They came from Missoula and Bozeman and Idaho, three machines with rotors that beat the air into submission, their undersides red and white, their searchlights sweeping the valley like fingers searching for something in the dark. They found the ridge first, where the survivors had huddled through the night, and they dropped supplies — food, water, blankets, radios — and they took away the injured, strapping them to gurneys, lifting them into the cabins, flying them toward hospitals that were not ready for what they would receive. The survivors watched them go, and they were grateful, and they were afraid, and they were already grieving, and the morning light was gray and thin and did nothing to warm them.
Luna climbed down to the village after the helicopters left. She went alone, because no one wanted to go, because everyone knew what they would find, because the village was a place they had loved and it was now a place that did not exist. She walked through mud that came to her knees, past the place where the general store had been, past the post office, which was a hole in the ground, past the barber shop, where the chair was floating in the doorway, and she reached the community hall, or the place where the community hall had been, and she found nothing but a foundation of broken stone and the splintered remains of the roof, and she knelt in the mud and put her hand on a piece of timber that was warm from the morning sun, and she said the names of the people who had been inside, the ones she knew, the ones she did not know, and she said them quietly, because the valley was listening, and the valley did not deserve their names, not yet, not until the water had receded enough to give them back.
Arrax was on the north slope, where the landslide had started. He climbed it with a team of volunteers, men and women from the ridge who had come down to help, and they walked through the mud and the shattered timber, and they found the source of the slide, a scar on the mountain face that was fifty feet high and two hundred yards wide, and they stood at the edge of it and looked down the slope, and they saw the boulders that had rolled ahead of the slide, and the trees that had been sheared at the base, and the mud that was still moving, slowly, down the mountain, and Arrax put his hand on the face of the rock and felt the warmth, the same warmth he had felt in the bridge abutment, the same warmth that had been in the earth for days, and he knew that the mountain was not done, that the slope would move again, that the scar would widen, and he turned to the volunteers and said, "We need to mark the slide line. We need to know where the mountain is still moving."
Heather was mapping the flood zone. She had a GPS unit and a notebook and a camera, and she walked the perimeter of the water, marking the high-water line on trees and buildings and anything that stood above the flood, and she took photographs of the damage, of the collapsed walls and the twisted bridges and the houses that were listing into the mud, and she uploaded the data to the ranger station laptop, which was still working, somehow, on a generator that had been left running when the water came, and she sent the coordinates to the county, to the state, to anyone who would listen, and she waited for a response that would tell her what to do next, and the response was slow, because the roads were gone, because the communication towers were down, because the world outside the valley was still waking up to what had happened inside it.
Valerie found a body in a tree. It was a man from the village, a farmer, one whose name she had written on her list of missing, and he was caught in the branches of an oak that had been submerged and was now above the water, his legs tangled in the limbs, his face turned toward the sky, his eyes open, and he looked surprised, as though he had not expected this, as though he had expected the water to pass him by. Valerie stood under the tree for a long time, her hands at her sides, her rifle forgotten, and she thought about the deer upstream with the torn throat, and she thought about the markers leaning, and she thought about the list in her notebook, and she thought about the man's face, and she turned and walked away, and she did not mark the tree, because she knew she would remember it, because she would remember all of them, because the list was growing, and the pencil kept breaking.
Peony found her garden in the afternoon, when the water had receded just enough to expose the soil. The garden was a ruin. The tomato plants were flattened, the bean poles were bent, the compost was washed away, the soil was bare and gray and lifeless, and the rosebushes were stripped of their leaves, their canes broken, their roots exposed to the air. She knelt in the mud at the edge of the bed and put her hand on the soil, and it was cold and dead, and she felt the absence of everything that had been there, the worms and the beetles and the bacteria that made the soil alive, and she knew that it would take years to bring it back, and she did not know if she would stay, because staying meant rebuilding, and rebuilding meant remembering, and remembering meant carrying the day in her hands every time she touched the earth. She stood and looked at the garden, and she cried, because she had promised herself she would not cry, because the garden was the first thing she had loved, and it was gone, and the tears were hot on her face, and she did not wipe them away, because they were honest, and honesty was the only thing that mattered now.
Senako found the forge in the evening, when the water had receded enough to reach the back of her property. The forge was standing, but the roof was gone, and the anvil was submerged in mud, and the bellows were torn, and the iron bars that had lined the walls were rusted and bent, and the fire pit was filled with silt and debris. She stood in the doorway and looked at it, and she felt nothing, because feeling was too expensive, because feeling meant admitting that the forge was her life, and her life was gone, and the silence was not empty, it was full, and she turned and walked back to the ridge, and she did not look back.
The bodies were everywhere. In trees, pinned under debris, tangled in fences, half-buried in mud, floating in the water that was slow to drain, their faces unrecognizable, their clothes torn, their hands reaching for something that was not there. The volunteers found them as they walked, and they marked them, and they waited for the coroner, and the coroner came in a helicopter, and he looked at them, and he wrote the time of death as the day before, or the day before that, and he did not look them in the eye, because he had seen too many, because the count was already in the dozens, and it would grow, and it would grow again when the water receded fully, and the valley would become a place of death, a place that people would speak of in whispers, a place that would be on the news, and the news would show the aerial footage, and the footage would show the flooded village, and the commentary would talk about the dam failure, and the dam failure would be explained, and the explanation would be about compaction and spillway design and rainfall, and none of it would mention the vibration, or the thread, or the river breathing, or the earth that had moved under its own will, because those things were not explainable, and the explanations were for people who were not there, for people who were watching from a distance, for people who would forget, and the forgetting would begin as soon as the news cameras left.