Midnight

drain, out at the foot of the bluff, before their bloated, purple remains were found.

5
    In the tomb-perfect darkness, Tessa heard the girl fall, and she immediately halted, planting her legs as wide and firm as she could on that sloped and curved floor, keeping both hands on the security line. Within a second that rope pulled taut as Chrissie was swept away by the water.
    Sam grunted, and Tessa realized that the girl had been carried into him. Slack developed on the line for an instant, but then it went taut again, pulling her forward, which she took to mean that Sam was staggering ahead, trying to stay on his feet, with the girl pressing against his lower legs and threatening to knock them out from under him. If Sam had been brought down, too, and seized by tumultuous currents, the line would not have been merely taut; the drag would have been great enough to wrench Tessa off her feet.
    She heard a lot of splashing ahead. A soft curse from Sam.
    The water was creeping higher. At first she thought she was imagining it, but then she realized the torrent had risen to above her knees.
    The damned darkness was the worst of it, not being able to see anything, virtually blind, unable to be sure what was happening.
    Abruptly she was jerked forward again. Two, three—oh, God—half a dozen steps.
    Sam, don't fall!
    Stumbling, almost losing her balance, realizing that they were on the edge of disaster, Tessa leaned backward on the line, using its tautness to steady herself instead of rushing forward with the hope of developing slack again. She hoped to God she didn't resist too much and get yanked off her feet.
    She swayed. The line pulled hard at her waist. Without slack to loop through her hands, she was unable to take most of the strain with her arms.
    The pressure of water against the back of her legs was growing.
    Her feet skidded.
    Like videotape fast-forwarded through an editing machine, strange thoughts flew through her mind, scores of them in a few seconds, all unbidden, and some of them surprised her. She thought about living, surviving, about not wanting to die, and that wasn't so surprising, but then she thought about Chrissie, about not wanting to fail the girl, and in her mind she saw a detailed image of her and Chrissie together, in a cozy house somewhere, living as mother and daughter, and she was surprised at how much she wanted that, which seemed wrong because Chrissie's parents were not dead, as far as anyone knew, and might not even be hopelessly changed, because the conversion—whatever it was—just might be reversible. Chrissie's family might be put back together again. Tessa couldn't see a picture of that in her mind. It didn't seem as much a possibility as she and Chrissie together. But it might happen. Then she thought of Sam, of never having a chance to make love to him, and that startled her, because although he was sort of attractive, she truly hadn't realized she was drawn to him in any romantic way. Of course his grit in the face of spiritual despair was appealing, and his perfectly serious four-reasons-for-living shtick made him an intriguing challenge. Could she give him a fifth? Or supplant Goldie Hawn as the fourth? But until she found herself tottering on the brink of a watery death, she didn't realize how very much he had attracted her in such a short time.
    Her feet skidded again. Beneath the surging water, the floor was much more slippery than it had been in the stone channel, as if moss grew on the concrete. Tessa tried to dig in her heels.
    Sam cursed under his breath. Chrissie made a coughing-choking sound.
    The depth of water in the center of the tunnel had risen to about eighteen or twenty inches.
    A moment later the line jerked hard, then went completely slack.
    The rope had snapped. Sam and Chrissie had been swept down into the tunnel.
    The gurgle-slosh-slap of gushing water echoed off the walls, and echoes of the echoes overlaid previous echoes, and Tessa's heart was pounding so loud she could hear it, but still she should have heard their cries, too, as they were carried away. Yet for one awful moment they were silent.
    Then Chrissie coughed again. Only a few feet away.
    A flashlight snapped on. Sam was hooding most of the lens with his hand.
    Chrissie was sideways in the passage, pressed up out of the worst of the flow, her back and the palms of both hands braced against the side of the tunnel.
    Sam stood with his feet planted wide part. Water churned and foamed around his