For three months Jasper Ridcombe rowed out at dawn to find the friend who drowned. He rowed the same stretch of water every morning, alone. His companion had gone down where the seabed dropped away into deep, dark water. But Jasper's little rowboat could not reach it. The oars caught in weed. The hull scraped sandbars. His search stayed stuck in the shallows, and each morning he turned back with nothing. This dawn he crouched in the tall saltgrass on the shore. Pale blades hid him from the fishermen who called him mad. He waited until they launched and were gone. Then he gathered stones and dropped them into a sack. He had a plan. If the boat rode lower, the wind might stop shoving it back to the flats. He stripped off his stiff canvas coat and looped his frayed rope belt through the sack of stones. The coat he left on the sand, folded, salt-white. He tied the rope to the bow cleat and let the weighted sack hang over the side. Then he rowed. The boat sat deeper now. It cut through the shallows without catching. Sweat ran down Jasper's sunburned neck. He pulled hard, past the last sandbar, out to where the water turned black and cold. His arms shook. For the first time the deep water opened beneath him. Then the weight worked against him. The heavy sack dragged the bow down. A swell rolled in and slopped over the rail. Water filled the boat fast. Jasper grabbed the rope to cut the sack loose, but his knife stayed in the coat on the shore. The boat tipped. Jasper went into the cold, mouth full of salt. He clawed at the rope belt around the sack and finally freed it. The stones sank. He hauled himself onto the swamped hull and clung there, gasping. His boat floated low and useless beneath him. A current took him. It pulled him not toward shore but along the edge of the deep, where his friend had gone down. He kicked and held the hull and let it carry him. The water there was clear. He looked down. Far below, on a pale shelf of sand, something dark rested. Not weed. Not stone. A shape with the outline of a man, caught where no small boat could ever reach. Jasper found what he had searched for. He could not touch it. He clung to a sinking boat with no coat, no belt, and no way down. But now he knew exactly where his friend lay. He kicked toward the shore, marking the spot against a bent tree on the cliff. His rowboat would never take him that deep. He needed another way down, and he needed it before the current shifted the sand and hid his friend again.

Jasper dried out on the shore, his coat back on his shoulders. He had found his friend on the seafloor but could not reach him. His lungs failed him. Each dive down the cold water pushed him back before he touched the sand. And with every wasted try, the current dragged more grit over the body below. He needed to breathe down there. He walked back to the boarding house to think. The old sailors' boarding house sat on the flats, its blue paint peeling, its porch strung with dead lanterns. Jasper climbed the sagging steps. Inside, the men who called him mad hunched over their cups. He did not want their talk. He wanted the storeroom in the back, where the last owner had stacked gear no one claimed. He dug through coiled nets and cracked buoys. In a corner he found it: a rounded pouch of stitched hide, brown and firm. A sealskin bladder. Sailors once filled these with air to float their lines. He pressed it and heard the leather creak. It held. An idea took him. He carried the bladder to the water at dawn. He filled it with his own breath, tied the neck, then loosened it just enough to draw a mouthful when he needed. He swam out to the bent tree on the cliff and lined up his mark. Then he went down. The cold closed over him. He kicked hard, past the depth that had always stopped him. When his chest burned, he set the leather neck to his lips and pulled. Stale air filled his mouth. It was foul and thin, but it was air. He kept sinking. The pale shelf rose out of the dark. The dark shape lay half-buried now, sand heaped along one side. Jasper stretched his hand toward it. His fingers brushed cloth, stiff and cold. He had touched his friend at last. He pulled at the shoulder. The body shifted, then held. The sand had packed heavy around the legs and would not let go. Jasper braced his feet and heaved. He gained nothing. His breath ran out. He sucked at the bladder and got only water. The air was spent. He let go and clawed upward. His lungs screamed. He broke the surface and coughed salt across the swell. The empty bladder floated at his side. Jasper hung in the water and stared down. He had reached the bottom. He had touched him. The breathing bag worked. But one lungful was not enough to free a body from packed sand. He needed longer down there, and he needed hands to dig, or a rope to pull. He swam the deflated bladder back to shore. He knew now that he could get down. Getting his friend up was another problem, and the sand was still rising.

Jasper hauled the empty bladder onto the beach and dropped to his knees. Below the swell, the current was already dragging fresh sand over his friend. He had touched the body. Now he could not even mark where it lay. The bent tree gave him a line, but a line was not a spot. If he lost the exact place, he would waste days finding it again, and the sand would win. He needed a marker. Something to drop on the seafloor beside the body, something heavy that the current could not shift. He looked around the beach and found nothing but stones and weed. Steps crossed the sand behind him. Coral Hanes, the lighthouse keeper from the point, stopped a few feet off. She held her logbook open in one hand. She had been nailing warning signs to the boarding house doors for days, and no one listened. Jasper had passed one that morning, its paint peeling, its faded letters warning of the harbor's strong currents. "Glass dropped again," she said. "Storm by tomorrow. You shouldn't be out there." "I have to be." He kept his eyes on the water. She followed his gaze. "You've got a line off the tree. Not a spot. The current shifts under here every tide." She said it plainly, like a fact from her book. Jasper turned. She understood the water better than the men who called him mad. "I need to fix a mark to the bottom. It has to hold against the drag." Coral looked at the tree, then at the swell, judging the pull. "You need weight and a float. Sink a stone, run a line up, tie something that rides the surface. Then you find your float, not your tree." He had rope. He pulled the coiled belt from his waist, its fibers frayed and stiff with salt. He knotted a heavy stone to one end. For the float he needed air that would not sink. He picked up the sealskin bladder and filled it with his breath again, tied the neck tight, and lashed it to the free end of the rope. "Measure it long," Coral said. "Deeper than you think." He swam out on the tree's line and went down. The cold closed over him. He kicked past the old depth and found the shelf. The dark shape lay there, more sand heaped along its side than before. Jasper set the stone in the sand a hand's width from the body and pressed it deep. The rope rose straight toward the light above. He surfaced beside the bobbing bladder. The current tugged it, but the stone held it fast over the spot. He had marked the place at last. Coral wrote in her logbook without looking up. "It'll hold through today. Not through the storm." Jasper stared at the float riding the swell. He had one day to get his friend up before the water took the mark, and everything under it, for good.