Ghost Bird, he recognized dimly, had already shot up and past him, toward a kind of glistening yellow egg of a reflected halo that might, or might not, be the sun. While he was still sucking water among the converging circles of the many swirling knives that stared at him with flat judgmental eyes. Confused by the swirl of pages that floated above or below, that stuck to his clothes, that came apart in miniature whirlpools to join the vortex. For a fading second, he was peering at a line of text and suffocating while blunt snouts bumped up against his chest.

Only when a true leviathan appeared did his oxygen-starved brain understand that they had emerged into a roiling school of some kind of barracuda-like fish now being disrupted by a larger predator. There came an awful free-falling emptiness … the quickly closing space where the enormous shark had sped through the vortex, annihilating fish in a crimson cloud. A megalodon of a kind. Lowry in yet another form … the air trickling out of his mouth like a series of tiny lies about the world that had decided to extinguish him.

“Lowry” left offal in its wake, so close to Control as he rose and it descended that the side of his face slid half raw against its gills. The frill and flutter sharper and harder than he could have imagined as it sculpted him, the expulsion of water a roaring, gushing piston in his ear, and the huge yet strangely delicate eye away to his left staring into him. Then his stomach was banging into its body, his bruised waist smacked by a swipe of the tail, and his head was ringing and he was drifting and he couldn’t keep his mouth from beginning to open, the dot of the sun smaller and smaller above him. “Pick up the gun, Control,” said his grandfather. “Pick it up from under the seat. Then jump.”

Did Lowry, or anyone, have a phrase that could save him?

Consolidation of authority.

There’s no reward in the risk.

Floating and floating.

Paralysis is not a cogent analysis.

Except it was. And from the wash and churn, the thrashing around him, a familiar hand grasped his drifting wrist and yanked him upward. So that he was not just a swirl of confused memory, a bruised body, a cipher, but apparently something worth saving, someone in the process of being saved.

His feet had kicked out against nothing, like a hanging victim, while the fish again converged, his body buffeted by a hundred smooth-rough snouts as he rose, as he blacked out amid the torrent of upward-plunging bodies, the rough rebuke of continuous flesh that formed one wide maw from which he might or might not escape.

Then they were on the shore and Ghost Bird was kissing him for some reason. Kissing him with great, gulping kisses that bruised his lips, and touching his chest and, when he opened his eyes and looked up into her face, making him turn onto his side. Water gushed, then dribbled, from him, and he had propped himself up with both arms, staring down into the wet sand, the tiny bubbles of worm tunnels as the edge of the surf brushed against his hands and receded.