“Biologically superior,” said Heron. “I keep telling you. Take this, the other end is still stuck to the shelf with a zip tie.”

“Probably why it’s still in here,” said Kira, but Heron was already gone. She surfaced a while later and nodded: success. Kira began coiling the hose as well as she could, and stopped after the first twenty coils. “This has got to be at least a hundred feet.”

“Then let’s do it,” said Heron, and gripped a portion of the hose as Kira ducked back out of the open window. Kira bobbed up farther south than she’d intended, looking up to see Samm watching from his roof. Was he smiling to see her? Of course he’d been worried with them gone so long, but Kira found herself hoping that he was worried about her, specifically, rather than just the success or failure of the search for rope.

She pushed the thought away and held up one end of the hose. “Hose,” she said simply, short of breath as she struggled against the current. She worked her way back to Samm’s roof, and he pulled her up. Heron clambered up behind her, not looking nearly as exhausted as Kira felt. Samm pulled up the looping lengths of hose and coiled them on the mossy shingles. He pointed back through the sunken city to the shore, where Heron’s horse Dug was watching them solemnly.

“I think that’s the best place to try to land it,” he said. “We’ve got a pretty clear shot, depending on how deep it rides, but it looks like a pretty shallow barge. If we head back that way and tie off one end of this to . . .” He paused, studying the bits of architecture that poked up above the water. “That light pole. I can swim out from here, tie this off, cut whatever’s holding it, and then we can tow it in to shore.”

“Just that easy, huh?” asked Kira.

“Unless the barge is tied down with metal chains,” said Samm, “yes. The hard part’s going to be getting it back out again laden with horses without foundering against those buildings.”

“I’m assuming we’re the first people to try to dock a boat at that end of Main Street,” said Heron. “I don’t think they designed the city with ‘barge maneuverability’ in mind.”

“We’ll just use poles to push ourselves away,” said Kira. “Against the pounding, bridge-destroying current of the mighty Mississippi River.”

“Just that easy?” asked Samm. Kira looked up and saw that he was smiling—a tentative smile, as if he was trying it out. She smiled back.

“Yeah,” she said. “Just that easy.”