They worked their back along the hose, Kira watching Samm and praying he didn’t shiver himself into a seizure. When they reached land shallow enough to stand on, she rubbed his back and chest, a quick furious burst of movement that probably soothed her conscience more than it did his condition. She felt a small thrill to be touching him—to feel the firm contours of his muscled chest—which seemed so enormously out of place she dropped her hands almost instantly, recoiling at the incongruity. She was a medic, not a schoolgirl; she could touch a man’s chest without going all gooey. He was still shaking, his teeth chattering with the cold, and she rubbed him again, working her hands up and down his pecs and sternum to force some warmth back into his body. A moment later the three of them seized the rope and started dragging the barge up the flooded street. Afa watched listlessly from the shore, almost too doped on painkillers to stand. The barge drifted toward them slowly, and when they gained about twenty feet of slack, Kira untied the hose and waded back to the next secure point, tying it off and then starting over. The barge scraped along the houses, catching on one of them so firmly Heron had to swim out and dislodge it with a plank of driftwood. After more than two hours they’d moved the barge close enough to shore for the horses to board it. It was barely three hundred feet.

They tied it off again, snapping the hose and almost losing it; Samm wrapped the trailing end around his arm and grabbed a brick wall with his other, straining red-faced at the pain as Kira and Heron scrambled to secure the barge more firmly. A heavy wooden door ripped from a nearby frame served as a steep boarding plank, and they walked the horses up one by one, Kira leading them with soft words while Samm and Heron guided them from the sides to keep them in line. Samm was still shivering, and his horse Buddy seemed more spooked in response, shuffling and backtracking so nervously that the door cracked. They coaxed him onto the barge before it broke completely, and then had to find a new one to get Oddjob on board at the end. Afa came last, his face slack, his massive arms wrapped around his backpack like an overstuffed life preserver.

“I can’t leave my backpack,” he said. “I can’t leave my backpack.”

“We won’t,” said Kira. “Just sit here, and don’t move, and you’ll be safe.”