“Tell me when you're ready,” Leah said, and when Elmer gave the signal, she kept pulling. Once Elmer was clear of the culvert, there was the mud to deal with. She propped Elmer up, her arm across his back, her hand in his armpit. Halfway to the trucks, they sat down on a downed cottonwood. The rain slicked Elmer's yellow rubber coveralls. She had expected panic from him, or at least some outward show of pain, but he kept his face stoic. Once in a while, he'd step wrong, wince, cry out just a little, but she pretended not to notice. She knew what it meant to crave dignity in the face of mortification. She could give Elmer that now.

“You trying to die today?” Leah asked. “Why'd you come out here?”

“Like I said, you want these gates open, want that water to flow out of here as fast as possible.”

The site was socked in with clouds, landmarks blurred by the steady rain. Leah tried to remember how it looked in the sunlight, the blue of the sky, the laconic drift of cumulus clouds. She heard a noise from her platform, looked up to see the osprey chicks, waterlogged and miserable, shifting position in the nest.

“How bad is it going to be?” she asked.

“I think pretty bad,” Elmer said.

Leah was glad of the cold rain on her face, which masked, she hoped, her tears at the thought of Riverside destroyed—her years of vision and management and work, everything she had imagined it could become—all of it washed out, washed away.

She stood up. “You get all the gates open?”

“Not the one I fell into.”

“I guess I have to get you out of here,” she said, but she didn't want to leave. She wanted to turn herself into solid brick and mortar, grow up to the osprey platform, root herself firmly into the wet clay, send the inundation around and away from her open space. She wanted to fight, but the rain came in sheets, the dam was already open, the system entirely indifferent to her puny desires.

She looked at Elmer, small but dry inside his yellow slickers. The ospreys had hunkered down, gone invisible.

“How long do we have?” she asked.

“Flood's still up top of the canyon,” Elmer said. “We got at least an hour, maybe more.”

“You think opening that gate will help?”

Elmer paused, shrugged. “Might be nothing can help.”

“Wait here.”

“Don't have much of a choice,” Elmer said. “This leg.”