He used to love the water. Hell, he’d grown up in Cairo, Illinois, where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers collide, and he and his friends were always stealing down to their favorite spot on the riverbank for a dip. Until one day during his twelfth year, when spring storms had swelled and quickened the rivers just as the entire town had turned out for a carnival near Fort Defiance State Park. At the height of the festivities, a drunken townsman had wandered too close to the crumbling banks and tumbled in. Another man had gone in to save him, and Flint’s father jumped onto a flat-bottomed fishing boat and went after them both. Flint and his friends watched as the two men in the water went under, and his father, reaching down to try to save them, was pulled in too.

All three bodies were recovered two days later, a mile downriver where the water calmed itself in the shallows, the three of them tangled in tree roots and moss, minnows darting in and out of their open mouths.

Ever since then, he’d been unable to swim. It was more than a phobia to him; it was like a curse that he knew would catch up to him eventually. All those years ago he’d come to believe that the river had really wanted him, but had taken his father instead. Some day, that debt would be paid.

And there was something else too: whenever he imagined jumping in, he thought of bodies bumping into him in the dark, bloated limbs caressing his flesh as they drifted with the current.

Now the great irony was that he was dealing with water all the time. This Jackson Hydro project alone meant he would in all likelihood be staring at rushing spring rivers and streams for months to come. But hell, this wasn’t just the Jackson problem any more, it involved all of Hydro Development’s projects scattered from Fort Kent in Maine to San Diego. The FERC and the EPA were keeping a close eye on the company, and had been for the past six months. There were some funny things going on at a couple of the major sites. Jackson Hydro was just the latest of them. In truth, the Commission had been shying away from granting a temporary license to build in the first place, but in the end they had gone ahead with it under heavy pressure from the boys in Washington (who, of course, were getting heavy pressure of their own from the lobbyists of Fortune 500 members who had financed their campaigns).