No one spoke for a moment. There was noise. Voices around them, idling diesel engines, radios crackling, orders being barked, the constant hum of the rain, the rushing river—but it was also oddly silent, the noises that were supposed to surround them absent. The Burnside Bridge was up, so there were no cars driving overhead. Naito Parkway, which ran parallel to the park, was closed to all but emergency personnel. No squawk of birds or kids laughing or dogs barking.

“Detective Sobol was attacked by an octopus?” Eaton said. There was no judgment to it; just a man in charge repeating information he’d been given by an expert. Archie could see why the guy had been promoted.

Robbins leaned close to them, his face tense. “Not just Henry—the three other victims, too. All tested positive for TTX.”

It made one thing make sense. “The puncture wounds on the palms,” Archie said. “But couldn’t someone have isolated the poison? Be injecting it with a syringe?”

“The point of entry on the palms is from a beak, not a needle,” Robbins said. “A blue-ring delivers venom by puncturing its prey with its beak. But let me be clear, this isn’t accidental. This thing is being used as a weapon.”

“So what’s the antivenom?” Archie asked.

“There is no antivenom.”

Which meant there was no cure. Which meant that Henry was still dying. Archie felt a wave of nausea rush over him, and he reached out and steadied himself on the back of the trailer.

“The treatment is palliative care,” Robbins said quickly. “Keeping him breathing. Keeping his heart beating. He’s lucky Claire and Susan found him when they did. If he can make it twenty-four hours, odds are he’ll recover.”

Eaton pulled some more at his tie, and looked around them at the National Guard, the cops, the massive sandbag effort that had drawn thousands of volunteers to the river’s edge. He didn’t look so calm anymore. “Wait a minute, son,” he said to Robbins. “You’re saying that there’s some sort of deadly octopi in the water?”

Archie could see Robbins bristle at “son.”

“Octopuses,” Robbins said. “‘Octopi’ would only be correct for a second-declension Latin noun. ‘Octopus’ is a Greek third-declension masculine. And no, that’s not what I’m saying.”

Archie was doing math. He had last talked to Henry at six. It was now nearly three A.M. Nine hours had passed. That left fifteen to go. Fifteen hours between life and death. It didn’t used to seem like such a long time. You could drive from Portland to Los Angeles in fifteen hours. Now it seemed like a lifetime. For Henry, it might be.

Three people had been murdered.

Archie coughed, the taste of diesel a paste in his mouth.

“The water’s rising,” Eaton said. “If there’s something deadly in there, we need to warn people.”