Chapter 6 The Drowning Hour

Ryan was there; the world shrank into the churning black water.

Lena did not think- she moved.

Plunging back through the roof hatch, the flood proper swallowed her whole. It was as if the cold had stolen her breath. Debris clawed her skin, but she kicked deeper. Her hands grasped through the murk until -

A fabric. An arm.

Sobbing, she hugged Ryan up from the bottom and held his face. Pale under the pale, blood spiraling from a gash laid open by a rebar boot against his ribs.

"Look at me!" Lena slapped his cheeks as the current began dragging against the collapsed shelves. Ryan's eyelids then fluttered as a bubble of blood formed on his lips.

Now it was too far off to access there. But skylight-

Lena swam, kicking amongst floating books and splintered wood, towards the skylight with Ryan draped around her neck. The skylight glass smashed under her elbow, she shoved Ryan through first and clawed her way out while the building groaned beneath them.

They were collapsed onto the roof in the brutal storm embrace. Ryan wasn't breathing.

"Not now," Lena declared, turning him on his side and drowning out the water in his lungs. "You don't get to leave me now."

He choked, coughing up seawater and blood. His hand found hers and clutched it as if it were a lifeline.

Lightning struck, illuminating what the flood had revealed: a metal box jammed in the broken skylight frame. Inside were documents, yellowed with age, stamped with her grandmother's signature ... as well as a deed transferring ownership of the building to her mother on Gaga's eighteenth birthday.

A lie unspooled in her mind:

"It belongs to the bank now," Tom's father had told her at the funeral. "Your grandmother mortgaged it to the hilt."

But the dates were off-kilter; it had never been her mother's.

"They stole it from you." Ryan's voice was a raspy whisper.

The sirens' howling resounded far away. The roof shook beneath them.

Lena held the papers close to her chest and bent over Ryan, her tears mixing with the rain. "Stay alive," she begged. "I can't do this without you."

His fingers brushed her cheek. "Always."