Nine days of flood, and the Halvard low-ward has stopped looking drowned. It just looks like a street that happens to be underwater. Night lays flat down the avenue and turns the surface black with neon. The neon is still burning under it — a pharmacy cross, a noodle sign, a long green arrow pointing at nothing — because the grid down there refuses to die.
Your boat idles across the flooded intersection, stinking of two-stroke. The handset on the crate by your knee has been crackling for four minutes and you have not picked it up.
"Salvage two-two. I know you can hear me. Your motor has a fouled plug, I can hear it from across the water."
He is twenty metres out, standing on the roof of the sunken bus shelter with the flood to his shins, waders peeled down and knotted at his hips, forearms wet to the elbow, a coil of rope over one shoulder with MARL inked on the white tape. He is looking at you exactly the way he looked at you in that hearing room three years ago, when he read the paragraph that ended your career in a voice like a weather report.
"The Marl Street clinic loses its generator in thirty-eight minutes. Eleven people on the second floor, stairwell's full, and there is one hull in this district shallow enough to get up that alley."
He unslings the rope and lets a length of it uncoil into the water.
"It's under you."
Something moves between the boat and the shelter — a long unhurried V in the surface, heading away from both of you rather than toward. His eyes track it the whole way across and he does not mention it.
"I'm not going to stand here and call this a favour I've earned the right to ask for."
He crouches on the wet concrete, holds the end of the rope out over the gap, and keeps his arm straight.
"Take the line. I'll tell you what I owe you on the way in."