The Streamway is a corridor with a river in it. Going in, it had been a river you could walk beside, with a gravel margin and a shelf to put your pack on. Now there was no margin. The stream took up the whole floor, wall to wall, brown to the thigh, and we waded, in a straggle, with the wind in our faces and our lamps making short yellow tunnels in front of us.
I could taste the moor in it. Peat, and grass, and under both something flat and cold like a coin in the mouth.
A sprig of bracken came by on the current, rust-coloured, still wet from the surface, turning slowly with a snail clinging to the stalk. It was the first thing from outside I'd seen in three days. Nobody picked it up. Hana watched it go as if it had been addressed to her.
"When we get out," Pim said beside me, in a conversational voice, as if we were on a bus, "first pint's mine. The Craven. I'll tell it all at the bar. 'And then Sabine goes, if anyone's a ghost.' I'll do the face."
"I haven't got a face."
"You've got a great face. It does a thing." He did it. It was a fair likeness: the grin with no bottom to it. "They'll love it. Best story I ever got, this. I'll be dining out till Christmas."
"You'll be dining out on me looking a prat."
"On you being right," said Pim, easily, and splashed on. "Or wrong. Either way it's a cracking story."
"First Duck in ten minutes," Abe called back. "Face up, chins high, and nobody stops to admire it."
A duck is a place where the roof comes down to the water. You turn your head sideways and put your nose into the pocket of air between them, and you go through on your back, or your side, with the stone an inch off your face and the water in your ears. Going in on Thursday it had been a bit of a lark. Pim had made a noise like a seal. This time I heard it before I saw it: a hollow sucking, like a bath being emptied somewhere large, and the stream in front of us going quiet and smooth and brown, and sliding under the rock like a lid.
Nobody made a seal noise.
Pim was ahead of me with the grey dry bag on his back, the roll-top one the size of a loaf tin. It had the spare batteries in it, every spare there was, and it was the only thing he carried, because Abe said that if Pim had one job he might do it. He stopped at the lip of the pool. He looked at the gap. He looked at the bag.
"Give it here," said Teo.
He'd come up through the straggle without any of us noticing, wading, easy, lamp off and a hand out. Pim opened his mouth to say something and Teo had the bag by its strap already, slung across his own chest, high, and was lying back in the water with his boots out in front of him. He went into the gap on his back, bag held up on his breastbone like a baby, and the roof took his face, and his boots slid under after it.
Nobody spoke. On the far side, a way off, his voice came back thin and flat. "Next."
Pim went. Ilan went with a yelp, swearing all the way in Latin, the names of bones. I went after Ilan, chin up, the rock a finger above my nose and the cold squeezing the breath out of me, and I came up on the far side with a gasp. Hana came through behind me with her eyes screwed shut and her lips moving, the Lord's Prayer at the speed of a bus timetable. Teo was standing in the shallows with the grey bag held out at arm's length, and Pim, through before me, was taking it from him with both hands.
"Cheers, Teo. Very good. You didn't have to."
Teo said nothing and went back to the front. Jory, ahead of him, hadn't turned round once. I could tell it by her shoulders.
"He's all right, him," said Pim, hitching the strap. He was whispering, close to my ear, grinning, a lad let off a fine. "He didn't have to. I'd have had it round my ears. I like him, Sab."
"You don't know him."
"Don't start." The grin stayed, but it had gone thin. "I'm tired and I'm wet and I like him. That's allowed."
"I'm not saying it isn't allowed."
"You were about to."
He was right, and I closed my mouth.
We stopped on a gravel bank where the Streamway widened, because Abe said so, because people were shaking and had to eat. Everyone dropped down on the stones with their feet in the stream. I sat with my back against a boulder and something cold and oaty in my hand. Hana unfolded herself beside the heap of tackle bags, and I watched her face change.
She had her sack open and was holding a day bag in each hand, weighing them like two stones. Then she pulled up her left glove and looked at the back of it, where she'd been writing in wax pencil all week.
"Thirty bags gone," she said.
Nobody answered. She wasn't talking to anybody. She was reading it off her glove.
"Three nights. Ten a day." She turned the glove over. "Eight mouths."
"Nine of us," said Ilan. He was lying flat with his helmet under his head and his eyes shut, and he said it as a person corrects a spelling. "Nine mouths, three days. That's twenty-seven. You've miscounted, Hana."
"I don't miscount bags."
"Ten a day." Flat, Yorkshire, as if she were reading a price. "I know what's gone. Every one's got its day on it. I put them in the packs and I take the empties out and I put them in the sack, and there's thirty, and that's every one."
I'd never heard her say so much at once.
"So there's a tenth," I said.
It was meant as a joke. It hit the water and nobody picked it up.
Hana looked at me then. She wasn't cross. She was never cross at that kind of thing. She looked at me steadily, as she'd look at a pan that wouldn't come to the boil.
"Somebody's eating that isn't us," she said.
The stream went by. Pim, who had been about to laugh, looked at his hands instead. Corwin had stopped chewing. Over by the bags, with his back to us, Teo was coiling a sling.
"Wet bags," said Ilan, to the roof. "Soaked ones you've chucked. We're all tired, Hana, it's all very—"
"Nothing's been chucked."
"Hana's tired," said Abe. "We'll go through it at camp, love, with a pencil. All of us. Nobody's in trouble." He slapped his thigh. "Ten minutes, then we move."
"Isn't there a way round the Ducks?" Corwin asked the roof, very small. "A bypass? Only I've never been good at—"
"It's a cave, Corwin," said Ilan. "Not a motorway."
"Odalys," said Abe. "How is she?"
He meant the stream.
Odalys was kneeling at the bank with her wrist under the surface, eyes on a stick she'd poked into the gravel at the water's edge. A little grey foam came away from the stones round it and drifted off down the current like something being sent to the Toll ahead of us.
"Up again," she said. "Not just up. It's going up with a push behind it now, it's not sitting there and filling. Second Duck's tighter than the first. Thursday it had a good head of air. Now?" She took the stick out and looked at the line on it. "Not that."
"How long?" said Abe.
"I can't give you a number off a stick. It's rising. I'd not be here in half an hour."
"Right," said Abe. "Right, then. Up we get."
It was the roar that did it. Under the talking I'd been hearing it for ten minutes, as you hear a lorry behind a wall. But now it had a lift in it, as if a note had gone up a tone. My ears went forward on my head.
I was on my feet before Abe was.
"I'll look at the second Duck," I said.
"Sabine," said Abe. "No."
"It's two hundred metres. I'll be five minutes. If it's shut we need to know now, not when we're all stood in it."
"We'll all go. Together. Line."
"Nobody gets hurt by a look!"
I was already wading. I'm the fastest in that cave. I've got short legs and no sense, and in a river that comes out the same as fast. Behind me Abe said "Sabine" again, the dog-voice, the one for a collie going after a rabbit, and then I'd got round the bend and it was gone.
The Streamway ahead of me was a sight I'll keep. All the water the passage had was coming down it in one long brown muscle, shouldering, humping up in the middle like a back. Froth had piled up on the walls, chin height, in grey dirty rolls. I put a hand on the wall and the wall was shaking.
The roar was in the walls now, in the floor, in the water I was wading through, and my knees took it up like a drum. It filled the passage the way a hand fills a glove, and under it, steadily, in my face, the wind.
I ran, if you can call it running when the water's at your thighs and you're swearing. I went down on one knee and came up with a mouthful of peat and a bruise I'd be feeling on Tuesday if there was a Tuesday, and I fetched up at the second Duck so fast I nearly went into it face first.
The roof came down to the water in a long grey slope. It came down and met it, and where it met it there was a line of foam and a lot of black water going in underneath. Nothing else.
No air. No gap. Roof, then water.
"It's shut!" I yelled. I turned and yelled it back up the Streamway as loud as I'd ever shouted anything. "Abe! It's shut! It's gone! It's under!"
The roar took it. I could hear it die a few metres from my mouth.
I stood there shaking. Then, because I'm me, I went closer, because it couldn't be. I waded up to the roof until the water was at my ribs, and tipped my head sideways and put my cheek against the stone.
Cold rock, running with wet. Foam at my ear.
And between the water and the roof, a dark line, long as the passage was wide, where the roof sloped down at the left. A slot with air in it. I could feel it on my lips, cold, steady, going past me, out.
It wasn't shut. I could have kissed it. I think I did, a bit, on the stone.
I pushed my sleeve back and stood my forearm up in the gap to see how much there was. Elbow on the water, fist against the roof. That was all of it. Wrist to elbow, and nothing to spare.
I watched the water come up my arm.
It didn't surge. There was no wave. It simply came, quietly, a bead at a time, up the inside of my arm from the elbow, over the hairs, and then my knuckles were touching stone with water round the heel of my hand. I took my arm out and the gap was a thread.
I went back faster than I'd come.
They'd got up in a bunch at the bend, Abe at the front, mouth set, with Jory beside him and Hana's lamp swinging in the wake of it all. I came out of the roar into their light, soaked, with my arm held out in front of me like something I'd found.
"It's not shut," I said. "I said it was shut. It isn't. There's air. It's—" I held the arm up. "It's this much. It was this much, and I watched, and it's going."
"Never alone in a duck," said Jory.
She'd said it low, to the water, without looking at me. It was the first thing she'd said to me since the knot, and it was a rule.
"Sorry. I know."
"Never. I'm not saying it twice."
"Is it shut, though?" said Pim. "Sab. Is it shut?"
"Not shut. Closing."
"Oh, lovely," said Pim. "That's a relief." He wasn't laughing, but he'd wanted to, and he looked at his boots instead.
"A forearm," I said to Abe. "That's all there is. Wrist to elbow. And it's coming up as I watch."
Abe looked at my arm.
"The Toll's forty minutes on from there," he said. "That's the way out, and the only way out, and the water's not sitting still for us. Odalys?"
"It was a forearm, now it's less," said Odalys. She had her hood back and her face turned up, eyes closed, as though she were reading it off the roof. "It'll be a face's width by the time we've got the bags through. Then it's nothing. Go now, or sit down here and take your boots off."
"We go now," said Abe.