The Glass Coast: The Man in The Wetsuit

The tide had turned by the time Luis Ardent reached the pier, his rubber boots squeaking against the salt-crusted boards. Dawn sat low on the horizon, bleeding copper light across the harbor, and the gulls were already screaming over something half-submerged near the barnacle-encrusted pilings.

Luis stopped. His right hand dropped to the knife sheath on his belt, not reaching for the blade but resting there, the way a man might touch a rosary.

The body floated face-down in the shallows, one arm curled around a wooden post as if clinging to it. The wetsuit was black, no logos, no visible brand markings. A hood covered the head. Fins floated loose nearby, torn from their straps.

"Christ," Luis muttered. He crouched at the pier's edge, the wet wood groaning under his weight.

The other body, the one from three days ago, had been different. A young woman in a cotton sundress, her hair tangled with bladderwrack, her skin carrying the same surgical incision across the throat that had haunted Luis since he'd first glimpsed it. He'd carried that weight in silence, told Wren Halloran only what she needed to hear, and told Cal Drumm even less.

Now this.

The diver's body shifted with the swell, turning just enough for Luis to see the wound. The same custom blade. Same angle. Same depth. A throat opened with surgical precision, then left to the sea.

Luis stood and walked to the harbor master's office without hurrying. He could feel the morning chill working through his oilskins, the salt drying on his cheeks, and the taste of brine so familiar it had become invisible.

Cal Drumm was inside, hunched over the ancient woodstove, coaxing a fire from damp splits. The old man's face carried the deep lines of decades spent squinting into salt haze. He turned when the door banged open.

"Another one," Luis said.

Cal's expression didn't change. "Where?"

"North pier. By the bait shop's float."

"Identified?"

"Not yet. Diver. No gear. No ID. Same cut as before."

Cal set down the poker and straightened, a faint wheeze escaping him. "Same as the girl."

"Same as the girl."

The radio on Cal's desk crackled, unused for hours. Luis resisted the urge to pick it up. Instead, he walked to the window and studied the slate-gray water beyond the breakwater, searching for anything that might explain where the body had drifted in from. The offshore fog sat heavy to the east, refusing to burn off.

"You thinking what I'm thinking?" Cal asked.

"That somebody's working the coast."

"Three days apart. Two bodies. Same signature." Cal's gravel-rough voice dropped lower. "That's not accident. That's a pattern."

Luis turned from the window. "I'll call Wren. She'll want to see this before we touch anything."

"She won't like it."

"No." Luis paused. "She won't."

He reached for his phone and stepped back onto the pier. The cold wind cut through him as he dialed, and somewhere across the harbor, the gulls continued their quarrel over the dead.

The drive to the harbor took less than five minutes from the Halloran place. Wren had heard the phone ring twice before she answered, her voice thick with interrupted sleep, and by the time Luis had explained the basics, she was already pulling on boots.

He found her waiting at the foot of Main Street, her breath fogging in the predawn gray. She wore a wool peacoat over what looked like yesterday's sweater, jeans, and rubber boots still spotted with bait-shop scale. Her dark hair was pulled back in a knot that had come half undone, and her hands were shoved deep in her coat pockets, shoulders hunched against the wind coming off the water.

"How bad?" she asked without preamble.

"Diver. Probably been in the water a few days."

She nodded once, a motion that looked practiced, like she had been rehearsing for this particular kind of news. "Has anyone touched him?"

"Cal put a tarp over. Waited for you."

"That's something, anyway." She started walking, and Luis fell into step beside her, the rhythm of their boots on the damp pavement a syncopated duet against the quiet. "Same as the girl, you said."

"Same cut. Same area."

"Who else knows?"

"Just Cal. And whoever is listening on the marine band, which is nobody right now." Luis paused. "I killed the harbor chatter as soon as I spotted him."

Wren glanced sideways at him. "You didn't call the police."

"Not yet."

"Luis."

"I waited for you." He kept his eyes forward. The breakwater was visible now, a dark line against the lighter dark of the sea. "Figured you'd want to see it before uniforms trample the scene."

She didn't respond for several steps. When she did, her voice was quieter, the reporter's instinct surfacing through the exhaustion. "If we touch this, we own it."

"I know."

"And if we don't, the state police come down, cart him off, and we get nothing. Maybe never know who he was."

"That's how it works."

Wren stopped walking. They had reached the bottom of the pier ramp, where the planking turned from pavement to salt-warped wood. The smell of brine and diesel was stronger here, mixed with something else underneath, something that made the back of the throat tighten. "Show me."

Luis led her up the ramp. The float beneath their feet shifted with the small chop, and the sound of halyards clinking against aluminum masts filled the silence. Ahead, near the bait shop's float, a shape huddled under a blue tarp, weighted at the corners with cinder blocks. The white boat rocked gently at its mooring, undisturbed by what lay nearby.

Cal Drumm materialized from somewhere in the shadows, his weathered face unreadable in the thin light. He handed Wren a pair of latex gloves without a word.

She pulled them on with the practiced snap of someone who had done this before, though Luis suspected this was mostly from processing bait orders and gutting the occasional catch. Still, her hands were steady.

"Ready?" Cal asked.

"No." Wren took a breath. "But do it."

Cal lifted the corner of the tarp.

The body lay face-down in shallow water, the back of a black neoprene wetsuit exposed, peeling slightly at the seams. The arms were tucked under the torso in the way the current sometimes arranged things, fingers curled loosely. No tank, no regulator, no weight belt. Luis had already noted that earlier, but seeing it again, in this light, it felt more deliberate. Someone had stripped this man of his gear before he went into the water. Or after.

Wren crouched at the water's edge, her knees hovering above the wet planks. Her gloved fingers hovered over the wetsuit's back pocket, then moved away. "I need to roll him."

"I'll help," Luis said, moving to her side.

"Wait." Wren pointed to a seam along the back of the torso, just below the shoulder blades. "There's something here. A line. Feel that?"

Luis leaned closer. She was right. A thin line ran along the seam, stiffer than the surrounding material, too regular to be part of the suit's construction. Wren pressed along it gently, tracing its path with her fingertips.

"Internal pocket," she murmured. "Custom job. Whatever's in there is waterproof."

She looked up at Luis, a question in her eyes.

"Your call," he said.

Wren reached for the seam. The stitching was tight, but salt water had done its work over the days the body had been submerged. The thread gave way with a small, wet sound, and a flap of neoprene peeled back to reveal a flat, rectangular bulge pressed against the body's spine.

Wren eased it out. It was a hard-shell case, maybe the size of a paperback book, matte black, with a single latching mechanism on one side. The latch was crusted with marine growth but moved when she pressed the release. Inside, nested in foam cut to fit its contours, was a portable solid-state drive, the kind a person might use for field backups. A short cable coiled beside it, and a small adhesive label on the drive's face bore a printed alphanumeric sequence.

"Drive's intact," Wren said, more to herself than to them. She closed the case carefully and held it against her chest. "If there's data on this, we need somewhere dry to look."

"My boat," Luis offered. "Cabin has power. No windows facing the harbor."

Wren nodded. She stood, tucking the case under her arm, and turned back to the body. The interruption of her examination seemed to refocus her. Her eyes moved over the suit, methodical, taking inventory. The thickness of the neoprene, the absence of a hood, the boots integrated into the legs rather than separate.

"Recreational diver," she said. "Not commercial. Not military. This is a rental-grade suit, or close to it. You can see the wear at the knees and elbows." She gestured at the face-down form. "Whoever put him in the water didn't bother to disguise the suit. Either they were in a hurry, or they didn't care about the suit at all. Just him."

"The girl," Cal said from behind them. "Was she in a suit?"

"Wetsuit, yes. Same brand, maybe. Same stripping." Wren's voice had gone flat, clinical, but her jaw was tight. "Stripped of identifying gear. No tank. No regulator. No ID. Stripped and set adrift."

"They're using the current," Luis said. "Setting them loose to drift in. Using the tide to bring them here."

"Why here?" Cal asked. "Of all the coastline."

Luis didn't have an answer. Wren didn't either. The question sat between them as the first real light began to bleed into the eastern sky, a thin line of gray-gold along the horizon.

"We need to move him," Wren said finally. "Before sun hits full."

"Coast Guard station's in Castine," Cal said. "Forty minutes. State police barracks, maybe an hour if they have anyone awake."

"Neither." Wren straightened. "The mortuary in Ellsworth. Doctor Oliveri. She owes me a favor, and she knows how to keep things quiet."

Luis raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

Wren caught the look. "A fisherman she knew died last year. She handled the paperwork gratis. I wrote her a human-interest piece that pulled in enough donations to keep her small practice open for another year." She paused. "She also doesn't ask questions when she doesn't want to know the answers."

Cal and Luis exchanged a glance.

"You trust her?" Luis asked.

"I trust her to do her job and not call the news desk." Wren tucked the drive case more securely under her arm. "That's what matters right now."

Luis considered the body, the dark water beneath the float, the slowly brightening sky. Every minute they spent here increased the chance of being seen. The harbor was quiet, but quiet didn't mean empty. Somewhere on the water, lobster boats were already running, their owners pulling traps, and the morning shift at the fuel dock would start in less than an hour.

"Decision time," he said.

Wren met his eyes. "I want twenty minutes with that drive before anyone official hears about this. Twenty minutes. That's all I need to know if this is worth pursuing or if we're chasing weather."

"And if it is worth pursuing?"

"Then we have a problem that won't go away by calling the police." Her voice was steady. "The girl was news for a day. Nobody followed up. Nobody cared enough. If these deaths are connected, if there's a pattern, the official channel will bury it under procedure and jurisdiction. We both know how that goes."

Cal shifted his weight, his old joints protesting audibly. "Luis."

"Yeah."

"Your boat. Cabin lights off. You can get twenty minutes before anyone notices your truck's missing from the lot."

Luis nodded slowly. He wasn't sure when the decision had been made, but it had been, somewhere between Wren's first question and the feel of the case under her arm. "I'll get my lines."

"Make it fast," Cal said. "I'll cover here. Tell anyone who asks I'm checking a fouled prop."

Wren was already moving toward the ramp, the case held close to her body like something precious. Luis caught up to her in three strides.

"You good?" he asked.

"No." She didn't slow down. "But I'm awake."

They reached the parking lot as the first working boats began their slow parade out of the harbor, their running lights still on against the lifting dark. Luis's truck was where he'd left it, and he had the engine started before Wren had the passenger door fully closed.

The drive to the boat ramp took four minutes. Neither of them spoke. Wren stared straight ahead, one hand resting on the case in her lap, the other gripping the edge of the seat as Luis took the curves faster than he should have.

The Fiona Marie sat at her mooring, low and dark in the water, her wheelhouse light off as promised. Luis pulled the truck close, killed the engine, and listened for a moment to the tick of cooling metal and the slap of waves against the hull.

"Inside," he said.

He rowed them out in the dinghy, Wren balanced in the stern with the case clutched to her chest, her face unreadable in the gray light. The deck of the trawler was slick with dew, and Luis moved with the ease of long practice, helping her aboard and then securing the dinghy.

The cabin smelled of diesel, old coffee, and the particular must of a working boat. Luis lit a single battery-powered lantern and set it on the galley table, then closed the cabin door behind them. The sudden quiet was almost physical, cut off from the harbor sounds entirely.

Wren set the case on the table and opened it. The drive sat in its foam cradle, the cable coiled beside it. She unwound the cable and looked at Luis.

"Laptop?"

"Bear. Drawer under the radio."

He fetched it, an older model he kept for navigation and weather charts, and set it beside the drive. The laptop booted with a hum, the screen filling with the Fiona Marie's usual array of windows. Wren plugged in the drive and navigated to it, her fingers moving with quick certainty.

The drive mounted. A folder structure appeared, sparse but organized. Wren opened the first folder.

Files. Dozens of them. Spreadsheets, PDFs, a folder labeled simply "Bills of Lading."

"Give me light," she murmured, more to herself than to Luis.

He adjusted the lantern. The screen's glow caught her face, casting the hollows of her cheeks into sharper relief. She was scanning the file names, lips moving slightly as she read.

"Seabed Holdings," she said quietly.

"What?"

"The folder name. Seabed Holdings." She double-clicked.

A spreadsheet opened. Columns of figures, dates, vessel names, dollar amounts. The header row was innocuous enough: Transaction Date, Vessel, Port, Amount, Counterparty. But the numbers in the Amount column were large, six and seven figures, and the vessel names were unfamiliar. Not local boats. Not boats Luis recognized at all.

"Seabed Holdings," Wren said again, slower this time. "That's a shell company name if I ever heard one. Sea-something. Sounds legitimate, smells like nothing."

She opened another spreadsheet. More of the same, but with an additional column: Destination Account. The account numbers were long, alphanumeric, offshore bank formatting. Luis didn't need to be an accountant to recognize the structure.

"Whatever this is," Wren said, "it's money moving. Big money. Quietly."

She scrolled. A name caught Luis's eye, halfway down the second sheet. A vessel listed as "Pelagic Dawn," with a port of registry in Portland, and an amount tagged beside it that made his stomach tighten.

"That's a name I know," he said.

Wren looked up. "Which one?"

"Pelagic Dawn. Out of Portland. She ran lobster for a while, then got bought out. New owners, maybe three, four years back. I heard she switched over to something else, but nobody around here ever figured out what." He paused. "She comes through this harbor sometimes, but never ties up. Refuels offshore, transfers crew by tender, keeps moving. Strange behavior for a working boat."

"Strange how?"

"Like she's hiding what she's carrying."

Wren noted this without comment and kept scrolling. The next folder contained PDFs, scanned documents with varying degrees of legibility. Bills of lading, as the folder name promised, but also what looked like incorporation papers, corporate filings, and a few handwritten notes that had been photographed and saved as images.

One note, captured in slightly blurred handwriting, read: "SH quarterly. Confirm vessel rotation before next drop. G. will want update on fuel subsidy."

G.

Wren studied the image. "Grant Ellerby," she said.

Luis went still.

"That's his handwriting," Wren continued, her voice careful. "I've seen enough of it to recognize it. He signs moorage receipts at the harbormaster's office with that same loop on the G. Very distinctive."

"You sure?"

"Reasonably." She turned the laptop toward him. "Look at the G in 'SH.' Same slant. Same pressure."

Luis leaned closer. She was right. The G in the note had the same exaggerated top loop, the same forward lean that Grant Ellerby put on every signature he'd ever seen. The harbormaster's handwriting was familiar to anyone who'd done business at the town dock.

"Seabed Holdings," Wren said. "SH. Grant Ellerby."

The cabin felt smaller suddenly, the air thicker. Luis looked at the drive, then at Wren, then back at the drive.

"This is the kind of thing people kill over," he said quietly.

Wren closed the laptop gently, as if the machine itself might be listening. "I know."

"What do we do?"

Wren was quiet for a long moment. Outside, the harbor sounds filtered through the hull, muffled but present, the sound of morning starting. Somewhere, a halyard clinked against an aluminum mast. Somewhere else, an engine coughed to life.

"We need more," Wren said finally. "This is a thread. We don't even know what it's attached to yet. But we know enough to be careful."

"Careful how?"

"Careful who we tell. Careful where we go. Careful that whatever we do next, we don't end up floating under a tarp like that poor bastard." She picked up the case and snapped it shut. "Drive stays with me. For now."

Luis nodded. "For now."

Wren tucked the case under her arm again, and this time her grip on it looked less like protection and more like custody. She stood, and Luis stood with her.

"Luis."

"Yeah."

"Thank you. For waiting. For not calling it in." She paused. "I know what I asked of you."

He looked at her, at the circles under her eyes, at the set of her jaw, at the case pressed against her ribs. "I know what I agreed to."

The cabin door opened. The morning air rushed in, cold and salt-sharp. The Fiona Marie rocked gently as a boat passed in the outer harbor, its wake sending a small swell beneath them.

They had twenty minutes. They had used every one of them.

And the thread they had found led somewhere darker than either of them had been ready for.

The morning aboard the Fiona Marie had a particular texture to it, the kind that came from too little sleep and too much coffee. The cabin smelled of grounds boiled twice and the lingering ghost of diesel. Light came through the porthole in a thin, salt-hazed bar, catching the dust motes that drifted between Luis Ardent and Wren Halloran like something almost alive.

Wren was still standing by the ladder, the case tucked against her side. She had not moved to leave.

Luis read the hesitation in the way she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, the way her thumb worried the brass clasp of the case. She was working something out. He had known her long enough to recognize the particular silence of a mind turning over a piece it did not yet know how to place.

"Wren."

She looked up.

"Sit. Before you wear a groove in my deck."

A small, tired laugh escaped her. She crossed the cabin and lowered herself onto the bench opposite him, setting the aluminum case on the table between them with the care of someone setting down something that might detonate. Her hands rested flat on either side of it, as if steadying a small animal.

Luis poured the last of the coffee into her mug. It was lukewarm and bitter. He slid it across.

"You didn't sleep either," she said.

"No."

"I can tell."

"That's because I look terrible."

"It's because you keep looking at that case like it owes you money."

He allowed himself the ghost of a smile. She knew him. That was its own kind of danger, and its own kind of comfort.

The harbor sounds were thickening outside. The first of the lobstermen would be heading out soon. Somewhere on the fuel dock, a pump clicked its steady metronome. A gull cried, and another answered.

"Talk to me," Luis said. "Whatever it is you're chewing on."

Wren wrapped her hands around the mug but did not drink. "I keep coming back to the wetsuit."

"The footage."

"The footage. The way he moves. You saw it."

"I saw it."

"There's no panic in him, Luis. He's not thrashing. He's not trying to get out. He's swimming." She paused. "Swimming downward."

The observation landed between them with the weight of an anchor. Luis thought of the man in the footage, the way his arms had cut through the dark water with a rhythm that was almost meditative. Almost deliberate.

"A diver," Luis said slowly. "Someone who knew what they were doing."

"A diver in a wetsuit too thin for these waters, carrying nothing, heading for the bottom of a channel in November." Wren's voice had gone flat, the way it did when she was most frightened and most determined. "Either he was running toward something, or he was sent."

Luis turned his mug in his hands. The ceramic was chipped along the rim, a souvenir from a fall years ago that he had never bothered to replace.

"Sent," he said. "By who?"

"That's what I don't know yet." Wren finally drank. The coffee made her wince. "But you recognized him."

It was not a question. Luis felt the recognition settle in his chest like a stone dropped into still water.

"I knew his father," he said. The words came out rougher than he intended. He cleared his throat. "Years ago. Back when I was still running with my uncle's boat out of Saltreach."

Wren's eyes sharpened. She set the mug down.

"Saltreach." She repeated the name like she was tasting it. "That's not just down the coast. That's home."

"It was home." Luis leaned back against the bulkhead. The wood was cold through his shirt. "For a while. Until it wasn't."

"Tell me."

He looked at her for a long moment. There were things he had not said aloud in years. Things he had folded small and tucked into the back of a drawer in his mind, the way his mother used to fold church clothes and put them away for Sunday. They smelled of cedar and they were not for touching.

"My father worked the boats," he began. "Not like here. Back home, the fleet was smaller, older. Wooden hulls, most of them, and men who had been doing the same work since they were boys. My father was one of them. He was a sternman, then a sternman who learned to run a wheelhouse, then a captain, all before he turned thirty. He had hands like leather and a voice that could cut through any storm."

Wren was still. Listening the way she listened to sources, with her whole body angled toward the words.

"I used to ride out with him when I was small. Too small to be useful, but too stubborn to stay behind. He'd put me in the corner of the wheelhouse with a life jacket two sizes too big, and I'd watch the lines come up, watch the gulls fight over the offal, watch the water change color with the depth." Luis paused. The memory had a particular shade of gray to it, the gray of early morning on the coast. "It was the only place I ever felt like the world made sense."

"What happened?"

"Fishing got harder. The stocks shifted. The bigger boats started coming down from Gloucester, from the Cape, even from overseas. They had hydraulics we didn't have, sonars we couldn't afford. They pulled more in a week than we could pull in a season, and the price of what we did catch kept dropping." He shrugged, but the shrug was not casual. "My father kept at it. He kept at it until his body gave out, and then he kept at it some more. By the time I was fifteen, he was too sick to work but too proud to stop. He died on the dock in Saltreach waiting for a boat that wasn't coming."

Wren's hand moved across the table. Not quite touching him, but close. Close enough that he could feel the warmth.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"It was a long time ago." The words came automatically. He had said them enough that they had worn smooth. But he kept going, because she had asked, and because the thread they had found led somewhere that required him to.

"When I left, I told myself I wasn't running from anything. I told myself I was going somewhere. Both of those things were true." He looked past her, through the porthole, at the thin slice of harbor visible beyond the glass. "I ended up here. I bought the Fiona Marie from a man who was retiring because his eyes were going. I learned the water here. I learned the names of the men who worked it. I made a life."

He stopped.

"But the men from Saltreach," he said. "They don't forget. And I don't forget them."

"The man in the footage."

"His name was Tommy Vetch. Tommy Vetch's boy." Luis said it plainly, the way he said everything that mattered. "His father ran a boat called the Mary K out of Saltreach. Good man. Quiet. The kind of man who would give you his last cigarette and pretend it was nothing. Tommy grew up the way I grew up, on the boats, in the co-op, in the church pews on Sunday. Then his father got hurt. Boom, the winch. Lost the arm halfway to the elbow. The insurance covered about a third of what it should have, and the rest of it ate the boat, the house, everything. Tommy left Saltreach not long after. I heard he went north. I heard he went offshore. I heard a lot of things."

"And now he's at the bottom of Stone Channel in a wetsuit."

"Now he's at the bottom of Stone Channel in a wetsuit."

Wren was quiet for a long time. Outside, the harbor sounds continued, indifferent to the weight of what they were discussing. A halyard clinked. An engine rumbled. Somewhere, a man shouted something that might have been a greeting or might have been a curse.

"Why would he be here?" Wren asked finally.

"That's the question."

"Someone brought him. Someone who knew the water, knew the wetsuit, knew the bottom."

"Or someone who knew him," Luis said. "And used him."

The thought settled over both of them like weather.

Luis thought of Tommy Vetch as he had known him, a thin boy with too-large ears and a laugh that came too easily. He thought of Tommy's father, whose name he had not spoken in fifteen years, whose face he could still see with a clarity that surprised him. He thought of Saltreach, and the smell of low tide, and the way the light fell on the water in the late afternoon, turning it the color of beaten gold.

He thought of his own father, dying on a dock in a town he had left.

"Whatever Tommy got pulled into," Luis said slowly, "it didn't start here. It started somewhere upstream. Somewhere up the chain."

Wren nodded. She reached for the case, then stopped herself. Her hand hovered over the aluminum like a hand over a stove.

"We take this to Cal," she said. "Quietly. See what he remembers about who was on the water that week. Who came in. Who went out without a record."

"And the drive."

"The drive stays with me." Her voice was firm. "Until I know what I'm holding."

Luis studied her. The circles under her eyes had deepened since she had come aboard. The set of her shoulders had tightened. She looked like a woman standing at the edge of a drop, calculating whether she had the nerve to jump.

"You're going to keep going," he said. Not a question.

She looked at him. "I'm going to find out what happened to my brother."

"Your brother is gone, Wren."

She flinched. The word landed, and he saw it land.

"I know," she said quietly. "I know he's gone. But I don't know how he went. I don't know why. I don't know who was in the water with him, or who put them there, or who is still walking around this harbor with my brother's name in their mouth like it means nothing." Her voice had gone tight, but she did not raise it. "I'm going to find out. Even if it kills me. Especially if it kills me."

Luis let out a long breath. The cabin seemed smaller than it had a moment ago. The air seemed heavier.

"Then we do it smart," he said. "We do it together. And we do not do it alone."

Wren looked at him for a long moment. Something in her face softened, just slightly. Just enough.

"Together," she said.

"Together."

She stood. She picked up the case. She tucked it under her arm with the same grip he had seen earlier, the grip that looked like custody rather than protection.

They climbed the ladder together. The morning hit them full in the face, cold and bright and smelling of brine and diesel and the particular green rot of November seaweed. The harbor was waking up around them. The lobstermen were baiting traps on the dock. The fuel boat was chugging out toward the breakwater. Somewhere on the far side, Cal Drumm's pickup was parked at its usual crooked angle near the harbormaster's office, the driver's side mirror dangling from its last wire.

Luis and Wren stood for a moment at the rail of the Fiona Marie, looking out at the water they had both staked their lives on.

"Luis," Wren said.

"Yeah."

"Thank you."

"You already said that."

"I know." She looked at him, and there was something steady in her eyes, something that had not been there when she came aboard. "I'm saying it again."

He nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.

They stepped off the boat and onto the floating dock. The wood was slick with dew. Their footsteps made no sound. Somewhere, a gull screamed. Somewhere else, a man was laughing at something that had nothing to do with either of them.

The morning was just beginning. The thread they had found led down into dark water, and they were only beginning to pull on it.

But they were not pulling alone.