The cold hit Ethan first — total, absolute, a hand closing around every nerve at once. His lungs screamed for air that wasn't coming. His body, stunned and betrayed, refused to fight for him.
He was cut somewhere along his scalp; he could feel the water going warm and wrong around the wound, the current pulling the heat away as fast as it bloomed. Life truly is unfair, he thought, and the thought had a strange, sharp clarity to it, almost funny. He'd finally seen it — the flicker of people who actually gave a damn, his parents' terror, Liv's ragged apology — and the universe had reached down and snatched it back in the very same breath, like a joke with a cruel, precise sense of timing.
Someone had jumped in after him. He registered the splash dimly, a blurred shape too far above, moving too slow through water that didn't want to give either of them up. He wouldn't make it in time. Wasn't that the punchline. A boy who'd wanted to die twenty minutes ago now spending his last clear thought hoping, quite badly, to be saved.
'Is it because I'm unconscious?' The question drifted apart before it could finish forming, syllables dissolving into current.
His back scraped against soft mud. Somewhere above, a hand reached for him — too late, too far, the distance between them collapsing into nothing that mattered. The dark folded over him completely, patient and total, and he let it.
And then — nothing. No cold. No burning lungs. No weight of any kind at all.
A flash of white, vast and sudden, cutting through the black like a struck match. A presence behind it, ancient beyond any scale he had words for, and utterly, unmistakably aware of him — the way you're aware of an insect that's just landed on the back of your hand.
"Hm," it said, almost bored, almost amused. "Not yet."
The dark took him back before he could ask what that meant.