"I'll bring him. I swear to God I'll bring him. Go."
Reyes let go of the dead boy's face. Carter would remember that, too, the way his hands came away slowly, one at a time, as if they were being pried off. Carter got his shoulder under the lieutenant's boot and heaved, and Reyes went up, scrabbling, half in and half out of the hatch, and then stuck, his gear snagged on the coaming, his legs kicking. Carter reached up with his right arm, got hold of the drag handle on the back of Reyes's vest, and lifted, and the flashlight on his wrist swung up with his hand and he saw, in that narrow beam, his own forearm across the lieutenant's back, the ink of the trident stark and black against wet skin, the compass rose beneath it running with oil.
Reyes twisted to look down at him. Their faces were a foot apart.
"Sir —"
"Go, Tommy. Go, go, I've got you, go."
The lieutenant went up into the dark.
Carter turned back to the water.
It had reached his chest. Bost was gone, pulled under or floated away, he couldn't see. He swung his light along the bulkhead and found nothing. He shouted the boy's name anyway. Then he heard another voice, from back the way he'd come, behind the tractors, and he knew it, and his heart turned over.
"Sir! Commander! Where are you?"
Mike. Mike Chardi, who had a son seven pounds eleven ounces with his ears, who had been ordered topside, who had taken the three sailors up to the main deck and handed them off to Dunleavy and then turned around and come back down into a sinking ship, because his commander was in it.
"Mike, get out! Get out, I'm coming —"
The Anahita rolled.