The model was standing on an island no larger than a dining table. Her dress trailed into six inches of water, and the photographer kept telling her to stop moving.
"She's frightened," Cress said.
"I can see that."
He lowered the camera. On the far side of the island, an arm reached from a square hole in the concrete. The hand opened, closed and disappeared.
Cress dropped her bag.
She had found the reservoir for the shoot. Disused, shallow, reachable by van. A single column rose from its center, holding nothing. She had photographed it at noon, when the bottom was clearly visible. Now the low sun turned the water opaque.
"Where's Matty?"
The model pointed down.
The photographer said, "He's on a ledge. He can breathe."
Cress called the emergency number before asking anything else. She gave the lane, the locked road gate and the name painted on the old pump building. The photographer stood beside her, trying to interrupt.
"Tell them it isn't deep."
"There's a shaft. Someone's in it."
The model's name was Veda. Cress had driven her from the station that morning. She was twenty-six, wore glasses when she wasn't working, and had spent the journey trying to find a receipt for a train she couldn't afford to pay for twice.
"Don't come out here," Veda called. "The cover's gone."
Cress saw it then, a rusted plate tilted beneath the surface beside the hole. Matty had carried the reflector ahead of Veda. The plate had held until his second foot went onto it.
The photographer, Dane, was holding the reflector now. He had pulled it out of the water because it was hired.
"How long?" Cress asked.
"A few minutes."
Veda said, "Twenty."
"We were trying to get him out."
There was a pole on the bank, an old wooden handle with a hook at one end. Cress reached for it. Dane caught her sleeve.
"It broke when he put his weight on it. That's why we stopped. If you do it wrong and he falls farther, they'll ask who told you to."
He looked at the phone in her hand. She understood that he had been imagining the questions for twenty minutes. Every attempted answer had become another reason to wait.
Cress went to the water's edge and called Matty's name.
"I'm here," he said from the hole. "My left hand's going."
He was standing on a maintenance ledge in water up to his chest, too far below the rim to climb. The broken plate had cut his forearm. Each time he tried to pull himself up, the hand opened before he could put weight on it.
The emergency operator told Cress help was coming. Cress put the phone on speaker and described the shaft, the ledge and the old sluice wheel beside the pump building. The wheel controlled the shallow basin, according to the faded diagram she had photographed on her scouting visit.
"Don't touch it," Dane said. "We don't know where it goes."
He was right about that. She left it alone.
There were two scaffold planks under the van's wheels, put there because the track was soft. Cress asked Dane to help recover them. He said the van would sink. She stared at him until he backed it off the planks and came to lift one end.
They laid the planks across the narrow stretch of water between the bank and the island. The first reached the concrete. Veda knelt, her dress spreading around her, and steadied it while they placed the second beside it. Cress crossed on her knees. At the island she saw Matty's face below them, eyes fixed on the narrow rectangle of sky.
"Don't stand," he said. "The edge keeps coming off."
She stayed flat. Veda gripped Cress's belt while she reached down with the sound end of the broken pole. Matty rested his good hand over it. She didn't try to haul him out. She kept the hand there while his injured arm trembled against the wall.
Dane called that he could hear a vehicle.
"Go to the road," Cress said. "Open the gate."
He ran. At last there was something he knew how to do.
The rescuers brought equipment and told Cress to move back. She crawled to the bank, leaving Veda lying beside the hole, talking about the receipt she still couldn't find. Matty answered that she had folded it into her glasses case. He had watched her do it in the van.
They brought him out strapped to a rigid board. Veda tried to stand beside him, and her knees failed. Cress caught her under the arms.
At the ambulance, Dane raised his camera. He asked Matty whether he could take one photograph showing they were all together. His voice was shaky. He wanted a picture of what the afternoon had become, something with a clear ending.
Matty turned his face away.
Later, while the crew packed, Cress found Veda's glasses in their case beside the folded train receipt. She took them to her. Veda put them on and looked out across the water, seeing the broken plate clearly for the first time.
"You said it was shallow," she said.
Cress had the scouting photograph on her phone. She started to reach for it, then kept her hands on the glasses case until Veda took it back.
