“It’s a good thing I told everyone I know where I was going today,” Will belted out confidently, even though he didn’t have anyone left he could tell. “Otherwise, they might be worried.”

“Sturdy hypothesis, Icarus Number One,” Titus said with an undisturbed face. “Can’t be over thoughtful, specially bobbing on the water.”

Will climbed into the seat, and Titus pushed off and pointed the skiff at the gap in the breakwater a mile out, the skiff’s bow clicking against the meager waves. The water looked frigid, and Will wished he’d worn his lightbulb-changing wetsuit. Titus lowered the outboard and began yanking the starter ferociously. When it caught, he blared the engine, and the roar buried the ambient hush of the harbor.

As they plowed away from shore, the skiff low in the water with the weight of the hose, the air whisked with impossible freshness across Will’s face, recalling to him that first walk along the creek, when everything was still amazing and shot with wonder. He watched the water darken from blue to black beneath them like a bruise. Aside from that time his mother said he’d once smacked his head on a pool deck, Will had never been immersed in water deeper than their bathtub. Swimming was an activity he couldn’t even consider. He only hoped the protective foam in his Helmet would keep him afloat if it came to that.

Looking back at Thunder Bay, Will recalled a painting his mother showed him in an art book she said had belonged to his grandfather. Ships in a harbor, some carts going alongside a cliff. “See anything?” she’d said. When Will replied no, she pointed to legs sprouting from a tiny splash in the corner like a flower. “I don’t get it,” Will said. “Icarus,” she said, indicating the splash. “He flew so high the sun melted his waxen wings and he fell to Earth. Except nobody noticed. Nobody cared. The world’s like that sometimes, Will. It’s too heartbreaking to look at.”

As they cruised farther out into the bay, Titus began rummaging in the pockets of his parka. He produced something, seemed to reject it, then placed it beside him on the bench seat. Will recognized it as a chickadee, except it wasn’t moving. Then Titus took out a wicked-looking fish knife and set it beside the bird. Will tried again to force himself to imagine Titus slicing Marcus, his throat, his chest, but he still couldn’t stitch the vision together in his mind. “Those elevators’re the tallest strivers for hundreds of miles!” Titus yelled over the motor’s white roar, pointing back at the harbor. “In my era, men came from all over, either to toil in them, or to toss themselves from the top! Some sad souls secured jobs only to perform that!”

“Why are your fingerprints in my house?” Will heard himself yell. And when Titus didn’t react, Will knew he’d only whispered it into the snoring of the motor. Soon the skiff passed through the southernmost gap in the breakwater—a giant’s version of a stone garden wall, car-size chunks of granite fitted together, all of it submerged hundreds of feet below—and Will knew that this passage had altered something fundamental inside him, that he was finally something different from a boy. Titus yelled about the millions of pounds of stone that went into the breakwater, the equivalent of five pyramids sunk beneath the lake. “Indian labor built it, mostly!” he said. “They put up a hefty chunk of Thunder Bay, but nobody honors their exertions!”

Out on the unsheltered water, a chop kicked up. No other vessels were on the lake except for a giant lakeboat anchored miles past the breakwater that Titus yelled was from Brazil and carried potash. Then Titus cut the engine and set the skiff to drift, the weight of their cargo dragging them on. The vessel lapped through the waves with the sound of slapping someone’s wet belly. A powerful inevitable feeling stood up in Will and informed him that he had this situation under control: he’d been training for this moment his whole life—all his Destructivity Experiments and brave Outside acts had prepared him well. He’d be as brave as Jonah jumping on that wolf, as brave as Marcus snatching the map from the Butler. He’d overwhelm Titus, not head on, but sneak up, garrote him, and force him to reveal where Marcus was. Already the man could barely breathe, so Will imagined strangling him would be something like popping a balloon with his bare hands or trying a new skateboard trick, scary and unwieldy at first, but easy once you barged through and tried it.

“You hungry, Icarus Number One?” Titus asked.

When Will shook his head, Titus lifted the dead chickadee from the bench and neatly stuffed it into his mouth like a pastry. He sat chewing, silhouetted by open lake. Stunned, Will listened to Titus’s soft crunches, his graying hair flying in the wind and eyes somewhere near gone. It occurred to him that Titus was leagues crazier than he or Jonah ever suspected and had suffered damage more titanic than anyone he’d ever met Outside. Titus swallowed, sucked air through his teeth, and stood. The skiff wobbled unsteadily under his weight and that of the hoses and the shopping bags of rocks, and a few pints of water splashed over the gunwales. Will tightened his grip on his seat as gulls whirlwinded overhead.

“Those resemble seagulls, but that’s negatory!” Titus said pointing upwards, too loud, as though the motor was still going. “They’re lake gulls!” He whirled around as they passed over, and the skiff tipped beneath him.

“Can you please sit down, Titus?” said Will.

“Gorge themselves on garbage all the livelong day! Riddled with blight, metastatics, and parasites!”

The skiff teetered worse, and a larger slap of water came over the side. Will saw it pooling beneath the labyrinth of hose. “Titus!” Will said.

“I took a cruise once,” he said, pointing to the anchored laker. “ ’Course that was another era. Best to leave it in the water.” Then he drew another, larger bird from his pocket and bit it bloodlessly in half, a tuft of down clinging to his lower lip.

As he gripped its dowels in his pocket, the garrote seemed suddenly ridiculous and toy-like in Will’s hands. Which string had he selected to make it? The highest or lowest? He couldn’t remember. Hadn’t his mother broken these strings while strumming the gentlest of folk songs? So how could this grown, lunatic of a man not be able to do the same? If Titus turned hostile, Will’s only hope would be to shoulder-check him overboard and start the engine before he could climb back in. He’d never make it to the breakwater. He could barely climb stairs.

Then Titus began to hop up and down at the back of the boat, whooping at the gulls. More water swamped into the skiff, soaking Will’s shoes. “Sit down!” Will yelled. “You’ll sink us!”

Suddenly Titus produced a sound near shrieking, and it poured slush down Will’s spine. He barked splinters of sentences and incantations as a diabolical force overrode his face, an amalgamation of surprise and sorrow and rage. But it was Titus’s avoidance of Will’s eyes that was most worrisome. Titus’s meeting his gaze seemed to form the last vestige of Will’s safety.

“No epoch but the current!” Titus roared, bending to pick up the fish knife, his eyes lustrous and blazed with gold. He pointed the tip to Will and stifled a chillingly girlish titter, then pointed the tip into the dark waves that flapped like fabric in a gale. “In we tumble,” he said.

“I don’t know how to swim,” Will whimpered, a small boyish utterance, as a great shaking overrode each of his muscles. “My mother never taught me.” What Will would give to be with her now, to be watching her snap a fresh sheet in the air over their bed, waiting for it to descend like a sweet parachute.

With that some dark spell was counteracted inside Titus, and at long last he met Will’s eyes. “She didn’t, did she?” he said. “I’m sure she had some silver explication. She’s too buoyant for it. It’s a risky businessman, swimming.” Then Titus chortled, and Will couldn’t decide if it was mirthful or maniacal.