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if someone doesn’t turn it off.”
    Derek had read her mind again, picked up on her thoughts about the fishbowl. She hated it when he did that. Patterson did it too.
    Well, she couldn’t tell someone to pull the plug.
    Cody’s light strokes were suddenly challenged by a strong current, and she dug her paddle in deeper. “Push!” she shouted back. “Harder!”
    It felt as if some invisible force were pulling them backward, away from Yakutat. She concentrated on deep even strokes. Push, pull. Even breathing. In, out. Even, steady. Push, pull. Breathing timed with strokes. Derek followed her lead.
    The bandanna slipped from her face. She didn’t stop to retie it. Sweat dripped into her eyes. She blinked away the stinging salt. The paddle was slick with sweat and water. Like wet feet, wet hands caused blisters. She sacrificed a few seconds to wrap her sweatshirt around the slippery handle.
    She figured that the current should have been pushing them forward, in the direction of Yakutat and the beach near the boggy trail that climbed uphill to the pickup. Instead, it was fighting them. Then she realized that all the beaches were buried in a watery grave, as the shoreline plants were. They’d probably have to swim through the forest to the truck.
    The Tide: that was how Cody thought about it—with a capital letter. It should be receding. Ebb and flow and gravitational pull. She’d studied it in science class. The moon and sun controlled the surface level of oceans, bays, gulfs, inlets, and fjords.
    But the water in Russell Fjord was intent on rising, with no signs of slacking off. The current was using all its muscle to fight the two paddlers, pulling on them from the open sea as if it would never let them go.
    “We’re hardly moving,” Derek said. “I’ve been watching the same clump of trees for half an hour.”
    Cody studied the mountains and forests through the early-morning glare. A landscape that should havebeen passing slowly to the side and rear of the kayak, passing behind them as they skimmed forward.
    Derek was right: Everything stood in place.
    Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and she swallowed hard. She didn’t remember the outfitters mentioning a tide that refused to fall.
    She thought about the history of the fjord. Eight hundred years ago a massive glacier had filled both Disenchantment Bay and Yakutat Bay and extended into the Pacific Ocean. Russell Fjord had been blocked by a dam of ice and could only drain into the ocean along one channel, called Old Situk Creek.
    The answer came as clear as the freshwater layer on top of the seawater.
    “I know why the water is still rising,” she gasped.

"I don’t get it,” Derek said after she’d explained it.
    “What do you mean Hubbard surged?”
    Cody thought of another word for
surge
. “It advanced.” She remembered the outfitters talking about Hubbard Glacier one night after she’d crawled into her tent. They had used simple terms:
advance
and
retreat
. To advance meant to move forward. To retreat meant to move back.
    Their conversation came back to her: 1986 was the last time Hubbard Glacier had surged. More than seventy miles long, the river of slowly moving ice had slid across the mouth of Russell Fjord, sealing off Disenchantment Bay and forming the world’s largest glacier-formed lake.
    “Are you sure?” Derek asked.
    “All the streams and rivers are draining into the fjord.” She shouted over the wind, which was picking up. “All the water that usually flows out to sea on the tide doesn’t have anywhere to go.”
    “No way out.”
    She silently finished his thought:
Just like us
.
    She gripped her paddle as a fist of wind rumbled down the passage, smacking them in the face. Thekayak lunged another foot backward. This wasn’t good at all. It was as if Yakutat were intent on pushing them away.
    A wind like this usually brought foul weather. An old Alaskan saying jabbed at her: “If you don’t like the weather, wait five