is horrified to see that the boulder is no longer there. The waters have somehow deepened, and she is much farther from shore than she thought.
She powers forward toward Gaia, seizing her by the hair just as she begins to fall under. She wraps her arms around her and holds her, their wet faces pressed cheek to cheek, both bodies shaking with terror and cold.
“Mumma,” Gaia says weakly, and Aurelia urges her to keep kicking her legs, to stay awake, not to fall asleep.
“Please, darling,” she says. “I know you want to go to sleep so badly, but you have to try to stay awake, OK? I’ll get you that dollhouse you wanted. You have to try, Gaia. Please!”
Gaia gives a faint murmur in response and wraps her arms around Aurelia’s neck, but her grip loosens, and Aurelia is forced to swim with one arm, using the other to hook Gaia’s face up out of the water. She sweeps and sweeps the water, dragging them to the shore, but the mist is thickening again and she can’t see where she’s going. She’s trying desperately to draw on adrenaline and reserves of certainty. If she panics, her energy reserves won’t last, and if that happens, it’s over.
“Nearly there,” she tells Gaia. “Nearly there.”
But then, Gaia vanishes. Aurelia looks into the space between her arms, which are encircled in the water as though she’s doing ballet. She’s standing, too, her feet no longer adrift in the depths but on shale, the water reaching her chest.
“Gaia?” she shouts. Her cries echo off the cliffs. The reindeer are gone. She stares into the jaws of the fjord. “Gaia?”
But there is no Gaia. There is only Aurelia in the fjord. The mists all around watch on, a silent, waiting congregation. And when she wakes, they are in the room with her, portentous, watching, whispering their omen.
33
the discovery
NOW
Tom, Clive, and a handful of the workers stand around the pit of dark clay and look down at what the digger has revealed.
It’s a body.
A few of the men cross themselves.
Clive and Tom share a look.
Tom finds he is ambushed by the memory of identifying Aurelia’s body in the morgue. His knees buckle, but he manages to lean on the digger and hold it together.
Clive jumps down into the pit, his feet almost landing on the corpse.
“Clive,” Tom finds himself saying. They ought not to touch it. More signs of the cross are made as Clive leans over the remains.
Clive can see the body has been in here a long time. The skull is most visible of all, leering up at the men, the jaw tilted forward and the teeth bared. There is some clothing, too, made of dark coarse fabric, stained in places from the earth. He swallows back a mouthful of vomit before taking out his phone to snap a few shots and climbing back up the bank of earth to approach Tom.
“This isn’t good,” he says. Tom is pale. He shakes his head in response. Clive looks over the workers. They are muttering among themselves in Norwegian.
“I think this is a good time for a lunch break,” he calls out to everyone, signaling that they should disperse while he and Tom figure out the next steps. Tom seems to have lost all strength in his arms and legs, and is panting. After a good deal of wondering what’s wrong with him, Clive remembers that Aurelia hasn’t been dead a year, and that perhaps the sight of the body has proved too much for Tom. He wraps an arm around him and helps him to his feet.
“Let’s go for a smoke,” he says. It’s the first acknowledgment he’s made of Tom’s filthy, environmentally toxic habit. Tom nods.
They smoke in the kitchen while Clive summons the words to say to Tom. “Look, I don’t want to freak you out any further,” he says. “But we need to act fast.”
Tom nods, sucks at his cigarette. He already knows that, thanks. A dead body right in the center of a building site is worse than a landslide or quicksand. A body means they have to call in the gamut of environmental agencies, police, surveyors, and God knows who else. They’ll have to exhume the body, obviously, but that alone can take ages. They’ll have to scour the site for other bodies, and it won’t matter that they’re presently building a house here—if more bodies are found, they’ll have to tear it down. Forensics teams will do their work. At