The lake had been warm at four in the afternoon. That was the lie it told to get people into it at midnight.

By the time Adkins finished his speech, the sun had been down three hours and the water had cooled to roughly the temperature of an open fridge. He had delivered the speech from the end of the dock in a pair of rubber sliders and a towel slung around his neck, where it kept his collarbones warm and left the rest of him to the evening air. He had used the phrase "we earned this" four times and "trust exercise" twice. On the second "trust exercise," Soap had cannonballed off the dock purely to get underwater where the words would have to swim after him, and everyone else had gone in after, one way or another. Now the dock held a stack of towels, an empty cooler, and Ghost.

Ghost sat against the last post at the far end with his boots planted on the boards and his mask rolled up to the bridge of his nose so he could smoke. The fire pit on the shore threw a long orange stripe across the water. It lit the near end of the dock, the ladder, and the towels Gaz had folded and stacked in order of ownership, {{poss_p}} third from the top, then gave up about twenty feet short of Ghost, which looked to be exactly where Ghost preferred it to give up. The cigarette brightened and dimmed. His eyes moved from the swimmers to the trees and back again in a slow, even sweep, like a lighthouse with a grudge.

Price floated on his back a short distance out from everyone else, arms spread, beard aimed at the stars, wearing the deeply satisfied face of a man who had organized his own morale trip and intended to get his money's worth out of it. Every so often he lifted his head, counted the dark shapes in the water, and let it settle back.

Gaz stood up to his chest in the shallows, where the sand gave way to something softer that everyone had silently agreed to keep calling sand. His right hand kept drifting to his left wrist to check the time on a watch currently sitting on top of his folded jeans. He caught himself at it twice, gave the bare wrist a look of mild betrayal, and put the hand back in the water.

Soap was everywhere. He had already swum to the rope swing, missed it, swum back, and floated in a lazy circle telling the stars about it. The lake had won its argument with his mohawk, which lay plastered across his forehead like a small drowned animal.

"Lieutenant," he called up at the dock. "Ye've been on that fag ten minutes. Get in, or Ah'm comin' up there wi' a bucket."

"Try it."

Soap looked at the ladder. He looked at the boots. He swam off to bother Gaz instead.

Adkins surfaced beside {{user}} with a gasp loud enough to shake the moths off the dock lamp, slicked his hair back with both hands, and pointed at {{obj}}.

"Forty one seconds," he announced to the lake at large. "That's breath holding to me. Put it on the board."

The board was Adkins's own invention. For three days he had kept a running tally between himself and {{user}}, and since he had lost every contest with a clear winner, he had moved on to inventing categories. Most fish spotted. Best cannonball, as judged by Adkins. Most improved at cribbage, which he had learned on Tuesday. He glanced over at {{user}} to make sure {{sub}} had heard, then hauled himself up the ladder in a shower of lake water and peered into the cooler with the face of a man reading bad news.

"Right. Beer run." He held up a dripping finger. "Nobody touches the board while I'm gone."

There was a short, visible negotiation between Adkins and his own sense of dignity, at the end of which the towel came down from his neck and went around his waist. He set off up the path along the treeline toward the house, sliders slapping, towel flapping, the white of it shrinking between the pines until the dark folded over it. The frogs on the far bank, who had been shouting at one another all night, carried on shouting.

The fire ate one log and started on the next. Soap informed Gaz that he could make the far dock and back in under five minutes, and Gaz informed Soap that he had just been beaten by a rope, mate, and the two of them settled into the comfortable rhythm of men who would be having this argument until one of them died of old age. Price hummed something tuneless at the sky.

Across the water, the frogs stopped.

All of them, at once, the way a room goes quiet when someone walks in. Ghost's sweep halted on the mouth of the treeline path. He lowered the cigarette. Up at the house, the porch light burned over the door, and moths ticked against it, and the kitchen window behind it stayed dark.

One frog started again. Then a few. Then all of them, shouting their heads off as though they'd only stopped to catch their breath. Ghost lifted the cigarette back to his mouth and went on with his sweep, slower now across the trees.

Soap rolled onto his back and squinted toward the house. "How long's it take tae find a beer? He's either lost or he's drinkin' them up there hissel'."

Gaz reached for his wrist, met bare skin, and put the hand back in the water. "Twenty minutes, give or take."

"Leave the lad be," Price said, without lifting his head. "Man's entitled to a bit of peace and quiet. God knows the rest of us are."

Soap drifted over and hung in the water beside {{user}}, chin resting on the surface, eyes bright with mischief.

"Forty one seconds, he says. Ah counted twenty six." He wiggled his eyebrows. "So go on, then. Whit's the real score?"

Morning came up over the lake gray and soft, with a skin of mist on the water so thick the far bank looked like a rumor. A heron stood in the shallows by the dock on one leg, holding very still and regarding the whole arrangement with deep suspicion.

Soap was the one who found the bunk.

He had gone in armed with a saucepan lid and a wooden spoon, in the twin spirits of fairness and revenge, intending to deliver Adkins's wake up call personally. The bunk was made. Tight corners, blanket squared, pillow plumped, exactly as Adkins had left it the afternoon before, after spending fifteen minutes on it so he could point out that it beat everyone else's. Soap stood in the doorway with the spoon raised and the lid at his hip, like a very small marching band that had arrived at the wrong funeral.

By the time the others got there, he had set both down on the dresser.

The rest came together fast after that, the way bad news tends to once it finds the door. Adkins's boots sat by the front step, laces tucked in, right where he had lined them up two days ago so he could say his were the cleanest. His phone lay on the kitchen counter, plugged in, battery full, the screen lighting up every few minutes with fresh messages from a group chat called LADS LADS LADS. Gaz opened the fridge and found two crates of beer on the bottom shelf, untouched. He closed the fridge. He opened it again, as though the beer might have an explanation it was willing to give a second time.

Out on the treeline path, about halfway to the lake, one rubber slider sat upright in the dirt, neatly, like someone had stepped out of it to go do something else. Three feet past it, the pine needles had been scraped into two shallow troughs, a heel's width apart, running off the path and into the trees.

Gaz crouched over them for a long time. His thumb rubbed slow circles over the face of his watch, which was back on his wrist where it belonged, for all the good it was doing anyone now.

Price stood on the porch with a mug of tea going cold in his hand and looked out at the lake the same way he had looked at it last night, minus everything that had made last night worth looking at. Then he went inside, set the mug on the counter beside the phone, and came back out with the pistol. He checked the magazine. He checked it again, and his mouth went flat under the beard, the face of a man counting something he already knew the number of.

"Right," he said. "Pairs. Everyone stays within shoutin' distance of somebody. Soap, Gaz, you've got the path and the trees either side of it, and you follow those marks as far as they go and not one step further. I'll take the house and the road." He looked down the porch steps. "Ghost. You and {{user}} take the shoreline. Boathouse and round. Back here in thirty. Anyone's late, we come lookin', and nobody'll enjoy the mood I'm in when we find you."

Soap had already found the fire poker. He weighed it in one hand, gave it an experimental twirl, and wore the grin he usually saved for detonators.

"Ah'll say it, since naebody else will. Somebody came oot here on oor leave an' nicked one o' ours." He pointed the poker at the treeline. "That's a hunt, that."

"That's a fire poker, mate," Gaz said.

"It's a hunt wi' a fire poker."

Ghost tugged his mask down into place, cracked his neck, one side then the other, and went down the porch steps. At the bottom he stopped and looked back at {{user}}, head tipped a degree toward the water. Then he walked.

The shoreline path ran along the lake's edge in a narrow strip of mud and reeds, with the woods crowding close on the left and the mist breathing on the right. Ghost took it a half step ahead and to the tree side, boots placed where the mud was firm, head turning in that same slow sweep from last night, trees, water, trees. Dew soaked the hems of everyone's trousers. Somewhere out on the lake a fish jumped and landed with a sound like a dropped glove.

The boathouse sat at the end of the path where the bank curved, a gray shed on squat pilings with a green tin roof and one side gone soft and dark with rot. The heron had relocated to its roof. It took one look at Ghost and left.

A man stood at the near corner of the boathouse, facing the house.

He was big through the shoulders and chest, in a dark canvas work jacket, a worn cap and a black knit balaclava. A long handled brush hook hung from one gloved hand, blade down, resting against his boot. Dew beaded across his shoulders and the bill of his cap, the same dew sitting on the reeds and the roof and the grass, which meant he had been standing there long enough to collect it.

His head turned. Slowly. Toward them.

Ghost's hand went to his vest, and the knife left it in the same motion. It crossed the gap with a short whisper and landed high in the man's shoulder, just under the collarbone, with a sound like a cleaver going into a board.

The man rocked back half a step. He looked down at the handle standing out of his jacket. He reached up with his free hand, closed it around the grip, and pulled the knife out, the blade coming free with a wet tug and a dark spill down the canvas. He held it a moment, turning it, the way someone looks over a tool somebody else left lying around.

Then he put it in his pocket.

He turned toward the rotten side of the boathouse, lowered his good shoulder, and walked straight at it. The planks gave with a crack like a snapped oar, and he went through the wall and out the far side in a shower of splinters and wet wood, onto the bank beyond, into the trees. Brush rustled under his boots, steady, unhurried, a man walking home from work, fainter and fainter, until the woods swallowed it whole.

A hole the size of a doorway gaped in the side of the boathouse. Pale morning light came through it and lay across the mud in a long, ragged shape.

Ghost looked at the hole. He looked down at his empty hand. His fingers curled in, slowly, into a fist.

"Tank," he said.