Mosaic by Jo Bannister

kind of hope remained. The mounting scream erupted not as sound but as sudden, galvanic movement as he broke for the river.
    Vanderbilt raised his voice in complaint. “Grant, for pity’s sake! I can catch you as easily that side of the river as this, only then we’ll both be wet.” Reluctantly he changed up a gear, jog-trotting after the running man.
    There was a shallows where the brown water raced spumy over a spit of rock. Grant ran past it, leaping recklessly downstream along the rugged, uneven bank where the river turned dark and fast, hurrying unbroken over the deep smooth bed.
    Vanderbilt frowned, wondering why. Then he knew why and he was running too, harder than Grant, the big muscles driving his thick legs like pistons, his broad hands seeming to grapple the air out of his path. There was nothing graceful or fluent about the way he ran; sheer strength gave him speed. He was a scant dozen yards behind when Grant threw a last, fast glance over his shoulder—in a split second Vanderbilt recognized hatred, fear, resolve and a terrible grim triumph: a compound nothing short of madness—and then he was gone. The river received him with hardly a splash.
    For a brief moment trapped air ballooned the fabric of his coat towards the surface. Then it escaped in a silent silver explosion and the dark thing that was the man was rolled down into the turbid race.
    Grant made no attempt to find his feet. He had no interest in the far shore. The surging little river, which was even in the deeper reaches just shallow enough to wade breast-high, was plenty deep enough for his purposes. With enough determination a man can drown in a gutter. As he felt the cold current take him he emptied his lungs of the buoyant air and filled his mouth with water. He could taste the acid peat. But for the most fiercely ingrained of human taboos with which the body frustrates the will, he would have breathed it deeply into him, such was his haste to die. His tumbling body collided softly with the muddy bed of the stream and he was rolled along it with relentless energy by the hurrying flood. If he had wanted to he could not have saved himself then.
    Vanderbilt, who had no desire to die, paused on the bank just long enough to rid himself of his heavy outer clothing and his shoes. He waded into the icy brown flood some way downstream from where Grant had disappeared. The cold gnawing at his groin made him hiss; under his breath, while he groped through the water, he whispered with vicious monotony, cursing Grant in three languages.
    The stretched seconds passed. Only a very few of them now marched between Vanderbilt and failure. Twice he dived, his spread fingers sweeping the silted bed, but he could not see through the brown fog and the strong current tugged him away from his station. Each time he recovered his feet with difficulty, setting his big body against the river, trawling it with wide arms, wholly aware that his best efforts could not stop tons of the opaque brown stuff passing him by with every second, enigmatic, any burden it carried hidden from his gaze. With mounting desperation he wondered if he should submit himself to the current, let it bear him away with its other trophies, in the hope that chance might bring him the prize endeavour denied him.
    Something touched his leg. It did not feel like a man’s body tumbling against him, or anything he could put a name to. But Vanderbilt had not paused to consider what it might be. That flaccid random touch was all he had been waiting for, and at it he flung himself bodily at the thing deep in the water.
    For a moment he could not find it; then the frantic, slow-motion milling of his hands connected with something inert in the stream and his fingertips recognized the texture of cloth. Groping for an elusive hold he encountered the gossamer threads of floating hair: he twisted it in a grip that Victoria Falls would not have broken and lunged for the surface and the