Surface Tension by Meg McKinlay Page A

sticks.
    Maybe it didn’t make sense to draw a map in the mud when we could have just used paper, but it seemed right somehow. When it rained it would be gone, washed away, but for now the sun baked it hard into the ground, solidifying the lines we had scratched out.
    That was the day we found it.
    I had pushed myself down from the edge of the raft, enjoying the feeling of spearing through the water, then kicking up towards the dark square that hung above me, framed against the brightness of the day. The sun was overhead and it was light in the water. Even a few metres down I could see my hands in front of my face, watch my feet below me disappearing into the deep.
    It was a fish, I thought at first when my toe brushed the edge of something. There was lake weed in closer to the shore but you wouldn’t get that this deep. But it hadn’t felt like a fish. It hadn’t felt like something that was passing, something I could nudge gently with my foot, sending it on its way through the water.
    It had felt solid. It had felt …
there
.
    When I surfaced, Liam was leaning down over the side of the raft. “What?” he asked.
    “There’s something down there.”
    “In the water? Like what?”
    “Good question.”
    “Hang on. Do you think …?”
    “Only one way to find out.”
    We dived down.
    We dived down together and freaked each other out bumping into one another in the shifting light. We surfaced together and freaked out when we realised the raft had drifted while we were under. Liam swam to get it while I stayed behind, treading water. After that we took turns, one of us staying with the raft, one of us slicing down into the lake.
    I went feet first, tin-soldiering myself off the edge of the raft, pointing my toes down and down, straining for the tiny tip of whatever it was, if it had even been anything at all.
    Liam went headfirst, hurling himself off the side. “It’s safe,” he said. “There’s nothing shallow here. And we can use our arms better that way, to pull ourselves down.”
    I knew he was right but I couldn’t make myself do it. There was something about having my face lead the way into the dark that gave me the creeps.
    “I’m going pretty deep,” I said.
    “I’m going deeper,” Liam replied.
    “I don’t know,” I said when he surfaced for what must have been the twentieth time. “Maybe it was nothing. Maybe …”
    Then I stopped. Because Liam was grinning. Because there was something in his hand, clenched tightly between his fingers.
    “You wouldn’t have got that off with your toes,” he said.
    “What is it?”
    “Wood.”
    “Oh.” Something like disappointment washed over me. Wood. That was all. A submerged tree, maybe.
    Liam shook his head. “Here.”
    Something else started growing in me then, something that wasn’t disappointment but more like … anticipation, expectation. Because it wasn’t that kind of wood. Not some bit of a stick or sheet of bark Liam had peeled off a tree, but part of a plank of wood, with milled edges and nail holes and the faint stain of rust.
    Liam pulled himself up onto the raft. “There’s more of it. A lot. Like a wall or something.”
    I laid the plank down on the raft and stared at it. How deep had it been? How old was it? And what was it from? What had it been part of, once upon a long time ago? The bakery, maybe? Or Tuckers? The old artists’ studio! That was a wooden building.
    Liam shook his head. “Not out here.”
    I looked around us. He was right. We were nowhere near the town. We were on the other side, out in the hills. That meant the ground was closer to the surface of the water and more likely to be accidentally kickable by a foot, but also that there was nothing but trees and farms. Not even any houses because they were all clustered down near the road so they could connect to the water and the power and all of that.
    Liam went down again. He dived over and over, pulling up piece after piece of old, rotting wood and laying them