The next morning, I found myself looking up from the table of covered with maps at the sound of a boat riding across the lake. Ryan walked out to meet it.

Connor was just visible in the distance at the end the pontoon. Stephen was sitting a little way off, surrounded by test tubes filled with water in and wearing an expression almost as exhausted as my own.

The boat came to a gentle stop and Nick got off, shaking Ryan's hand in greeting before they started down the ramp towards me.

'Hey, good morning!' Nick called as he got closer.

'Hmm, yeah, not for her,' Ryan interjected before I had the chance to respond, 'she's been here all night.'

'What?' Nick came to a stop in front of my table and I lift my gaze to find him staring down at me. 'I thought I told you to go home and get some rest.'

'You did,' I replied, 'I did, Connor and I even got half way there before I brought us back.' I lifted a finger before Nick could reprimand me and I quickly went on to explain. 'I realised something. Here. These are maps,' I explained, 'local within a 30 mile radius, detailing swimming pools, lakes, rivers, any body of water right?'

'Right...' Cutter repeated.

'And we know that the anomaly, linearly to the past first appeared at the swimming pool, here.' I pointed to the dot marked out on the map. 'Whereas we know Anthony Barton– G R H S– got swallowed before it ran to the reservoir, here.' I pointed to our currently location. 'Where we found his remain. Which must have been approximately 6-12 hours after his death, according to the rate of digestion. Yesterday, I said it was connected somehow to water, except I checked and there aren't any streams or pond or goddamn sprinkler systems between them. I think it's a Tem–Fau.'

Ryan frowned, 'what's a Tem-Fau?'

'A temporal fault line,' Nick clarified.

'What does that mean?' Ryan asked.

'Well, that's not actually important, what you need to understand is how it works in this instance. Do you know how Hawaii was formed?' I questioned. Ryan paused thoughtfully for a moment, so I took the silence as an invitation to continue. 'Basically, a hot point beneath the earths crust melted the oceanic plate above and magma broke through and formed land, then a shift in the convection current beneath the tectonic plate forces that land to move but the hot-spot remains in the same place, melts that oceanic plate and creates new land again.

'What are you trying to say?'

'The past is the hot-spot,' I explain, 'no matter where the anomaly appears next, it'll be along this line.'

'Brilliant.' Nick put a hand on my shoulder as I sank back in my chair and sighed, exhausted, 'good job.'

'Professor?' Connor's voice carried from somewhere around the lake and I immediately started flapping a hand.

'Yeah, yeah, we should go. He got bored and started distracting me around 4 am, I told him to check the water level.' I scraped back my chair and stood up. I looked up to see him still jabbing the water with a stick, 'let's...' I gestured towards him.

'Professor,' he called again as we walked down the pontoon, 'you're really going to want to see this. The reservoir's land locked right?'

'Yeah.'

'So, allow for condensation and rainfall. The depth should be pretty consistent?'

'Yes.'

He pulled the stick out the water and pointed to a strip of red tape stuck around it.

'I made this mark at water level earlier.' The he dropped the stick back into the water. The boardwalk beneath us began to wobble from the effort of Stephens heavy footsteps stomping towards us and he came to a slow stop beside Nick. 'The water level's fallen 40 cm since then,' Connor explained, 'this isn't a reservoir anymore, it's a tidal lake. The water's literally pouring out.'

'It must be flowing out through the anomaly. Which means it's still down there somewhere.'

I remembered a long time after I realised I'd been watching him, that it was– in fact– rude to stare.

Nick was standing at the very edge of the pontoon, squinting from the sunlight as it reflected off the surface of the lake.

Someone had gone on a supply run. As annoying as it was having the Home Office sniffing around most of the time, even I had to admit having them there had some positives. 20 or so cup of hot, black coffee had arrived and been dumped down on a desk, and after waiting for the soldiers to claim the ones they wanted I picked up two of the remaining cups and walked down to Nick.

I got his attention by tapping him lightly on the arm and he turned his head down towards me. 'Here.' I passed him one of the cups, then quickly realised that was the one I had already drank out of and corrected myself, 'wait, this one.'

He laughed under his breath. 'Thank you very much.' Taking the cup from me, he lifted it to his lips and took a sip before his eyes flickered back to the lake.

'You're thinking about Helen,' I said. I didn't think much about it before I'd said it, and realised far too late that I probably shouldn't have said anything at all. It wasn't difficult to realise; he'd been thinking about what happened to her since we first set foot through the original anomaly. Nick whipped his head down to look at me, then, he proceeded to stare directly into me, until I turned my head and met his gaze.

'How do you know that?'

'I know that look in your eye.' I'm sure I had the same one whenever I thought about my family. 'You're not happy.'

'I'm not un-happy,' he replied reassuringly.

But I wasnt worried. 'Yeah,' I agreed, 'that's the one.'

He knew what I meant. He slowly started to nod. 'Yeah.' He sighed. 'Whatever I'm doing she's always there, she never really goes away.'

'Guilt does that. It's like a cancer.'

'You think it's guilt?' he asked.

'You said it yourself. You think it's your fault she went missing because you didn't go with her.'

'Yeah,' he agreed, 'but honestly I'm not thinking about her for that reason... for a change. I think it's strange. Of all the people in the world to hallucinate about, Stephen chose Helen.'

I hummed in response, raised my cup to my lips to take another sip as I turned to glance across the lake at Connor, just to check where he was and make sure he was okay. I quickly located him on the other side of the lake with Stephen so I started to bring my attention back to Nick when I noticed it. 'Steam,' I said.

'Huh?' Nick replied.

'There, see?' I pointed out to the middle of the lake where vapours of steam hung just above the surface of the water. It was a sign. 'The tide must be coming in and bringing in warmer water from the other side, the steam is telling us exactly where the anomaly is.'

'You really want to go down there with them?' I asked again as Nick and I walked quickly down the dock towards the boat. He was already in a wet suit so his mind was obviously made up and it wouldn't make much difference now. But I felt better for asking.

'You don't?' He returned.

'I want to stay with Connor,' I replied, 'if Stephen's going with you then someone's got to look after him. I've got a bad feeling about him today, I don't know why.'

Nick laughed. 'That's a good point. You don't have to worry about me.'

'Oh I'm not, I'm worried about all the extra paperwork I'll have to do if you drown, I don't want the responsibility.' Then, I felt my face drop. 'The creature could still be down there,' I said.

'If it is, we'll find it.' He hopped up into the boat, leaving me standing there on the dock whilst he sat down beside Stephen on the bench in the boat. The engine ripped into life, and he had to raise his voice to a yell to ensure I could still hear him over the noise. 'I'll be fine! Don't worry.'

'I'll always worry,' I finished, and the boat pulled away, and the pontoon rocked in the wake of the waves.

Connor groaned as we trudged back across the gritty shoreline, waterproof waders pulled up to our chests and wellies protruding out of the ends. 'Why does Stephen get all the fun stuff to do while we get stuck collecting water samples?'

'He looks better in a wetsuit,' I heard myself reply. And then, before Connor could see the expression I pulled, I turned around.

'That's debatable.'

'Okay, better than you in wetsuit,' I corrected.

Connor huffed. 'yeah, alright, that's probably true, but I can do the action stuff as well you know; I'm not just a massive intellect.'

'Aw, Con,' I cooed, linking an arm through his, 'you're perfect just the way you are. Intellect and...'

He tutted, 'oh, ha ha.'

'Hey,' I complained as he tried to pull his arm from mine, 'I'm kidding, I'm kidding Con, come on. I wouldn't change you for the world, just, please don't hurt yourself trying to do something Stephen could probably do in his sleep.'

'I hate you,' he grumbled.

Laughing, I pulled him back again. 'Connor, hey, I know you can't choose your family, but if you could, I'd still choose you.'

I watched him try to fight the smile but was unsuccessful and gave it to a grin. 'Really?'

'Of course.'

There was a moment of quiet before either one of us spoke where all we could hear was the sound of the stones crunching beneath our wellies.

'He doesn't remember a thing you know,' Connor resumed, 'Stephen.'

'That's not the point,' I replied, 'he knew what he was doing when he asked me out–' I had another sudden realisation, '–and he knew he had a girlfriend! And he knew that Nick and I–' I stopped talking. Even I didn't know what was going on with that.

'Yeah and he'd just been poisoned by a giant centipede that might have affected his judgement just a little bit.' He paused. 'But, that being said, I do get the feeling.'

'Yes, the feeling,' I agreed.

'The impression,' he repeated, 'and the feeling that he... you know... He has this way of looking at you when you aren't looking. He laughs when you make a joke that isn't funny–'

'–subjective–' I interrupted defensively.

'–and he asks me stuff, about you, personal stuff. So, while I'm pretty sure he isn't some two-timing scumbag who just set out to make you and Cutter hate each other just so he can sleep with you, I'm not 100%,' he said. 'Why are we even talking about this, it wasn't like you were actually going to go to dinner with him, were you?'

I thought for a second. 'I would,' I said, to keep my promise. 'I wouldn't have enjoyed it.'

'Well okay then. Why did you agree?'

My lips pursed. 'There are some things you learn the hard way in doctor school Connor, things that arent in any textbooks. One of those things is that sometimes you can do every medical thing in your power to save someone but if they don't want to survive their chances are much, much lower.'

'We're you worried he wouldn't pull through?' he asked.

'Not so much worried, just... aware of what would happen to him and I wanted to make sure he had the best chances. We all have to do things we don't want to.' And I was compelled further by oath.

'He doesn't remember asking–'

'He says he doesn't,' I butted in. 'I get the feeling, the impression, he might just be saying that in front of Nick.'

Connor seemed to think for a second. 'That makes a lot of sense. What are you going to do?'

'I haven't got a clue.' I looked out across the lake again, just in time to see the two of them, equipment in hand, jump from the boat into the water. 'I kissed him, Con,' I said, as I suddenly realised I hadn't told him.

'What? Who?' he responded, 'Stephen?'

'No, Nick.'

'When?'

'Well, first at the hotel, then at uni that night after we came back through the anomaly.'

Connor was quiet for the longest amount of time he'd ever been quiet in his life, and I found it strangely unnerving. 'You just kissed him, right?'

'What? Yeah–'

'I'm just saying his office has a lot of... surfaces.'

I realised what he meant and groaned. 'Stop it. I have not had sex with your lecturer, okay?'

He stepped back, his wellies squelching as his feet sloshed into the lake. 'But you're hardly going to announce it if you do, right?'

I followed him out. 'Right,' I agreed, 'who I sleep with, and when, is not your business.'

'It is if he's my professor,' he replied.

I held up my hands, 'if you wanted to sleep with him, you should have just said. I didnt know you had dibs.'

'You know, if I were gay–'

'I know you're not gay, Connor.'

He looked at me with a frown. 'If I were gay,' he repeated more firmly, 'I'd like to think I could do better than the professor.'

'Hey, believe me, you could do a lot worse than Nick Cutter,' I told him. Then, under my breath I continued, 'he's a great kisser.'

Connor groaned and reached out to splash me. 'I don't want to know.' He reached into the big front pocket on his waders and tossed one of the collection pots to me. 'I still don't understand why we have to be the ones to take water samples.'

'Well,' I replied, 'not only is this safer, it's also a lot more important. Any sort of long extinct algae could be pouring through that anomaly into the reservoir with enough medicinal properties to cure cancer. You would be responsible for finding it.' As I started to unscrew the first pot to dunk it into the water, I heard Connor wading up behind me, before I felt his hand close around the strap of my dungarees. 'What are you doing?'

'I'm... just a little worried that you're gonna be knocked off your feet and carried out...' he explained, just as I felt his grip tightening, 'so I'm holding on to you.'

I scooped up some water into the first pot and smiled, tucking it into the pocket in the overalls, then turned around, taking another pot off him and pulling him further out into the lake.

'This is actually pretty metaphorical of our relationship,' I joked, 'you holding me up by holding on.'

'Nah, you've always held yourself up Anna,' he replied.

Face angled down to the water, I smiled. 'Yeah, but, if you let go I'd fall.' I felt his hand tighten again, his breath suddenly catching in his throat and sensing that something was wrong I looked up from the water and followed his line of focus to immediately locate an ominous shape moving towards us.

'Anna...' he sighed out under his breath, 'what's that?'

I slowly lifted a finger to my lips, and he got the message: don't speak, don't make a sound. 'Don't move,' I whispered. He replied through a look in his eyes, and reading it, I turned my head to look back over my shoulder at the shoreline. We hadn't gone too far out, it wasn't more than 10 meters. The creature circled us curiously. Now it had our scent.

I was acutely aware of how painful my heartbeat felt in my chest, how heavy it was pounding like it was trying to break out of me and I had to physically forced myself to remain calm; panicking last time was the reason Stephen almost died and I needed to keep a clear head.

The shoreline. We needed to get to the shoreline. And I knew as soon as we started to move the creature in the water would be right behind us.

I held up my hand, lifting my fingers to count down slowly from 3 to 1.

And we surged forwards, splashing back through the water to shore where my feet ran aground moments before Connors did and I grabbed his hand to help yank him back onto land.

A moment later, the creature burst out the water, snapping at our ankles and we retreated clumsily further back up the bank to the fence.

I saw the paddle of an ore overhanging the end of a boat nearby and stomped down. The ore flew up, and I caught the handle in one hand and immediately spun around, smacking the creature on the end of the nose.

It growled, the scales of its face concertinaed as it gnarled it teeth, jaw opening wider as I clawed its way further up the bank.

I lunged forward again, jamming the ore upright in its open mouth and the creature roared. It started to slam its head against the ground to try and remove the irritation from its mouth but the attempts were in vain and after crashing backwards into a loose pile of kayaks, it was caught up in the avalanche of boats and tumbled back into the water.

I waited for what felt like hours for the creature to remerge from the depths, but it didn't. And taking a deep breath I turned around to check that Connor was okay.

I don't know how Nick heard about it, but I could tell from his expression when he walked purposefully across the dock towards us that someone must have told him about the attack.

I saw him coming.

Connor had fallen unnaturally silent again. His eyes remained drawn off to the water in what I expected was an attempt to make sure the creature wasn't coming back. I slowly pulled my fingers from the pulse point on his wrist and reached out towards the medical equipment nearby to grab a blanket to put around his shoulders.

Then I stood up, walking back up the pontoon to Nick. 'A Mosasaur,' I told him before he had the opportunity to say anything himself.

'You sure?' he responded as he reached me.

'Definitely a Mosasaur. I saw enough of its teeth to know. It's about 6, maybe 7 meters. Scary, but at that size it couldn't have even been fully grown–'

'Which is just as well for you. Are you okay?'

I paused, lifting a hand to my neck to take my own pulse. 'It's like alarmingly normal.'

'No,' he replied, 'are you okay?'

Tilting my head slightly from confusion, I searched his expression for any indication of what that actually meant. 'Okay?' I repeated, 'yeah. I'm surprising fine– I feel fine.'

'Come here.' I felt his hand on my waist as he took half a step towards me and enclosed me in his arms.

'Nick...' I attempted to argue again. It felt like I could feel people watching us even if in reality that was far from the truth.

'Anna, I'm not going anywhere.'

He leant in and I wrapped my arms around his shoulders. He held on to me just as tightly, dropping his head to rest it against my shoulder and I could feel his the exhale of his breath fan out across my neck.

A short cough from behind us made me pull back to find Ryan standing behind us. 'Sorry,' he said sheepishly, like he thought he was interrupting something, 'they're um–they're all really upset about losing the diver. Tell me exactly what happened.'

'He swam through right in front of me. He should have been able to make it back through.' Nick glanced back over to the team of divers. Amongst them, someone was helping Stephen out his equipment. Once his tank and harness had been removed he turned around to face us, his gaze met mine, and everything I'd talked about with Connor started to replay in my head.

'Something must have stopped him,' I said.

'Are you absolutely certain the anomaly's closed?' Ryan questioned.

'Straight after the mosasaur went back through,' Nick said, 'the water temperature's already back to normal.'

'Then we've lost him,' Ryan sighed.

'Yeah.'

'And you, Anna?' I turned my attention back to the Captain.

'I'm okay, actually. I probably shouldn't be, but...'

His arm came out– I wasn't really paying enough attention because I'd been too busy thinking about the mosasaur– and instead just saw his hand coming towards my face. And for a split second I thought it was going to hit me and flinched and braced for the pain, but his hand fell to my shoulder. He squeezed. 'What you did was really brave.'

Shaking my head slightly, I responded, 'not really. It was just... desperate measures... you know. It's not exactly the first time we've almost died together. I actually owed him one.' I looked back at my cousin, only to find he wasn't sitting on the ground where I'd left him but was now standing on the edge of the dock, cocooned in a blanket that didn't quite hang low enough to cover his shaking hands. 'Sorry... excuse me...'

He jumped slightly when I stepped up to his side and took his hand, turning it over and holding it gently in my smaller palm before I pressed my fingers to his wrist to take his pulse again.

'Take a deep breath,' I told him.

He inhaled, held it for a moment, before he breathed the air out his mouth in one long sigh.

I smiled. 'You see, that's already better.' I put my hand in his.

'You saved my life.'

'I did, didn't I?' I responded. But when I saw that he couldn't even manage a smile, I squeezed his hand. 'Well, now we're even.' But he didn't react. It wasn't like him. 'What's wrong?'

He laughed out his nose and dropped his gaze down to his shoes. 'I should have been the one to save you. It's my job.'

'Your job?' I repeated. 'Why? What makes me your responsibility, huh?

'You're my baby cousin.'

'You did save me, remember?'

'Not this time.'

'Connor,' I prompted. He lifted his head up. 'We're a team, right? That means, occasionally, I'm gonna save you too.' I let go of his hand to instead tuck both my arms beneath the blanket and wrap them around his torso. I leant in to rest my head against his chest and listened to the beating of his heart.

The first indication I got that Stephen was standing behind me was the sound of a sigh I almost didn't hear over the noise of the papers rustling on the table, as I folded up the maps to take with us back to the home office.

I glanced over my shoulder. He was still slightly damp from the water, his hair flopping down over his forehead as, similarly to Nick, he'd pushed his wetsuit down to his waist and was standing with his hands on his hips.

'You took on a mosasaur?'

I frowned. 'What?' I don't know what it was about his tone that annoyed me so much but immediately I was getting defensive.

'You know that was stupid, right? You can't fight a creature that's already killed a man, with a boat ore.'

'Why?' I snapped the map in my hands closed and threw it down onto the table, 'because I'm a woman?' The map knocked the vials of water samples off the table and they clattered to the ground. I groaned. The sound must have caught Ryan's attention. He turned around, away from the men packing their equipment away into the boats ready to take back across the dock to the road and narrowed his eyes at us.

'No,' Stephen returned, 'because you could have been killed.'

'You know, I'm getting pretty fucking sick of you saying shit like this Stephen. How many times do I have to save your life before you trust me?' Frustrated, I bent down to collect the fallen samples.

'You think I don't trust you?' He crouched down beside me and started picking up some of the other plastic tubes. 'What's up with you, Anna?'

I bit the inside of my cheek as I responded. 'All these people, Stephen, all these men and you're the only one whose got a problem with me looking after myself.'

'Is that how you see it?' he asked.

I stood up and dumped the pots back on the table, then reached for a storage box to start packing them away to be transported back to the lab. 'Yes, that's how I see it.'

'Because to me it seems like I'm the only one here who cares enough to actively try to keep you away from danger.' He got up from the ground and unloaded the vials into the box.

'What?' I questioned.

His hands stopped their ministrations and he was still for a second. 'You were never going to have dinner with me, were you?'

I looked up and locked eyes with him. 'What dinner?'

There was a momentarily silence and stillness. He blinked back at me but made no further effort to communicate anything. 'So that's a no?'

'My mum always used to say, never lie to a dying man.'

'You knew I wasn't going to die,' he said.

'I didn't;' I insisted, 'I hoped. What I didn't know is that you have a girlfriend.'

'Don't you get it? I needed to know what you'd say.'

'I should have told you to go fuck yourself–'

'Is everything okay here?' Ryan interrupted. .

I crossed my arms over my chest, the accumulating tension now somewhat diffused, but still trying to calm myself by taking a few deep breaths. 'Fine.'

Stephen nodded in agreement. 'What she said.' He sighed. 'I'm gonna change.'