CHAPTER 1

The wet suit and the water are black, and after theman slips into both, he seems to vanish from the world. He hascome on a starless night to avoid being seen, to hide a few containerswhere they won't be found. He will be underpaid for this taskby his anonymous employer, but times are hard so he takes whathe can get.

He has gone into the water between his bobbing boat and twelveshadowy structures that float. They are gathered under the weakmoon in a semicircle like disciples awaiting their teacher. But he isnot the one they wish for. As instructed he will secure his packagesunder the second unit, which is squat and unfinished. Which willnever be finished.

The silky surface between him and building 2 reflects the sky'ssilver stars. For a moment, before he lowers the diving mask, he isdistracted by the glittering scene. The understanding gives him ajolt: because it is a starless night, and these are not reflections. Theyare sardine-sized creatures flashing with their own energy, flickeringrandomly, tricking his eyes.

He lets go of the boat and reaches out to touch one, expecting itto dart away. It flares instead, flaming like a struck match thoughfully submerged, and sends a tingling shock through the palm ofhis hand. He jerks back. The flame dies. With the thumb of hisother hand he tries to rub the sting away.

The pain won't die. Nor will his sudden certainty that moresecrets than his are hidden in this place.

He would turn back, if not for the money.

He dives into darkness to do his work, avoiding contact withthe silver things, and as he swims they fade away. Fear hurries himalong. He needs to be gone before the sun rises, before everythingconcealed comes to light.

CHAPTER 2

If he had been looking at the day from a differentpoint of view, Vance Nolan might have figured out the problemwhile there was still time to act. But when he first sensed thatsomething was wrong, his instinct told him to search for the usualsuspects: Equipment that might malfunction. Procedures thatmight be short-cut. Materials that might be shoddy.

So it was nearly noon before Vance realized that the thingbothering him was not any of these. Instead, it was an absence, anoise stripped away from the world, something like not being ableto hear the sound of his own breathing.

He couldn't hear the birds.

Vance stood at the tip of Eagle's Talon, a long peninsula thathooked the wide Rondeau River like a bird snatching a fish. Featheryblack willows spread shade across the land and housed plenty offeathered creatures, as did the tall grass-like leaves of the floweringriver bulrushes. Most days Vance could hear the calls of terns andgulls and other waterbirds over the clattering human noises thatrose from his construction site. But hammers, drills, nail guns, aircompressors, trucks, and jocular workers had never drowned outthe world as they did on this brilliant July day.

On the inside of the claw-like strip of land was a cove almosthalf a mile across, sparkling with summer sun. On the outside ofthe land's curve, the river was a swift highway that promised totransport a man to utopia if only he had a boat. Apparently thebirds had set off for paradise already.

Vance removed his white hard hat so the light breeze could coolhis head, then brushed shore dust off his short beard with his otherhand. From this vantage, facing north, he could see the entire constructionproject going on inside the crescent of the cove. Beforethe first day of fall, the neighborhood that had been translated fromhis mind onto paper and then into a model would finally become afull-scale reality—though not exactly as he'd originally envisioned.

He looked north toward the top of the cove, where the long,skinny boom of a truck-mounted pump formed a towering arcnearly forty feet over the water. It scraped the sky's belly and thenturned downward to deliver wet concrete to the surface of anunusual foundation. Constructed of sealed foam blocks, the platformwas designed to float.

Here at Eagle's Talon, Vance built homes on water.

Technically, they were condominiums. Elite living spaces forwealthy owners, eight units in each of the twelve buildings, ninety-sixunits total. To Vance, though, they were the first step toward hisreal goal, which was to build beautiful amphibious homes for thepoor. Until Tony Dean had scuttled Vance's plans, that's what theseunusual units were supposed to be.

In spite of this, every day Vance stood here at the tip of the peninsulaand reminded himself that all work was worth doing well.

On the day the birds fell silent, Vance's construction crew wasassembling prefabricated aluminum walls on the cured foundationsof buildings 1 through 6. A subcontracted pump company had spentthe week pouring the foundations of buildings 7 through 11. Building11, the final pour, would be finished within a few hours. It wouldcure within a few days. Building 12, the model, had been completedin the spring and already had residents in four of its eight units.

On the shoreline behind 11, the rough-terrain concrete-pumptruck was braced on extended outriggers between the water andthe earth. Behind the truck, a concrete mixer continuously fed wetconcrete into the pump via a chute. And on the floating platform,the pump operator guided the boom with a remote control while alaborer pointed the hose where he wanted the concrete to go. Thetruck's rack-and-pinion slewing system made a whirring sound asthe operator directed it to shift.

The only detail out of the ordinary that day was the presenceof a fifteen-year-old kid, the pump operator's son, who was permittedto sit in the truck's cab while his father worked down on thefoundation. Vance wouldn't have allowed the kid on the site at all,and he had questioned his presence in the truck, but the operatorassured him it wasn't against company policy.

Vance didn't really care. Too many things could go wrong ata work site like this, and all of it was his responsibility—especiallythe things that went wrong. So he had asked the subcontractor'sforeman, Drew Baxter, to send the kid home. As this would havesidetracked the operator and delayed the day's work, Baxter refusedand blew him off with a grin that made Vance feel uneasy.

It wasn't long afterward, while Vance watched this operationfrom the peninsula's southern point, that he noticed a small brownbird performing aerial stunts around the highest point of the concretepump's boom. The silent bird made one, two, three loops andthen plummeted toward the surface of the river, pulled out of itsdive at the last possible second, and shot away, scratching the glassywater with the tips of its feathers.

That was the moment when the birds' silence commandedVance's attention.

Vance reseated his hard hat, then peeled off his outer workshirt and left the tip of the peninsula. The summer heat had creptup on him. It caused the skin at the nape of his neck and under hisbeard to itch.

He began to walk back toward the pump-truck operation. Atbuilding 2, a young apprentice named Andy was bent over a drill,securing the wall to a floor joist. Andy was just out of high schoolbut demonstrated the reliability and skill of someone who'd beendoing this kind of work for much longer. Vance planned to keeptabs on him. The crucifix Andy wore around his neck dangledaway from his body as he worked, then slapped his chest when hestraightened up to wave a greeting.

Vance passed buildings 3 and 4, scanning the riverside...