The Undertow / Season 1, Episode 4
Distress in the Fog
The cutter’s engine growled low as it sliced through the inky water, the fog so thick it felt like wet wool pressed against Rena Okafor’s face. She gripped the wheel, knuckles pale, her breath shallow in the damp cold of the predawn. Nowak stood at her side, his silhouette barely a shape in the gray, scanning the shoreline with binoculars that might as well have been pressed to a wall. The distress call had come in twenty minutes ago—panicked, garbled, a woman’s voice shrieking about her husband, about the cliffs, about him just... walking into the tide. Rena’s gut churned, not from the roll of the boat but from the memory of those kayakers last week, their empty eyes, the way they’d stared past her like she wasn’t even there. “Anything?” she barked, voice cutting through the hum of the engine and the slap of waves against the hull. The air smelled of salt and rot, something deeper than the usual fish-gut stink of the bay, something that clung to the back of her throat. “Nothin’ yet,” Nowak muttered, lowering the binoculars. His jaw was tight, the stubble on his chin catching flecks of mist. “Cliffs are a damn ghost in this soup. You sure dispatch said north side?” “Positive.” Rena’s eyes flicked to the radar, a green glow in...