Did I know what end awaited them? I think, I hope, that I am earnest when I write that I did not. But neither was I surprised when the news came. When I’d first laid eyes on Celestine’s Crystal, when I’d first conceived a weapon out of it, I’d known that thousands of lives would be taken by it and still I advanced, unflinching. So why is it that the fate of these two, barely women, weighs heavier on my heart than those of all of the others combined?

• Personal Journal of Sir Haggard Moloch

It was proper rappelling form, once you had secured yourself, to walk slowly backwards over the edge, two hands holding the rope in front. Perhaps at the top of a sunlit, windswept mountain, that made sense. But down here, three kilometres beneath the surface, where the world diminished to the beam of a headlamp that was swallowed by the void the moment I turned my head, I felt as if I were submitting to a maw. Five hundred and fifty seven metres of sheer cliff to descend; after that a walk of one point three kilometres until we made it to the water, and I could find out how deep of a hook the caves had put in me this time.

I checked once more that the thin steel carabiner that was supposed to keep me from falling into infinity was closing properly.

A voice rose from the great darkness beneath. “Private Jillian Reynolds, what is taking so long? Are you inspecting each and every clasp?” Sergeant Ricca McCray, my direct commander, had a delicate hissing quality to her voice that I was not yet accustomed to.

“They should be replaced every three and a half months. We’ve been using this one for half a year.”

“The Crown has more pressing needs than replacing a clasp that’s barely seen any use. Would you move yourself?”

Sighing, I let myself fall back into the void, releasing the rope one fall at a time. “No surprise that you aren’t worried,” I called. “You look like you could scale these walls unassisted.”

I could tell by the beam of her headlamp that Sergeant Ricca McCray had raised her head to look at me. Her barely-visible face was mostly human still, but the alterations she’d acquired this time were hard to miss: the little black bulbs, not quite eyes yet, two columns of three adorning her tall forehead; the neatly tied “horsetail” of straight, black hair peeking from under the back of her helmet; the thick, sparse hairs on her chin and jaw, like the kind I’d once seen on a dried tarantula in a museum. The rest of her body was perfectly human.

She made a sound that I’d learned was the clicking of her long fangs. “You’re persistent in believing that alterations have some function. I told you already: the only thing they’re good for is an excuse to go on vacation. You’re going to learn that again, as soon as the water touches those lovely new gills of yours, and nothing happens.”

“We’ll see about that.” I brought my hand to the side of my neck, where my gills hid under flaps of skin. It was hard to believe that they’d just sprouted yesterday, while the four of us ascended to our sleeping quarters with half a fistful of Crystal. It’d taken us an entire month to collect that bounty—a grain here, a sliver there—but it accumulated to a mass that could fuel a single Crystal bomb. Not that we had any understanding of what the bombs did or how—all we knew was that they were the reason we were down here, collecting Crystal—A translucent material, except for the tendency to refract light into rainbows near the surprisingly sharp edges it tended to break into—sharper, I’ve heard, more than any man-made material.

And as we’d collected it, its effect on us accumulated. We had hoped to get it to the surface before the alteration occurred, but just as we were preparing to ascend, it had erupted in an altering pulse. A nauseating shiver had washed over us—first Watts with the hard carapace covering his shoulders and chest, tearing through his uniform, then Ricca, myself, and finally Chambers, who seemed perfectly unchanged until a forked tongue flicked out of her mouth.

“Half a bottle of hard liquor if you’re wrong, Sergeant?” I said.

“Accepted, on the condition that you shut up. Your hands are slower when you talk.”

I answered her proposal with silence, broken only by the hiss of rope against steel and boot against rock. And so we went, her lamplight descending with the assured hops of a webless spider in hunt, while I dragged myself down the wall with all of the confidence and grace of a blind fish out of water.

“May I ask you a question, McCray?” I asked as my boots finally found flat rock, and I released myself from my harness.

“Sergeant McCray. And It’s not like I can stop you,” Ricca said. She dragged one finger from the bridge of her nose, between her pair of real eyes, up through her faux ones, which blinked unevenly, all the way to the top of her forehead, then back down again. “You’re the kind of girl the entire world couldn’t stop you from asking questions better left unasked. Just ask.”

“Why is it always the two of us that stay down here?”

She was already further down the narrow path, between the walls that towered endlessly above, leaving barely enough room for one person to walk. With her back turned, she seemed like any other woman. She was taller than I was by about a forehead, and though both of us had been hardened by climbing and rappelling, her shoulders and arms had grown bulkier than mine. My eyes were a lighter, greenish-brown, while hers were almost black. My hair was short and reddish, while hers was long and dark. My nose was small while hers was roman in its slant, almost manly but handsomely so, and that manliness was balanced by her features that were more pronouncedly feminine, from the way her hips swung as she walked to the sort of… softness that was pleasant on the eyes. “I’m the commander, and you begged me to perform this idiotic experiment of yours. What’s there to ask?”

I followed, stepping on familiar footholds. “I asked to test my gills only after you said you and I were staying. Each time the four of us go through an alteration, it’s always you and I that volunteer to stay down for the first shift while Watts and Chambers restore their forms in the sun. Is it harder for them? Stranger?”

“Not more than for you and me. That’s the oddest part of these alterations – that they don’t seem odd to the one being altered, though you’d expect that they should.”

“Do they have lovers waiting for them upstairs?”

“Seems like something you should ask them, don’t you think?” The bundle of black hair swept her shoulders as she shook her head.

“You’re right, honesty is noble by nature. Then what about you, McCray? Do you have someone waiting for you upstairs?”

Ricca looked over her shoulder at me, her backpack stopping her from turning fully, her eight eyes glistening in the lamplight. Handsome, still. “Don’t even start, Jill. You love me like an older sister and that’s the end of the story.”

“If you knew how I felt about my older sister, you probably wouldn’t have said that.”

“Shame on you, Jill. How many SCOFs do you have for your sister?”

“Gods in the heavens, why have you forsaken me,” I said, laughing. SCOFs were a measurement for terrain slipperiness, useful in assessing the safety of a terrain. Wet surfaces, naturally, received higher SCOF scores. “That’s not what I meant,” I said, still smiling. Of all the people in the world I could’ve been tossed in these caves with, there were worse alternatives.

We walked for a while, the silence broken only by the rattling of spelunking gear on our backs and scraping of boots every time we had to climb over a vein of rock. I was keenly aware, either by smell or the changed nature of echoes, that we were closer to the pool now, the body of water that had previously stopped our progress.

“That’s the difference between you and me,” Ricca mused after a while. “You want to understand everything, to find the meaning behind things.”

“And you?”

“As long as my soldiers return to the surface safe and sane, preferably with their pockets heavy with Crystal, what do I care what any of this means?”

The end of the narrow tunnel opened into a cavern, more spacious than anything else I’d seen below ground. The walls were out of sight in the lamplight, the ceiling far out of reach. Only a small portion of the floor was reddish, slippery rock; the rest was water. And what enchanting waters these were, seemingly black under lamplight, like the flat eye of a colossus in a rock socket. The stalactites, slick and greenish black, stretched downward like long fingers. Some even reached all the way to the water but didn’t make contact, as if wary of crossing that boundary.

I’d nearly drowned once as a child, an experience that left me not outright hydrophobic but cautious, wary of complete submersion. Every time I got into the water there was a tightening of my chest, a grip under the heart that made it impossible, ironically, to fill my lungs with air, and thus to float. Many a Britonic summer I’d spent in shallow water, sticking to where I could still stand and watching my friends swim freely. When Watts had swum here, unaltered, I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off him, counting the seconds each time he dove in search of Crystal grains and relaxing only when he re-emerged. He’d found nothing.

“Don’t just look at it,” Ricca said from behind me. “Come on, Private. Your anagnorisis awaits.”

“Big word, Sergeant. I’m impressed.” I let the bag’s straps slip off my shoulders, and it dropped to the ground. I took off my helmet and placed it on the bag so it would illuminate the water, then kneeled.

Fully clothed, my boots, knees and hands firmly on the rock, I put my face closer and closer to my reflection’s. Then came the familiar sensation, my chest seizing up, my breath becoming intermittent and desperate and shallow, but thankfully too quiet for Ricca to hear.

I dipped my face into the water before I could think of an excuse. Chin first, and, after a moment’s pause to adjust to the cold, mouth and nose and closed eyes. I sunk my jaw down to the joint, fighting not against the water’s resistance by my own, then my forehead, the neck, where the water felt like a cold, gripping hand, and further, until finally it tickled the gill openings. It felt strange—not unpleasant but so queer, as one gash went into the water on each side, then another set, until all six were beneath. Suddenly it felt wrong to have any air in my lungs at all, and I had to be in the water, my body entire. I threw myself in, and as my lungs emptied of air in a single burst of bubbles, the fear was gone with it. My chest was as tight as it could be, but it didn’t matter. As my lungs compressed and my belly pressed against my back, I realized I didn’t need any air, and an intense calmness fell over me.

Ricca rushed towards the edge and halted, almost slipping, as if she were intent to pull me out but reconsidered when she saw me sitting calmly on the bottom.

Hesitant, she raised a single thumb in question, and I raised one in answer. She looked at me and scratched at the hard, sparse hairs on her chin.

As I turned to explore the mysteries the water had kept hidden from me, my legs kicked aimlessly behind me and my arms flailed: After all these years, the water felt like home, but I was still a lousy swimmer, though. I stayed near the surface, for Ricca’s sake, just deep enough that no part of me touched dry air..

Through fragments of lamplight I watched a school of fish approach, their scales darkly silver and their eyes gone. I put my hand out, but they kept a safe distance. Somewhere I’d read that blind fish had developed sensory organs that allowed them to sense nerve activity in other aquatic animals. Carefully they swam around me, the new, foreign pattern, and then, as if on silent command, all turned at once and were gone. I wondered what they ate.

Further into the pool, I found the formation Watts had described to us after his swim— two inclined walls whose intersection created a tear-drop shape, wide and round at the bottom and narrow at the top. He’d said that it seemed too narrow for both a diver and equipment, and it seemed so to me too. But what about the diver alone? If I wedged myself correctly, made sure to angle my head in one direction and twist my shoulders in another, I could perhaps…

I heard a snap, high-pitched and painfully loud then a second one and a third. Behind me Ricca was assaulting the water with open palms as she ran in, her yells incoherent and her mouth unreadable through the disturbed surface.

I swam ineptly shoreward until the water was shallow enough to stand in and eased my head out of the water. “Alright, alright,” is what I intended to say, but pain gripped me as I tried to breathe. My lungs were aflame, the air scorching as it passed the separating layers, and my gills were bone-dry deserts, the flaps of skin slow to cover them. I considered re-submerging, taking a moment to prepare, but Ricca was already hugging me, her strong arms under my armpits, keeping me from dropping back into the water. Her face was tight with barely-controlled terror.

“Jill?” Her voice was the loudest I’d ever heard it. “What’s wrong? Can you breathe?”

“Ricca,” I choked out as soon as I could. “You owe me a bottle of liquor.” I let my body slump against her sturdy frame, savouring the rare moment of proximity. “Hard liquor.”

The relief spread from her face, so close to mine, to the rest of her body. She exhaled, her shoulders dropping. “Are you trying to cheat your own sergeant? We said half. And do I even owe you that? All I saw was you falling into the water, taking a little swim, then having a coughing fit as soon as you got out.”

I found my balance again and pushed her gently away. “I’m serious, Sergeant. I must have been in there…” a violent hiccup shook me, “…for at least two minutes. Let me do it again and we’ll time it.”

She took a watch out of her pocket. “I already did. It was four and a half, actually.”

Four and a half. “Ricca. There’s an opening in the rock, leading further down,” I said, my voice almost steady. “Just like Watts said. We have to go there.” 

She looked at the water like a mother scrutinising the dirty, snotty friend her child had asked to play with. “Fine.”

“Honest? That’s it?”

“Yes.” She looked solemn. “If there’s a chance there’s Crystal down there, we have no choice but to go onward.”

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