It was a long time before I saw Haggard Moloch again. Two, perhaps three months, though the longer I spent down there, the harder it became to keep track. I was back in Britonia, at the heart of the same pool where I’d first tested my gills and detonated a charge. The pool beside which I’d sat by the warmth of a fire and heard Krentz tell of her own horrors. I was waking up, but not from sleep, not exactly. I’d just stopped thinking for a while, did nothing but stare at the complex, shimmering border between water and air, the light breaking as it passed through the media. The surface of the water was about a metre lower, but it hadn’t drained like we thought it would. Somewhere outside of the water there must have been a single oil lamp, casting shaky, uneven light on the dry rock.

Miles Ogma had been here for a while now, and presently knelt by the water’s edge—the same shy boy who’d come to The Pits to attend to the descent of a woman made of stone. He was now three metres tall, his skin brown and hard like that of some cave insect, his arms longer and thinner then they’d been. He was working as my assistant now, as no one else wanted to. He owed me that much.

His long arms going deep into the water, he strapped the waterskin to my chest. There was no way that the thing wouldn’t obstruct the flow of water around me as I swam, but the straps were thin and smooth, and the sack lay relatively flat against my streamlined form. It could have been better, but considering it was the work of one man paid with nothing but a sense of duty, and that it had taken him five tries, it was a bit of a miracle.

“The straps shouldn’t be torn easily,” he said. His bass was a novel thing, deeply masculine. In a way, these caves had made a man out of him. “But please, even if they do rip, take it along with you instead of throwing it aside.”

I’ll try. Thanks, O. I clicked nail against nail, one hand outside of the water. Names didn’t impart quite the same casual familiarity in Morse Code, when they had to be signalled one letter at a time.

After he’d dried himself from fingertip to elbow he waved, reassuring me that it was no great trouble. An impressive gesture: each of his arms was longer than my entire body. Thin, strong limbs, darkened with hard chitin. He was adept at crawling over jagged surfaces, even the stalactite-studded ceiling, as I’d pressured him into demonstrating after first summoning him. This form suited him beautifully. I was sure that, somewhere in The Pits, there waited a chasm only he could climb over.

But even as his body language spoke of ease, his lips stretched to the side of his broad, heavily-jawed face in a hardly hidden grimace. I ignored it and instead raised my head out of the water. Immediately I was overcome by the feeling of dryness and suffocation in my gills, an intense aversion, similar to having air blown into one’s eyes. I squeezed periodically at the rubber, pear-shaped pump by my chest, each pump delivering about a quarter-handful of water unto my gills. A moment of moist relief was followed quickly by increasing discomfort. Another squeeze at the rubber heart; another short reprieve.

Miles squatted on the ground and looked at me. It was hard to see in the air, but I found some solace, looking at his altered form: His shins had grown so long and thin that his knees were at each side of his head, framing his stubbled face. Thick, protruding, dark-gold eyebrows made him seem constantly worried, though at that moment he might genuinely have been. “How long is the crawl?” he asked.

I clicked with one hand, and kept pumping water with the other. 30 m down, 2 h back, aprx. I didn’t tell him how every time I got there it became a little harder to return. When lying to someone, the most important thing to do was not speak the truth one was trying to hide, even in one’s mind. My body slid down through the water, back to safety, and I let go of the pump. Ricca? I asked.

“Still in the sanatorium,” he said, shaking his head, and looked at me for a long moment. Even squatting, he was tall enough to peer easily from above into the water. His gaze was unflinching, confident in a way I couldn’t imagine from the Miles I’d seen in this very cave two months ago. “She’s asking about you too.” I was glad that she did, though what answer she’d received I’d rather not know. “Watts and Chambers, too. They’re worried.”

Tell them I’ll be fine, I clicked.

He reached for his bag, and pulled out a stiff notebook, a towel, and a large, strange-looking pen.

I let one hand out of the water. What for?

“So you won’t be able to cut the conversation short because you’re allegedly tired of clicking. So you’ll speak to me.” He sighed, his shoulders and ribs limber. “Listen, Jill, I know that command authorised all of this. I’m not contradicting them. But we’re crossing a line, aren’t we? This isn’t something we’ll be able to tell anyone once we get up, is it?”

I got my head out of the water, just enough so my gills stayed inside, took the towel, wiped my arms, handed it back, and reached for the offered notebook and pen. It was too dark for me to see what I was writing, and I pointed at the light, for him to bring it closer. He did, his expression disapproving, as if there was something wrong with wanting more light. Finally, I wrote:

You mean how serious our alterations are? Don’t worry. I’ll buy you a drink on that boat… It took me a moment to remember the name of that nice pub in Birmingham, a large boat by the edge of the river. Murphy’s. It didn’t have the familiar ring, written. On a Sunday. We’ll put our legs over the edge. And we won’t say anything, not one word, but we’ll know what happened here.

I turned the notebook for him to read. I’d penned the words confidently, but I found the image I’d described out of my mind’s grasp – not only could I not imagine myself throwing legs over anything, I couldn’t even imagine our hometown’s overcast sky, or any other sky, for that matter. In my mind, I was throwing my tail fin over the edge of the boat, and the sky was lit by stalactites.

“That’s not what I meant,” Miles said.

What, then? I wrote as quickly as I could.

“This. What you’re doing here. Going deeper inside—and I’m helping you do it. If your sister knew that I was a part of the reason she hasn’t seen you in so long – ”

She hasn’t seen me in more than 6 months. 1 or 2 more won’t make that much of a difference.

“She heard that you were missing.”

Did she? Hear, I mean.

He grimaced and ignored my tasteless joke. “We thought you were gone. Now she’ll probably hear that you’re in no condition to be seen, but also needed in action. Can you imagine how angry she’ll be? She’ll say that I should slap you across the face to snap you out of it, and probably demonstrate on me, too.”

Tell her I’ll be back soon. And that I know how hard it must be for her to make do with half a brain. I should know.

He gave me a look.

She’ll laugh. Trust me. I turned the notebook to him, but I saw it wasn’t enough to soothe him.

He looked away for a moment. “Also, I thought you’d heard. About Murphy. I thought I’d told you.”

Heard what?

“Murphy’s won’t be opening anytime soon. His ship was sunk somewhere in the Baltic. They got him in time, but he hadn’t opened his eyes in two months. Last I heard, anyway.”

I didn’t know how to communicate to him how sorry I was. My face wasn’t as expressive as it used to be. Poor man, I eventually wrote. He was always afraid of falling into the water.

Bitterly, Ogma smiled. “He was. And you always took unnecessary risks.”

You know me. Did you ever see me take a risk that wasn’t worth taking?

“Funny,” Miles said. “You used to be obsessed with fire, and I thought you’d gotten better, but you’re just as enchanted by water now, aren’t you?”

And thus the silence was finally broken, and our hidden bond was finally spoken aloud. I closed my eyes, letting the memory wash over me.

#

I’d been too much of a coward to light the fires myself. But I had stolen kerosene from my sister’s workshop. Mere millilitres at first, when we were setting fire to small things like trash bins and bulletin boards, and then half a litre at a time as we advanced to greater endeavours like park fences and benches. We were barely more than children, feral and without purpose, and fire was something to worship. The trick was to know when to leave: The longer you stayed to watch it, the likelier you were to get in trouble, but if you turned tail as soon as the fire started, you’d miss out on the true joy of arson – to see the fire bloom from a seedling to a roaring, dangerous thing that refuses to be put out.

Once in a while we’d dally too long, enchanted, and a night patroller would spot us, and we’d run. Outrunning a policeman wasn’t the hardest thing in the world, as long as you didn’t trip.

Which, that one time, Miles did.

I’d been almost around the corner when I heard his frightened squeal and, without thinking, turned back to rescue him. The rest of the gang kept running, passing me by without a word. His leg was tangled in a tree root, and the look on his face was of someone who’d resigned themselves to their gods. The officer behind him was swinging his copper stick, his face distorted in a heinous hybrid of pleasure and fury I haven’t managed to forget. Nor have I forgotten the sound Miles’s skull made when the club hit it—the resonance of it—nor the skin opening and blood spilling into his eye. It sounded different the second time, when his nose broke. I thought, slowly, that the constable had not taken any action to prevent the spread of the fire, and that I needed to stop him, while there was still anything left to save.

All I had was half a bottle’s worth of kerosene, and I’d not yet realised what should be done when I went towards the officer, and swung, splashing the constable’s chest. He looked up at my eyes above the cloth mask that covered my mouth, and I drew a box of matches from my pocket – someone must have asked me to hold on to his, and we forgot. I drew one out. I would never have had what it took to set a man on fire, but at that moment, I was close.

Our eyes locked. I saw the shock on his porcine face as, with a gasp, he realised that he was flammable. I lit the match, and he looked at it for a single instant before turning and running for his life.

#

“I don’t see any other way you’ll stand your form,” Miles continued, his voice echoing in the cave. “I know I can barely stand mine.”

You can leave whenever you want, I wrote. I’m your commander, technically, but we’re friends first. I asked you for a favour, and you repaid in full.

“Then I will. Thank you. But when I reach a sanatorium my mother’s going to hear about it, and then your sister will hear about it too, and she’ll pay me a visit.”

You’re afraid she’ll give you a good one?

#

After not setting the patrolman on fire, and taking a very long walk to get Miles home, and telling his mother he’d fallen off a swing, I’d returned to my own home just before sunrise, my hands shaking and stinking of kerosene. My sister had given me a stern look but said nothing, and in my naive youthfulness, I thought she hadn’t noticed. Our mother had been dead for a year then, and we both had our own ways of coping.

The next time I’d gone to meet the gang at the abandoned Dionysian temple that was our usual rendezvous, she’d followed me. Just as we were about to leave, my sister walked in. I yelled at her, “What the hell are you doing here? Just go home!” But she ignored me, and went right up to the leader—a boy as lean as a knife, feline in his movements and icy in his stare, with a rich criminal record. Without any warning, she slapped him. Not the ladylike slap that says ‘how dare you,’ but a wholehearted whack. Her back foot came up off the floor as she drove her work-hardened palm into the boy’s face. He rose into the air before dropping violently against the cobblestones.

“Please, go home!” I screamed at her back. Her ears had been red, swollen and pus-filled as they were every time the infection returned, despite my prayers, taking a bit of her hearing each time. She turned to me, furious and confused, and said:

“What?”

#

Miles Ogma reached behind his neck and scratched, his fingers almost brushing at the stalactites above us in its wide swing. “No,” he said. “I’m afraid she’ll be right. Sir Haggard Moloch, in the healthy, human flesh, has been telling everyone who would listen that this excavation should be abandoned, that you two took everything that was to be taken, and that it would be a fruitless risk of lives to proceed. Is he wrong?”

It is dangerous, I wrote from within the water. If you need to breathe. I’m going to be fine. I promise. I couldn’t tell if the effort on Miles’ face was from deciphering my handwriting, or the intention behind it.

I’d heard about the tenacity with which Haggard insisted we abandon the entire site. In fact, the danger he had worked so hard to exaggerate played a part in making my dealings with command much easier. Once it was clear that I’d made it back, they’d raised my rank (was it captain now? General? I couldn’t quite remember), and awarded me a medal that Miles kept dry for me in some drawer or other. They’d also granted me full command of this site. I used that authority to make sure I was the only excavator that had to go into these dangerous waters..

“Jill,” Miles said. “Command are happy with the deal you made. As long as you keep bringing in the Crystal, they’ll keep giving you free rein here, no matter how dangerous that is. But I’m not asking about them. I’m asking about me. Am I going to regret what we’re doing here?”

No, I wrote. After I’m done here, you’ll feel stupid for worrying even for a second. I underlined to strengthen the effect, but it seemed to make my bluff seem even more obvious.

“If you say so,” he said. “Do you need anything else?” He looked back, as if suddenly realising how far he would have to climb to see some sunlight. Or, perhaps, he was thinking how hard it would be to bring up somebody who would have to be carried in an aquarium.

Don’t worry. You’ve brought me enough equipment. I think this might be the last time I head down the breach. That, in fact, was the truth.

He turned back to look at me, hesitant. “Something to eat, then?”

You’re a sweetheart O, but I have everything I need down here.

A mistake, I realised as his eyebrows knitted together. He shrugged, his double-jointed shoulders rolling all the way to his ears, but he couldn’t hide how it made him worry even more. He rose to his full height. “Should I leave the lantern on?”

Not for me, but thanks, I wrote, and handed him the notebook.

He was about to swing his arm to extinguish the light when someone else entered the cave. Something was familiar about the confident stride, though I didn’t recognize his face. His eyes were brown and cold. The tone of his unaltered skin made me think it’d been acquired both recently and quickly, from constant, elongated sun exposure. His thin, sun-bleached brown hair rested on his neck in a ponytail, lighter at the edges.

Miles rose to his full height and saluted. “Sir.”

“Dismissed, Private Ogma,” the man said in a voice that I had never heard, yet recognized. He stepped to the edge of the rock, not allowing his boots to get wet, and leaned towards the water like he was staring through a glass pane in a zoo. He looked at me, his face emotionless but for a subtle grimace, an expression so typical of Sir Haggard Moloch that I would have recognized it even on a stone.

NEXT