It is a late summer day. The sea is as warm as she’s going to get, and the sun is so sublimely bright it’s hard to imagine such a thing ever existed. I’m wearing a modest, dress-like bathing suit, standing at the edge of a cliff that’s seven or eight metres above the water. My older sister is behind me, wearing a fashionable bathing suit that emphasises the new changes in her body to such a degree that our mother blushed but said nothing. She’s not quite blocking my escape, but not permitting it either.

“It’s such a long way down…It really doesn’t hurt? You’re not just saying that, right?”

“You’ve seen me do it a hundred times. Just keep your arms tucked and it’s no problem.”

I turned to her. “But I don’t swim well! You know that.”

She sighed. “I know it’s scary. Mom made me do it when I was your age because it’s scary. That’s the part that makes you stronger. And it’s just a couple of metres back to the rocks. You can even dog-paddle it. “

“Are you sure? Maybe if you were down there…”

“Neptune my witness, if the doctor hadn’t forbidden it,” she absentmindedly brought a finger to pick at her ear, then leaned closer to whisper in mine, “I’d jump with you, hand in hand. Now come on, little Samsonite. One-two and you’re down there, and we’ll have the rest of this conversation while you’re drying off.”

A smile creeps across my face at the combination of praise and her use of my secret nickname, a feminisation of my favourite biblical hero. She delivers an encouraging slap to my shoulder, and bravely I set out to take one large step forward, right to the edge—but my foot only moves a quarter of the distance. I step again, and that step is even shorter.

I come so close I can peer down. The water is so far away that I really don’t think I can do it. But then that thought comes, as if on its own: Whatever happens, happens, and my legs respond, and I am over the edge.

The air washes over me and I think that there is freedom in it, now that I can’t choose, and if it hurts it hurts and I tuck my arms to my body and press my legs together right before my feet hammer into the water my eyes closed and body tense and in less than a second I am in.

I expect to be only a couple of centimetres under the surface, but when I open my eyes I can’t tell up from down. Half of the world should be up, but I turn around and around and around and all I see is endless water. I exhaled all I had while falling, and there is nothing in my lungs. I don’t even float, just paddle my arms and legs forwards in search of a clear path, but there is none. Salt water in my eyes and nose, my lungs pushing and pulling aimlessly—and I think, with the clarity that only children are capable of, that this is how it ends, I’m going to drown here and die, and the harder I fight the sooner it will come. God, I think. Are you taking me in? So soon?

Then something pierces the water, coming down from above, it could only be above, bringing with her a storm of bubbles that quickly clear. She turns and turns, looking intently, and I open my mouth to scream, I am here; see me! and she does, and swims down into the depths to save me.

#

I remembered a sound so loud it was not even that—more a discontinuity in reality, a strong current carrying me below, twisting me around, scraping me against the rock. I braced for the impact at the end of the fall, but to my surprise found myself floating slowly in deep, dark water. Not falling, not in danger, but still alone and lost.

What god do you pray to, when you are lost in darkness, not knowing up from down, right from wrong? Dionysus, Haggard said, but I do not believe in Dionysus. My merciless, furious god won’t permit it.

The pain reached me then, in my elbows and forearms, which I must have used to protect my head, and in my forehead, and the back of my head, which hit the wall before the entire cave collapsed. I could not quite recall the explosion, the impact. The pain was sharpest in my ears, and there was an ominous buzzing sound. I snapped my fingers in the water, and I wasn’t sure if I were hearing the sound or just feeling the vibration climbing up my arm. What do fingers snapping in the water even sound like?

I was no longer numb or scared, but my thoughts were blurry, unfocused. It was too much too quickly.

It was perfectly dark and quiet, and although instinct pressed me to retreat quickly from this place to the safety I’d come from, I stilled myself.

One sane thought persisted: that I should keep thinking, slowly and methodically. How can I go up? How can I tell where up is?

Even without air in my lungs, there should be a slight pull taking me upwards, even if I couldn’t sense it. A residual buoyancy that would bring me to the water’s surface, where I should be able to see things more clearly.

So I lay there, motionless, and waited. This gave me time to form a hypothesis. Ricca said that under the shelf might be either air or water. The pool we’d blasted under had been formed above another cavern full of water, making for the relatively gentle transfer from one to the other. I could still faintly hear a rushing current as water flowed to equalise the pressure. Either I would float to the bottom of a rock ceiling, or be lucky enough to find my way straight back to the cleft, then all the way back to the pool, where I could return to Ricca and the rest.

We were fools for not having planned for this.

Moloch should be here somewhere, and, with any luck, thinking along the same lines. Unless he hadn’t survived the explosion. His flesh wasn’t as firm as mine. Could he float? He had said something about taking a nap at the bottom of a lake.

Eventually, my movement stopped. My back, which I had expected to touch rock, was out of the surface of the water, in cold air. I had been looking down the entire time. I raised my head, confused, and found myself in damp cave air.

The moment my gills touched air, I was suffocating, my lungs struggling to draw in air, stiffened by the long time they’d been pressed together. I quickly submerged again, letting only my face out, looking up through wet eyes. I was floating on a different body of water than the one I’d dived into. This water was black, and the surface was rippled by drops of water that fell from the high ceiling, crowded with stalactites that glowed magenta and turquoise and all shades in between. More beautiful than any cave I’d seen before, and I’d seen quite a few.

I forced myself to consider things. If I’d fallen through a hole in the bottom of one pool into another, it made sense that the fracture in the floor would be visible somewhere above me. Instead, the ceiling was an unbroken field of faint light.

Obviously, there had been a mistake in my reasoning.

I let myself sink, once again astounded at how much easier it was to get into the water than out of it. Under the faint stalactite light, I saw fish swimming around me, perhaps attracted by my movements. A different species from the ones I’d seen earlier, similarly eyeless but slower and larger, their scales silvery-black. One came closer than the rest, mouth open as if tasting the water around me. I smelled it, too, a scent not much different from the one fish have out of the water. When I reached for it, it turned quickly with a single tail stroke and disappeared into the darkness.

There would be no way to find Moloch in these dark waters. If he had survived, he would wait for me on the shore, where I could see him. If Ricca and Krentz found a way to get a rope down, it would also be easier to see from air. I cursed again for losing my only light source.

The correct thing to do would be to swim around to get the lay of the place. But I was so very tired. I’d just rest here for a moment, then go.

#

The fish around me darted away in unison, jolting me awake. Perhaps it was just the confusion of unconsciousness after having fallen asleep, but I could have sworn I felt something in the water, deep beneath and rising towards me. Some ancient predator. I wanted to turn and look at it, but a deeper instinct clutched me and in one motion I turned to swim, like one of the fish. The glow of the stalactites was my only indication of direction, I hoped that a shore would reveal itself soon.

I had no clue what was in these waters that no human had ever swum in before, but I could feel it giving chase. My arms pierced the water as fast as they could, and my spine and legs waved in powerful motion, my body swimming on its own much better than it ever had under my conscious guidance. If I’d needed air, I would have been out of breath by the time I spotted a slope of rock descending into the water. An escape.

The swimming thing was so close that I could hear it moving, almost on me, and I realised that I wouldn’t be able to outswim it. I’d have to fight, gouge its eyes out, if it had any. I spun around and was immediately blinded by a bright, yellow light that hurt my eyes. As I blocked it with one hand I saw under it the shape of a man, his skin milky white and translucent, his eyes brown and bulging, though strangely human. His features vaguely reminded me of a cave snail’s.

Thank God.

He floated in front of me, upright, his shell-brown hair almost touching the surface around his helmet, his backpack on his back and a pickaxe on his belt. You seem in good shape. Were you injured? he signed.

I’m OK, I signed back, relieved. You?

Good. We should swim for shore, he signed, amused. Gods know what hides in these waters.

He swam ahead, and I found that my hands had repeated the sign for Gods—two hands meeting at the fingertips, above the head, forming the shape of a roof. I followed.

We swam, less hurried now, until we reached the shore. It was a narrow strip of bare rock, leading to a single opening in the wall ahead of us, up the slope. The rock was a pale green and slippery, smoothed by thousands of years of water flow, and still wet— five or six SCOFs. Difficult to climb up, dangerous to come down. The light coming off the stalactites reflected faintly in the streams of water. Fingers of rock descended from the ceiling, but unlike the ones above the water they were lifeless and dark.

Haggard crawled out of the water, his ribs expanding and contracting rhythmically, foggily visible through his flesh.

“It hurts you too, doesn’t it?” I asked once my retching had eased. “The transition back.”

He raised his gaze at me and pondered for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “I’m just exhausted. I don’t think you know how quickly you swim.”

He must have really feared for me, that I’d get lost in these caves in my attempt to escape him.

“Sorry,” I said, but he waved the word away, just like Ricca would have.

The light from his lamp made all other light grow pale and the caves around us clear and distinct. The rest seemed like unreachable darkness.

“Should we be moving away from the breach the explosion made?” I asked him once my lungs had finished contracting. “I think we should wait for the rest of the team to come here—”

“S’going to take them more than a minute.” He picked himself off the floor, slowly but steadily. “Once they figure it out, it will be much easier for us to find them. And by the time they do, we’ll have already taken a little walk. If there’s no Crystal here, it was all a waste of time anyway. If there is, then we shouldn’t come back up without it.”

I looked ahead, at the opening up the slope. Haggard’s yellow light made it seem like a black maw, its contents unperceivable.

There’s always fear, being where you’ve never been before. That fear can be alleviated in many ways—clearing the path back, or going back and forth, or being accompanied by companions so familiar your points of friction have been long ago worn smooth.

But here, with the way back unknown, accompanied by a stranger, fear was rising in me. I fought to control and, for the time being, did not lose.

“Listen,” he said. “They’re going to come back and find us. And once they do, we’ll have already collected enough Celestine to be celebrated as heroes. In the newspapers, they’re going to write about Jillain Reynolds and Haggard Moloch, and how they bravely went deeper than anyone ever has, and changed the course of the war.”

“Moloch,” I said. “Sir. Are you truly not worried?”

He took off his backpack, and crouched over it, opening the waterproof seal and taking out a small pickaxe. Another one was waiting for me above, I remembered, in my own backpack, but I hadn’t put it on when I still could. “Not at all,” he said, as he offered me the tool, handle first. Perhaps because he’d seen that I needed something to hold on to; perhaps because human beings tended to feel more at ease with a weapon in their hands. “And please, call me Haggard.”

I closed my fingers around the wood. “Haggard,” I said. “Thank you.” It was a manipulation, making me feel safer than I should have, but I welcomed it.

“Don’t thank me, Jill: have a go at that stone. My hands are still shot from the rope work.”

I struck the rock four times at the same point. It felt soft, three or four Mohs at worst, and even in my shaken state I didn’t strain to make a deep gouge in it. I touched the mark with my fingers so that when I returned I would know its height and texture, even in the dark.

We walked forward into caves that branched and tunnelled, our feet bare against pale grey calcite that glowed green in the synthetic light. No matter where we turned, the path inclined downwards and shallow streams of water flowed under our feet. That dangerous combination often caused me to slip, but I knew that going back up would be much worse. Haggard, on the other hand, seemed unbothered by the slipperiness, and every couple of minutes told me to mark the rock again, and I did. The excitement had quickly waned, and with time to think, the fear returned. A queasiness took hold of me. Was it fear? No, fear had never caused me nausea. Crystal, on the other hand, always did.

I raised my eyes to meet Haggard’s excited glare. He had felt it too. “You ready for a well-earned vacation, my girl?” He started ahead with a new vitality, panting.

I followed, matching his speed, holding up the pickaxe like a weapon. As we walked, the walls grew closer and the ceiling grew lower, until we were in a narrow tunnel. My mouth tasted of copper, as if I’d bitten my tongue. Electricity pulsed up and down my arms.

It wasn’t far.

The tunnel curved sharply, and as Haggard went around the turn he made a sharp, surprised sound. I ran towards the light he’d taken with him, and almost slipped as I, too, took the turn.

Haggard was glaring at the wall of a cavern. His legs were bent, his back curved, and his hands curled into claws, even though there were no nails in them, nor strength to the grip. In the reflection of the helmet light coming off the wall, his hungry grin was more frightening than anything I’d seen in the caves.

Slowly I passed him to examine the wall and saw what had him staring—there was a hole there, clearly unnatural and sharply angled, larger than my head. It hadn’t been made by a pickaxe, though I couldn’t think of a tool that could have carved such sharp, smooth planes out of the rock in such a narrow space. Haggard was breathing hard, his soft fingers leaving a trail of mucus as they caressed the edges of the cut. “I knew it,” he whispered, genuine madness glistening for a moment in his brown eyes. “I always bloody did.” What he’d known, or how he’d known it, I dared not ask.

He straightened and set off deeper into the caves, not looking back to see whether I was following.

It’s hard to explain the mental conditions that lead one to march into the danger, particularly an unknown one. A part of me shook with nameless horror, scraping with manic fingers for a handhold to pull myself away, but I couldn’t have called myself a soldier, a decent person, or a Jew, if I’d let Haggard walk into that alien danger by himself. Or perhaps I was just more scared of being left alone.

I hurried to catch up with Haggard, who was moving even faster now, with an almost furious energy. We found another impossible cut in the wall, and another. Each was far larger than necessary to extract the kind of Crystal shards we usually found. Either the excavator had been extremely diligent, or the bounty that waited for us here was greater than we could have hoped for.

The caves grew wide and narrow; high and low. They curved left and right. The colour of the rock shifted slowly from grey to yellow, and I hoped that subtle gradient would guide us if we got lost.

I had just raised my pickaxe to make another cut when Haggard turned to me and signed Stay quiet.

We kept pursuing. I still tasted blood in my mouth and felt the electricity in the air, or maybe within my own nerves. We stopped only when we reached the river.

We heard the rushing water before we saw it, crossing our path and blocking us from the path that continued on its other side. To our right was a wall, arching over the stream. To our left, a cavern opened above the stream, but the walls were too smooth to climb on. Altered or unaltered, falling into the stream meant certain death. Haggard and I wouldn’t drown, but even if the current didn’t send us crashing over some waterfall, it would drag us far enough that we might never find our way back.

The water was speckled with long, thin leaves I didn’t recognize, probably collected by some overground stream that led here. But from where?

I noticed only now that the vertical wall was cut with deep gashes, seemingly with the same tool from before, spaced just far enough that someone could stick their hands and feet in them, pass from one to another. It would be possible to get to the other side, I realised with numb horror.

I glanced back at Haggard, who nodded. You first, he signed, then presented his hands. I’ll make it too slippery. He turned away and started wiping his hands against the rock wall.

I could have argued. Said that I wasn’t sure he could even cross after me, that if one of us slipped we might never return, that we should wait for the others to come and secure ourselves with ropes. But even if he hadn’t turned his gaze away and made himself blind to my signs, there would have been no argument to be had. There was someone, or something, cutting at the rock here, and we needed to know what it was.

I looked over the gushing water and imagined recalling this moment—in a dark future where I had fallen into rushing water and found myself lost in the caves forever, living off fish and leaves—as the last in which I had been connected to the world above. I could refuse to move, and Sir Moloch, in his frenzy, would go ahead with hardly so much as a sigh. But this was my risk to take. My sacrifice to offer.

I placed a trembling hand into the first cut in the rock, then set my foot on a protruding knuckle. Another step put all of my limbs against the wall. Breathing quickly and quietly, I looked down at the deadly rushing water I was hanging over. Curious, how danger feels less real when we turn our face away from it.

“Keep moving, Ol’ Daughter,” Haggard whispered—not admonishment, but practical advice. I followed it, using the faint light to place my hands and feet in whatever holds the rock offered. I kept moving, kept breathing, until finally the landing was within my foot’s reach, and I found myself standing on the other side.

Haggard was already on the wall, moving at a steady, measured pace, the rock glistening with the slime left by his bare feet. I held my breath as he climbed. When he reached the landing, he took the lead again. He stayed on one side of the tunnel, making it easy to avoid his sticky footsteps.
And then he turned a corner, and froze mid-step. His hand stretched to his side to stop me, but it was a limp, distracted motion. His body wasn’t as tense as before, but seemed imbued with smooth, fluid slowness. His steps were quieter now, his soles sliding against the rock as he moved forward.

I followed, my hand on the wall, and saw it: a Crystal taller than I was. A chunk so large it could end the war, and all the wars that would come after it. Rainbows refracted inside of it from our lamplight.

We moved closer, the immense power of it washing us. Tears obstructing my sight, I traced the beautiful branchings of the translucent material, the sharp outgrowths of it. Haggard stepped forward, lighting this fantastic bounty even better—and I saw something in it that should not have been there.

A naked young man was suspended in the Crystal like a moth in amber. His body was lean in the ways of boys put to work, the skin under the Crystal untanned but naturally darker than ours, marked by wisps of hair, curly and sparse on his upper lip, chin, chest, belly and further down. His chestnut-coloured hair was long and floated about his head as if it were in water, not the most expensive material known to man. His eyes were closed.

“Quick,” Moloch commanded, abandoning stealth. “Give me the pickaxe!”

I ignored him, knowing that his soft hands wouldn’t be able to strike the pure Crystal. I struck instead, both hands holding the wood, but the chunk that broke off was barely as long and thick as one of my fingers. At this rate, it would take us a day to expose the man’s skin.

The body inside the crystal turned to me, eyes opening, and the entirety of the Crystal moved with it, surprisingly quickly. I jumped back, and the tip of the crystal outgrowth cut the pickaxe in half, the blade falling to the rock, almost crushing my foot. The Crystal outgrowth around his arms, I realised, was separate from the rest of the torso, allowing him to move.

The Crystal around his mouth parted as he said, his voice terribly young, “¡Por favor, no me golpees! ¡Me duele!”

I didn’t understand the words, but I recognized the movements, the hands going over the head, the coming down to his knees. Physically, he was on the boundary between man and boy, but mentally, this was a boy begging for mercy.

I looked at the pickaxe’s blade, lying next to the shard of Crystal that was big enough to have taken a month’s work, yet had come free with one strike. I let the decapitated handle in my hand drop.

Moloch gazed at the heavily altered boy kneeling on the floor, then at me, suspicion in his eyes. For a moment I considered that the boy was pretending to be vulnerable, tricking us, but what for? With Crystal so sharp, movements so quick, he could have killed us, or at least attempted to. I would not make Moses’s mistake—This was no time to strike at the rock, but to speak to it. But what should I say?

“Gods,” Haggard muttered. “That’s an alteration.” His hand seemed as if looking again for the comfort of a weapon to hold.

The young man in question raised his head, chunks of Crystal moving accordingly, and for the first time I saw his eyes. They were green, and looking at my breasts. When he saw that I’d caught him, his embarrassed stare jumped to Haggard.

He spoke calmly now, and his voice, unaltered, testified to how unfairly young he was.
“¿Británicos?¿Has venido a atraparme? ¿Cómo se las arreglaron para encontrarse aquí?”

“You’re speaking Espanish. Why are you speaking Espanish?” When no response came, he began yelling. “Who are you? How’ve you come all this way?”

The youth put his hands between them, and mumbled weakly. “Lo siento, no te entiendo, lo siento. Por favor no grites.”

It was confusing to see Sir Haggard Moloch lose his cool, particularly when it was so obviously counter-productive. “Haggard,” I said. “Calm down.”

He turned to me, his bulging eyes feral. “How can he be here? How is that possible?”

“We’ll find out sooner if you stop scaring him,” I said. He scared me too.. I turned to the boy, crouching like I would to talk to a child, or calm down a frightened animal, though I still stayed out of his sharp reach. “Hey. Do you speak English?”

He raised his eyes up to my knees and shook his head. “No entiendo. ¿Hablas español?” He spoke softly, as if trying to appease an angry parent.

The only word I understood was the name of the language spoken in the Espanish Empire, which I was not familiar with. I’d been told that the nature of the words were similar, tranquil and tranquilo and such, but I understood nearly nothing of what was being said so far. “I’m afraid not.” I shook my head. “English? Uh, Inglese?” I asked again and realised how senseless it was.

The youth looked slightly cheered by that, and tried again. “هل تتحدث العربية?” he offered, the accent so profoundly different it might as well have been someone else talking, while trying to clear their throat.

I shook my head and looked at Haggard, who shook his head as well and took a long, forceful breath, perhaps in an attempt to calm himself. “Loqueris latine?” he asked, his tone controlled.

The boy shook his head again. “No, perdón.”

We stood there in silence for a long moment, confounded. I realised I had one more suggestion to make, one more language I could try, but it was too dangerous to reveal, and unlikely to be useful.

It was the boy who gave up first. A wave went through his Crystal carapace—an altered shrug. When he spoke, he did so in a language I had not expected to hear anywhere but behind closed doors, hidden away in the rooms of rooms. “Speakers of Hebrew, thou are?”

Funny, how foreign he had sounded in those other languages, and how familiar in this one. I almost opened my mouth to answer, my teeth unclenched but I stopped before my lips parted. If I exposed myself to Sir Moloch here, would he keep my secret when we returned to the surface?

I trusted him with my own life, practically speaking, but not with my sister’s, and exposing my faith to him meant exposing hers as well. I shot a sideways glance at Moloch, who was already looking at me. His glare was piercing, seeing through me as if my skull was even more translucent than his. He knew; he had found me out. So be it: I would speak here, finish this mission, and later pray to my one God that Haggard’s honour would lead him to keep his mouth shut.

He turned away from me, and back to the face buried in treasure. “Yes,” he said in Hebrew. “Speakers of it we are.”

NEXT