Miles left his perch by the water and picked up the bags of Crystal from my last excursion. He used his long arms to hold the bags away from his body as he walked to the bottom of the cliff, where he’d begin the long climb back to the surface. I don’t think he required any climbing equipment, at this point—the rope he had on him must have been in order to keep the Crystal at a distance as he climbed. He glanced back only once as he stepped out through the mouth of the cave. Looking either at me or Moloch, I couldn’t tell through the shimmering surface of the water. Moloch waited for him to leave, and only then approached.

This was the first time he had seen me since I fell into the river, and for a long moment we examined each other. I looked at his nose, and brought a fluttering finger to the two parallel gashes at the front of my face. I knew that I too would develop such a cartilaginous bulb, if exposed to enough sunlight, but it was genuinely hard to believe.

He must have heard, either from Watts or Chambers, or whoever they spoke with, or even from Miles. Heard that I was confined to a single body of water, which was almost true, and unable to speak. He must have already known that I was, at least in appearance, more fish than woman. Yet it clearly surprised him to see it in the cold, scale-covered flesh.

I hope my appearance isn’t making you uncomfortable. I was never sure the nuance of syntax translated well in sign language, but I’ve learned it’s better to act as if it does.

“Not uncomfortable, no,” he said. “Bloody surprised, though. When they said General Reynolds agreed to speak to me, I was hoping to find something that could speak.”

You seem to understand me just fine, I signed.

He laughed hesitantly, then sighed and crouched on the balls of his feet. Getting a closer look, like one would at a strange specimen. Only four people laid their eyes on me since I’ve returned, and Moloch was the first of them to do so without flinching. “About time you saw some sunlight, isn’t it, Ol’daughter?”

There’s still work to do. I was angry, but I wasn’t sure he’d see it.

“My eyes may not be as keen in the darkness as yours, but I can still spot a lie when I see one. You don’t want to give up this form, do you now?”

I didn’t want to correct the mistaken assumption on his part. There was no need for him to know that my eyesight had only gotten worse. What for? A couple of weeks in the, I didn’t remember the sign for sun, and opted instead for four parallel fingers pointing diagonally, meaning light, and I’d be back down here, waiting to return to this form.

He clenched one firm hand into a fist. “You know what was interesting about seeing the sun again?” His voice didn’t rise, but there was an intensity in it, now. “It surprised me, when Krentz carried me out of the caves. She was terrified of me, but she still carried me all the way up, without rest. And when I saw the sunlight, even the vague reflections against the walls of the caves, it surprised me. Like I had forgotten it. I didn’t want to come out. I wanted to go back, search for you. My eyelids were completely clear, unable to block direct sunlight, and still she took me, the bastard. She swore never to come to those caves again.” The harshness dissipated from his voice then, leaving only wonder.

“The smell,” he continued. “That’s what surprised me most. You don’t know how much you miss the smell of sunlight. You don’t even know that you aren’t smelling it, in The Pits.”

I spun around in the water, and turned back to him. The light can wait.

He sat down on the rock, his brown eyes transfixed on me. “I saw Sergeant McCray, when I was in the sanatorium. She seemed to be having a particularly difficult time. You see, as soon as I came back here with the Celestine and told her the news, she wanted to head down and look for you, even without diving gear. Miles wasn’t down here, at that point, having gone up to bring more equipment. So, when Krentz carried me up, the situation forced McCray to carry all of that bounty herself. If Krentz had changed any more, she might have not been able to move at all, let alone climb.

“So McCray was in close proximity to a large amount of Celestine, for a long time, see? By the time she went up, she barely seemed human. Now she wakes up every time someone walks down the hall or turns in their bed. I asked the nurses’ permission to modify her bed, suspend it on springs so it would dampen the vibrations, but they refused, saying it would engender regression.”

Are you saying the sanatorium is going to be worse for me? Even if it takes a year until they send me home, it will be worth it.

He shook his head. “Tell me, have you ever heard of anyone who’s been in a recovery ward for more than six months?”

No. Why? I signed, annoyed.

He lowered his head and his voice, as if talking to himself. “If we had any decency, we’d take the recruits up there first thing. To see what they may turn out like.”

It doesn’t matter, I answered. Any place can be a sanatorium if it has enough light and is secure enough from gawkers.

“I’m not talking about recovery wards; I’m talking about where they take the ones who don’t recover at all. There’s a point of no return, once you’ve lived with an alteration long enough.”

(Bull)shit, I waved. I would have heard about all those troops who returned home with tentacles or glass limbs. We would have seen them.

He laughed bitterly. “Would you?”

There had been a time where I wouldn’t have believed Sir Haggard Moloch would lie.

Put your hand in the water.

“What?”

Put your hand in the water and say that again.

He sat forward stiffly, resisting, as if strings were pulling him toward the water. Eventually, he rolled up one sleeve, rose to a crouch again, took two small, squatting steps forward, and finally submerged his palm. The tastes of oil and metal spread through the water, and the nerves firing within his hand flashed so brightly they could have been lightning in the night sky. If he lied, I would see it. I knew very well what the hand of a liar looked like – I often saw it on myself.

He coughed, and when he spoke, he did so quietly. “When you saw my alter, it wasn’t the first time I let Celestine change me to that form. My assistants and I experimented on ourselves. Unlike my parents, you could say, all of my sacrifices were willing. But, on a whim, I decided to break us off into two groups. One exposed themselves to increasing intensities of exposure, and the other, made of only three assistants, barely got exposed to the Crystal at all. Those three were given veto rights for the whole experiment, which they used very quickly. They were in consensus that we were addicted to the alterations, making excuses in order to expose ourselves again, achieve more extreme depths.”

There was an excitation in his nerves, like my own showed when I prepared for a fast bout of swimming, as if he wanted to escape.

He sighed, releasing some of the tension from his nerves. “They were right. I reported this to Military Command, which put the lid on it without any hesitation. Not that I can blame them. You know how bad the recruitment rates are for The Pits. Most youths would choose incarceration over coming down here, and that’s when they think all of this is reversible. It’s one of the reasons they allowed me down here: to raise morale; to make this place and its demands seem tolerable. It is hard, so bloody hard, convincing a soldier to turn his back on the enemy and take on a digging job. And why? Perhaps it’s the fear of seeming like a coward. Perhaps, it is the desire to become a hero. As a scientist, I can’t agree with Command without further testing. As a soldier, I obeyed. Until now.”

I couldn’t tell exactly what emotion it was from his palm alone. Fear, or maybe shame. The firings of his nerves told me that it was painful for him, but there was nothing in the pattern to suggest that he was lying.

“When the first treatment resistant patients began to return from the pits, I came to see them.” He paused, running a thumb over the smooth, shaved skin under his square chin. “If you’d seen what I’ve seen, grown women and men out of form, unable to speak…and the ones who do can only speak of how urgent it is they go back to The Pits or the armoury or the battlefield where they lost themselves. They’re so afraid of light that even those who were forced to heal their bodies endure irreparable damage to their minds. Even Krentz, now fully healed, sometimes forgets to move for an entire afternoon.”

His face was harder to read than his palm, but in his voice the shame was clear. I was not sure if he was ashamed for telling me this or for letting Lydia Krentz, and others like her, sink so deep. She’d wondered, back then by the fire, if the Crystal was taking revenge on her, through the alterations. I wondered if she still believed that.

“Well,” he said. “What does your sense tell you? Is this the hand of a liar?”

I shook my head, my entire body moving with the gesture. Will Ricca be alright?

“She has already begun to recover. As long as she doesn’t get exposed to even more Celestine, she should be alright. But she made me promise that I’ll bring you back up, and I did.” He spoke offhandedly yet sincerely, as if this was a simple matter of fact. “Am I lying to you now?”

He wasn’t. But did it matter? Soon, I will be in a place where none of them could find me.

You’re telling the truth, but it doesn’t matter–if they chose not to tell me, it means it’s more important I keep going through the fracture. I’m bringing in glass faster than any other team. If it makes the battle shift a little quicker, end a little sooner, who am I to refuse?

He snorted, pulling his hand out of the water and drying it on the flank of his coat. “What battle?” He mimicked the sign I’d used, two fists pressed against each other. “We’re chasing the beaten and the wounded, and soon we’ll install our own warden in España. Getting Crystal a little bit faster isn’t worth losing lives for anymore.”

My shoulders were too deeply set within my torso to move, so I shrugged with my hands, making the gesture exaggerated and childish. We’re soldiers. It’s a part of our job to be ok with people dying. And there are other needs besides war. I hear most of our turbines are turned by centipedes now–would you have us return to steam?

He looked sidelong at me, and I knew that even with my face being what it was, and my having no voice to shake, he could still see through me. “They could do it without you. From what I hear, you spend a lot of time alone down that river, and you keep losing ropes and hooks to the current. One might suspect you’re being reckless, needlessly putting yourself in danger. Not just needlessly—purposefully.”

What does that mean?

He shook his head. “You were once a soldier under my command. I will not surrender you to a deathly neurosis, and neither will McCray.”

I hadn’t known such rage since I’d seen Haggard Avravham Moloch kill a boy who could have been his son. I wondered if I could lunge out of the pond and wrap my fingers around his throat, pulling him into the water and drown him. The sound I made could be best described as a furious gurgle. Is that how you decide who’s worth saving and who isn’t? I didn’t know the sign for ‘affiliation’. Group?

“If you won’t come up with me, then I’ll come with you. I’ll get the authorization, gear, and crew. I still remember these passages.”

He’d done wisely to pull his hand out of the water before making that claim. I didn’t believe him. Not like I do. Would they risk it, if they knew that I could still sabotage the entire operation? Up above they know they made a devil’s deal with someone who’s turned into a fish and lives in an underwater cave. They’d be fools to think I haven’t gone insane. Do you think they’ll dare anger me? For a moment I considered threatening to expose our ancient religion. It might have scared him, but it still felt wrong to say something so ugly, let alone lie.

I should have known Haggard Moloch well enough, at that point, to know that he wouldn’t meet force with force. He leaned forward, his expression compassionate. “I know what you’re doing down there,” he said quietly, and my heart skipped one of its many fluttering beats. “I figured a long time ago, Ol’daughter, and I’d like to help.”

Could he have known? Perhaps he’d picked up on clues that I hadn’t, but it wasn’t beyond Moloch to pretend that he knew when he didn’t, to bait me into exposing information. I don’t need your help.

“Your being here proves that you do. I…” he sighed. “I have no remorse for what we did. I’ve forgiven myself for it. I don’t feel any guilt.”

I didn’t think his intention was to enrage me further, still, I could feel my body becoming rigid and warm.

“But you do. You’re not the first soldier to feel guilt over military action. Accept it. You can’t just stay here until these caves wipe your humanity away, hoping it would take the guilt with it.”

I almost sighed with relief. He had no idea. I played along. Why not?

“Excuse me?”

Why shouldn’t I let it?

“Because that’s the easy way. There is an entire world waiting for you up there, and you’re hiding from it.”

It would have softened me, three months ago, to see him express such empathy. Made me apologise for making him worry and scurry like a dog to prove my obedience again. But now I could see through him. His expression was light, almost shrugging, but there was sweat on his forehead, and for a moment it could have been mistaken for the shimmering slime of a cave snail. It was an act, one that I could choose to play along with, or not. Had he changed, or had I?
He would have given us the glass. You know that, right? If we’d stayed until morning, and offered to take him with us, he would have given us all he had.

The shadow of a doubt, perhaps even of regret, crawled across his tanned cheeks. He brought his hands into the lights and signed: I won’t pretend my actions weren’t wrong. This place had made me into a _______ –

I brought my hand up, cutting his flow. Made you into a what?

“A monster,” he said. These holes make monsters of us all. Did you notice that when I told him somebody was climbing from below, he wasn’t happy that his master might have returned? He was terrified.

That, I had to admit, was a very good observation. Sir Haggard Moloch didn’t become one of the Crown’s leading scientists by ignoring clues. What does that matter?

Confident that his words were not incriminating, he used his voice again. “None can live so long without sunlight and keep sane. Even the savages in the new world know well enough to worship the sun, as a healer—”

Don’t you dare speak to me of savages, after what you did. Don’t speak to me at all. Leave—and if you ever return, I’ll tell Command that you’re distracting me and interfering with my productivity. A chill swam through me as I signed, shocked at my own words, but I didn’t hesitate.

A part of me expected him to say what had always been easy to say, about how I’d lost my mind, and he would fight tooth and nail, now that he had both, to get me back up. Instead, he sighed. The cave was silent for a long time except for the sound of still water. “This isn’t you, Jillian.”

What an odd sound that name was, coming from his mouth. Wrong. This is me. Whoever came before—that was someone else.

He looked at me, then, with the confusion that good scientists cherished, the suspicion that one of their assumptions may have been incorrect. “What happened to you down there?” He asked.

I truly wished I could have told him. 

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