Isadora’s light ascended from the black water, then surfaced beside me. She put her head into the air, gills still in the water. I turned away from the waterfall crashing above me and turned to her. She was smiling warmly, her long teeth interlacing, her eyes set back and each looking at another side of the world. If I’d seen that smile, even in a picture, before I’d first come to The Pits, would I have perceived its beauty? I wasn’t sure. But now I couldn’t bring myself to look away, to deliberately detach from her saintly, guiding warmth. A wave went through her long body, creating a pulse in the water that brushed against my side like a caress. “It doesn’t have to be today,” she said. “You can take more time, get a little stronger.”

Perhaps she even meant it. I shook my head, a torsion of my whole body. I felt like a Godsent saviour, like Samson the Hero. I was needed, and even if that was the exact emotion that Isadora aimed to inspire in me, it didn’t matter. I felt alive. She looked at me, and like always, I knew she understood. What a blessing she was.

She leaned closer, gazing into my eyes, her breath cool on my skin.

“There is a plaza in Seville, called Plaza de España. You can remember, no? I will be there every year, on the longest day of the year, the most sunny day. Every year I will come there and wait.” She paused, as if shy, which I doubted she was. “But you will not recognize me, will you? I will be different, and your eyes will be different. I will wear a red dress, blood red, and a red hat, and a red scarf, and people will look and say,” she mock-sneered, “who is that woman with no taste? But if you are there, if the borders are open, you will come and show me your face—your real face—in sun light, and I will show you mine.”

She fluttered her fingers beside my jowls, the waves licking at the bony ridges, and brought her face in front of mine, and the expression in her eyes was so queer, like that of someone speaking from within a dream. What real face? I wondered. She’s looking at it right now. Is this the feminine romanticism the older girls have always warned me of developing? “Easy to remember, no? Most sunny day, in the España Square in España, and the colour of blood.” She put the centre of her face to mine, where our noses once had been. “You will remember, no?”

I would, yes. I didn’t remember what colour blood was, but I remembered blood, the thing in my veins. But why had she chosen now to tell me? There was still time for me to return, to place the ropes and the hooks where they needed to be, to get her and the rest of them up the river. After they were on the other side of the waterfall, wouldn’t there be enough time to plan our rendezvous?

Yes, but all of that was based on the assumption that I would return. Oh, how late I was to catch on. She’d manipulated me, but I wasn’t angry with her. I was grateful.

Alberto climbed into the air, to the flat rock shelf and then up the sheer wall beside the waterfall. A rope made of woven pondweed was looped around his carapace, in a way that didn’t interrupt him as he climbed, placing his stake-like legs into the downward depressions in the rock. Alberto himself had fashioned these, chipping with delicate legs, thousands of strikes per peg-hole, shell against rock, for years upon years, only to finally reach the top and realise that he could not climb against the powerful current where the stream began falling, nor squeeze himself into the narrow space between the rock ceiling and the rushing water.

Osvaldo crawled onto the shelf, placing himself right under Alberto as if to catch him, his body’s skirt flapping in the water, tossing water up on his body. His toothy mouth turned to me, and the cave shook with sound.

“He asks if you are sure that you are ready. That you don’t need more time to heal.”

Perhaps the ceremonial atmosphere of that place had gotten to me. Perhaps it was just that it was Osvaldo asking, but I dove back into the depths and drove my body quickly up into that shimmering mirror and through, for the first time in a while, immersed in nothing but air. It didn’t hurt yet, for my gills had not had time to dry. I burst back down to Isadora, scattering air bubbles all around me. I felt like my old self again, agile and strong, suffused with an intense, holy preparedness. Let me die with the philistines.

“Go in peace,” she said. “And may light guide you.”

I swam towards the edge, where Osvaldo waited to lift me up. Alberto waited above us, his sharp, white body tucked close to the wall, and his claws rolled down the rope that he had brought with him, with a net weaved at its end. He cocked his head, looking down at Osvaldo and me, perhaps wondering why I hadn’t climbed up onto the worm’s body yet.

I knew that the more Alberto waited for me to move, the more he would be exhausted from keeping that awkward position, and the likelier he would be to drop me when I reached the top. I had feared getting out of the water, being carried in that net, but this wasn’t the thing I feared the most. I looked at Osvaldo’s teeth, and my body, suddenly foreign, refused to move.

Isadora would hate him fiercely, if he ate me, and he knew that. If he did eat me, though, they’d be here for decades. She’d forgive him in a decade, wouldn’t she? And if he feared showing this form to the world like I suspected he did, he would rather stay here with them, even if they all hated him…

Alberto chirped, and even I could hear the impatience in it.

Isadora had been right. You cannot do anything worthwhile without faith. I couldn’t save them without trusting them first.

Whatever happens, happens. I put my body over his, and immediately he pulled me upwards, thousands of muscles rolling me on top of him. I lay against his closed mouth, with its hundreds of teeth, my gills already beginning to dry. As he started rising against the wall I couldn’t help thinking how easy it would be for him to open his mouth and sink those teeth into me.

I fought to breathe. If he tried to bite me, could I hold the teeth apart? Could I swim into his mouth, and punch with clawed fingers into his brain, assuming he had only one, and that it was anywhere near his mouth? His jaw shifted slightly, as if to open, but the rows of teeth quickly tightened again. No, if I were to be eaten, there was nothing I could do about it.

And as soon as I had given it up, I’d found the net descended on me, and I climbed with what little strength I had into its safety. I tugged twice to signal Alberto, who immediately started pulling at the rope, claw over claw.

An ache settled between my temples as my lungs struggled with the task of breathing. No matter how much I panted and gasped, I was still suffocating. Oh, how I wished that there was some way to keep my gills wet as I made the necessary trip inside air.

I wriggled in the basket, trying to indicate urgency, but whether Alberto understood or not I couldn’t know—he continued pulling the rope in his claws, one and then the other, steadily.

Hoping to waste as little oxygen as possible I let my body go loose, and my head slumped, turned to the side and downwards. I saw Osvaldo beneath me, dizzyingly far and getting farther still. If I fell on him, we’d both be hurt, but we’d recover. But if I missed him and hit the rock instead, I thought breathlessly, I might not recover at all.

I saw her light, then, beckoning, summoning, calling me back below, where I belonged. What a horrible thing it was to be taken away from.

Finally, Sovereign of the World, it was time to act. A claw took hold of me, not delicate but thankfully precise enough not to crush my ribs. The crags scraped at my scales as he turned me around like a fish in the market. Finally the edge of the waterfall was in front of me, and I reached for it.

Throw me into the water. Blessed be the Name: toss me in there before I die.

He held my entire body in one claw, peeling the net off my tail with the other, while I reached out into the falling water and brought it to my gills a tiny handful at a time. Such scant relief—until finally, one claw pressing my abdomen and the other my chest, he carried me over to the water. I struggled then, gills parched, flailing my tail even before he let go, and savagely smacking as I fell, either at rock or carapace. I couldn’t afford to look back. I heard a shrill, frightened chirp from behind me, as if a large crab had surprisingly lost his grip. It didn’t matter, as I was almost touching the water. Nothing else in the world mattered but to return to Britonia, where I could get the equipment that would let them return home.

My body slammed against the current and my gills felt a pleasure I had not known was possible. Submerged, my muscles sprang into action and my mind cleared—yet the river was endless, pouring viciously against me, and my body tired much sooner than I’d expected. Pain took hold of my tail muscles, like claws digging deeper and deeper into the tissue until I could swim only a little faster than the current, giving everything I had and still almost staying in place.

I knew that if I failed I would drop back down the waterfall, breaking a few bones and hopes. I could almost see Isadora’s heartbroken face as I fell back into the water, and worse, her acceptance. The quiet disappointment of Alberto and the lovers, and Osvaldo’s quiet, smug elation.

I burst forward, my muscles burning. I was starting to accept the possibility of defeat, of return and descent, when a side opening in the path blessedly revealed itself. I grabbed with both hands at that smooth, pebble-like edge, and just barely pulled myself inside, out of the way of the stream.

I was in a circular pond, hardly deep enough for a man to drown in, and just wide enough for me to lie in lengthwise. Some fish swam quickly out of my way and hid among the pondweed. Perhaps they were just taking a rest, on their way forward and up, or were trapped in the current and had nowhere else to go.

Heart still pounding, I craned my head out of the water, filling my lungs with air, and looked at what was above the pond. My vision wasn’t as clear as it had been, but still I saw stairs leading to a spacious hall, and carved nooks with statues, which I knew were in the images of the gods, even if I couldn’t quite make them out. On the floor lay a couple of abandoned cans of food, courtesy of the Britonish Crown. A mound of Crystal, too, larger than the entire reserves of both the Britonish and Espanish, and inside it, the corpse of a boy that I wasn’t ready to look at. Above the body was a sheer wall, and atop it, the hallowed ground where Moloch had struck him dead.

I was now one of the fish in Sargasso’s pond. I laughed, and then suddenly stopped. Perhaps, after I’d saved Isadora, I’ll deserve to cry here. It felt wrong to be here—and I hadn’t expected to return. How could I have forgotten that this place stood in the path? If something was the matter with my memory, it must have affected the ability to remember other things, too. Whether or not my memories were affected, I couldn’t know. For the time being it was safer to assume that my mind just avoided thinking about what happened to Yitzhak here. Perhaps it was better that it did, when I was away.

But now that I was here, I needed to decide how to proceed.

I could crawl out of the pond, and perhaps reach the stairs without getting cut too badly by the Crystal shards. If I were fortunate, I might even climb the staircase before my gills dried up and I’d be left to choke in air just like any other fish. If only there were a little water on the path, just enough to wet my gills…

I slammed a fist against the rock and fell back into the water, scaring the fish all the way to the border between the pond and the stream. They still feared the current more than me, and rightly so. I feared it too, but I had no choice but to brave it again.
A fury rose in me, a rage at the caves themselves, this solid chunk of stone that oppressed space and allowed existence only in the narrow veins it did not occupy. What facet of God had made this? What purpose did it serve?

I’d have to swim up the stream, all the way to the same bridge Moloch and I had crossed, through the water itself. Once I got there, I’d collect water from the ground as I crawled back to Britonia. I imagined myself charging against the water, summoning strength I simply didn’t have, and jumping up like an autumn salmon over the same edge I’d fallen from.

It was the only way up.

I turned to the school of fish crowding the exit and grabbed at one with a flick of my clawed hand. It had turned to evade but, as it did, I sensed the fish’s nerve pulsing in the darkness and my hand corrected on its own before my eyes could comprehend what was happening, claws piercing flesh. I brought it to my eyes. The scales on the fish, as well as my hand, shimmered in quicksilver-black. I was vaguely aware that they hadn’t always been like this.

I threw the fish into my gullet, hardly chewing. It felt right. Hunger ignited, burning higher and further back into my stomach than it used to. The other fish had retreated, staying low and close to the walls.

I focused, singling out the nerve firing of one fish out of the school. A particularly large one with a bite mark on its dorsal fin, and saw how, for every pulse of my nerves, there was an echo from its own. Its reactions became so predictable that I coaxed it into my open palm, wondering whether it sensed my control, or felt that it was its own intuition leading it into my jaws. The intense flare of nerves as I sunk my claws into my prey was painful in my state of heightened sensitivity. I didn’t know if the pain was mine or the fish’s.

Tired after gulping down about a kilo of raw flesh, I allowed my muscles to relax and my eyes to close. I slept so deeply and dreamlessly that, when I awoke in the pond, it seemed like the continuation of the same moment, though the heaviness in my guts had passed and I felt light and vigorous. I let one hand out into the stream, webbed fingers splayed, and estimated its briskness. I filled my lungs with air, jumped out of the current just far enough to steal two chunks of the Crystal that had fallen off Sargasso’s body, and gripped one in each hand, wincing as they cut into my palms. I slid back into the water, emptied my lungs again, and paused for a moment to steel my spirit. Then I threw myself into the rushing water and swam faster than I’d ever swum before.

#

I awoke to a rasping sound which took me a moment to recognize as my own lungs pumping cold air. My gills were dry, and my face was pressed against the rock floor. Water rushed behind me. I looked back at the wall from which I’d fallen to the water, altering, while Moloch watched. It seemed I’d managed, in various states of consciousness, to swim up the stream, launch myself out of the water, hold onto the rock, and pull myself up, just before losing consciousness.

A shallow current of water passed by me, and I scooped some with my hands, dripping it over my gills. So little.

More than anything I wanted to plunge back into the gushing stream—back into the life I could live down in The Pits, safely submerged.

No, not more than anything. I had a duty, and I wanted to fulfill it more.

I grabbed the Crystals that I’d dropped when I lost consciousness, and put one elbow in front of me, then the other, and started pulling forward. I stopped often to drip water onto my gills, knowing that the wetter they were the more I could breathe. More than once, I closed my eyes thinking I wouldn’t open them again, only to wake up some undisclosed amount of time later and keep crawling. Every little pool, every shallow puddle was a sanctuary I wished I didn’t have to leave.

I remembered reading about these kinds of trials, about the lengths people went to on faith alone—like Ya’akov fighting with the angel until the sun rose, not letting him go until the angel agreed to give him a new, godly name—and how I’d always thought I could never put myself through one of those. I couldn’t have known, as a sniveling, pale child, what this faith felt like—a desperate need, a relentless fury, and worse of all, a great love, that together could take anyone through the worst torture. Even me.

I crawled across the curve of the tunnel where Moloch and I had found the marks of cut-out Crystal, finally reaching the downhill crawl back into the body of water I’d crashed into after the explosion. I was too exhausted to stop myself from rolling down the slope, and succumbed to unconsciousness the instant my gills touched the water.

I woke up rejuvenated. My gills still hurt where the drying was worst, but I was swimming freely again. The lake that had seemed inscrutable to me, when I’d been lost in darkness after the explosion, was now clear as day. Still dark, but I had senses now that I hadn’t had before, an awareness of the currents going through the water. That awareness led me to the bottom, where the slow flow of the currents was… anomalous.

I found the passage even before my eyes glimpsed it, and realised why Haggard and I hadn’t been able to: we’d been looking above us, while it was below. The passage opening was circular, decorated by broken, jagged rocks. I pushed a large one out of the way and crawled in. At some point as I swam, it no longer felt like I was swimming down, but up. In this place where España was conjoined by some miraculous umbilical cord to Britonia, whatever aspect of God held up and down in their places had been relieved of their duty. I wondered if science would ever explain this. I wondered if we needed it to.

Blind fish clustered near the exit hole, their nerve-firings anxious and hesitant. I swam through, scaring them away, and finally reached the rocky shore where I’d last spoken to Ricca. I hoped she’d be waiting there—but it was Watts, shirtless, gazing into the water with an opaque expression and smoking a cigarette. His muscular shoulders were no longer covered by a carapace like they’d been when I’d last seen him. Not only did he not recognize me, but his jaw dropped and his eyes tore open as he saw my head emerging from the water. A choked wheeze escaped his throat and his smoke fell into the water, spreading the smell of ash in the water. After a moment he composed himself enough to scream and scramble backward.

Chambers came running, her chestnut hair disheveled and her shirt unbuttoned, pickaxe in hand, ready to cave in my skull. I couldn’t speak, and she obviously didn’t recognize my face, so distorted was the image of me she had in her head. What can you do when you want those above to listen to your pleas?

With two raw palms, I presented the chunks of Crystal to her. She froze, though she didn’t take them. The water did little to muffle her exclaimed profanities. I let the Crystal roll onto land so my hands were free. My teammates’ shock gave me enough time to clap in Morse code, one letter at a time, in front of their bewildered eyes.
It’s Jill. I’m back.

NEXT (and final)