In another situation, I may have been embarrassed to be bare-breasted amongst clothed people. This was not Solstice, where all were equally naked. But with Moloch presenting us with his internal organs and Krentz displaying alterations so extreme she could easily be mistaken for an object, showing a pair of breasts did not feel like such a sacrifice. Nobody gave me even a passing glance aside from Ricca. I couldn’t tell if I saw a twinkle of interest in her eyes, or imagined one.

Moloch got out of the water, put on his gloves, and retrieved three items of equipment from his backpack, two of every sort—a roll of string, a pinch of tape, and a small device, pen-shaped, with a tiny display and dial: an underwater barometer, for measuring depth.

I tucked my own equipment down the sides of my briefs and entered the water. I was surprised by the feeling of blissful freedom that washed over me as soon as my lungs emptied. Moloch, more crawling on the bottom than swimming, seemed similarly pleased to be submerged. I saw no gills on him, but didn’t snails breathe through their skin? It didn’t matter, as long as he breathed.

Lead the way, my girl, Moloch signed with sluggish hands. I swam further ahead, my fingers brushing the bottom.

Quickly we found the opening that would take us further than anyone had ever gone.

Moloch looked at me and I reminded myself he was taking a measure of my body’s dimensions, nothing more. You go first, he signed. If you get stuck, I can pull you out, call for help. I can go where you go. If you’re stuck behind me, we’re both stuck.

Agreed, I signed—and went deeper. It was not a tunnel per se, just a narrowing between two walls, wider at the point I thought of as an entrance. Once through, I turned my headlamp left and right to try to understand the lay of it—it seemed to branch, a cavernous labyrinth of areas that were and weren’t wide enough to crawl through, like an arterial system.

I pressed my face against stone in a crevice so narrow I had to decide which way my head would turn before getting in, because once I did it would be too tight to turn it. In a space so cramped it barely allowed for any ventilation, the smell of my own body was strong. I noted that smelling underwater was a thing my body was now capable of, though I didn’t even know which organ was accomplishing this. The thought terrified me—the sudden awareness of how strange these alterations had been, how quickly I’d accepted them, how far down into the belly of the Earth I’d pushed myself. But I couldn’t afford to panic, not when I had a mission to accomplish, so I kept my mind focused on the lives that I would save, on what an honour it was to find myself at such a crucial juncture, and pushed ahead.

In truth, I couldn’t help but envy the troops on the front line. It would have been easier to run and crawl for my life alongside comrades who would die for me just as quickly; to die under the roar and flash of vicious bombardments. In the relative tranquillity of The Pits, there was no rushing in your ears, no war drums to spur you to a murderous frenzy, foaming at the mouth. Down here, death was a stranger standing beside you, sliding effortlessly between the walls, taunting you to lodge yourself just a little deeper, a little tighter. A stranger that was becoming increasingly familiar.

At times I was tense, haunted by the irrational fear that the caves might shudder, like the insides of a living creature, and crush me between its mountainous guts. At others, I was perfectly calm, trusting that this crawl would be nothing but a story to tell in the sanatorium garden to other soldiers while sunbathing. I tried to keep that picture in mind, but it was constantly slipping out of my grasp as I slithered into the cleft, trying to feel with my hands where the path got wider. I could hold the white-yellow colour in my mind, but not recall what it felt like; the way it flooded you with warmth. Why did it frighten me even more than the obvious danger in front of me?

Finally, I reached a point where I could trust that I would get stuck if I crawled even one more metre, marked it with a piece of tape and a string, and took a depth measurement. By the time I crawled, in reverse, all the way out the muscles of my shoulders and calves had begun to stiffen, and my skin was scraped from the rough surface.

Haggard had also crawled out of the crevice. In the darkness of the water I thought he might have become a little flattened. Still underwater, we compared our measurements; despite Haggard’s advantage, it seemed that I had been the one to find the lowest point.

#

Standing in knee-deep water, I could barely hear Ricca and Moloch’s talking over the sound of my own retching, as my lungs struggled to recall what they were supposed to do with the air that burned them. Moloch had gotten out of the water first, and I knew I should not leave them to have that discussion alone. Krentz and Miles had started a small cooking fire and presently were sitting by it, watching. It had not been such a dangerous thing to start a fire here—the rising heat from the little steel bowl of burning alcohol would cause enough circulation, the cloud of hot gas climbing up, bringing in about as much oxygen as it would use, and alcohol fire didn’t smoke. They were not fools, up in command—they knew that there was a comfort in fire, a mental, if not physical, substitute for sunlight. Even as I was struggling to breathe, I found solace in it. Miles stirred the pot, while Krentz sat motionless and looked at both of us.

“Not a grain,” Moloch responded to Ricca’s question. His transition to air had been effortless. I tried my best not to covet him that.

Ricca came to me, wading clumsily in the shallow water, stopping only when she was close enough to touch me, though she chose not to, this time. “Jill?”

“Give her a second, will you?” Moloch grunted.

I shook my head. “Nothing,” I managed to say between sucking hiccups. “No Crystal down there.”

“Sergeant,” Moloch said, sternly and delicately at the same time, as if convincing a child to go where they’d prefer not to. “S’time to talk about getting demolitions involved.”

“I can’t let you do that.”

I’d expected him to speak in anger, but his tone was flat, curious. “Why in the name of the gods not?”

“Beneath this body of water in which you stand, Sir Moloch, there is an absence, a cavity larger than this entire cave. We are standing not on solid rock going all the way down, as one would suspect, but a shelf, a divide of stone thinner than any natural structure has the right to be. If an explosion takes place inside of the fracture in that shelf, with the weight of an entire pool pressing on it, it might break the shelf down, dropping the entire pool with everyone in it.”

I turned very slowly to Ricca, and saw a stillness in her face, something that might have been guilt. She didn’t look at me.

“This certainly falls under the category of things that I needed to know.” Now there was controlled anger in Moloch’s altered voice.

I didn’t disagree. “Ricca, how can you possibly know this?” I said, my voice almost steady.

ֱ She gestured for us to follow her to dry land. My lungs finally regained the rhythm of breathing and I dragged my legs through the shallow water. The air was colder on my bare skin than water.

“Reynolds, why don’t you do me a favour and tap a few fingers against the floor,” she said while taking off her boots. She set them neatly one beside the other, then peeled off her socks with her toes, and finally placed her bare feet on the floor and turned around. “Any number, as long as you don’t tell me what it is.”

Confused, I crouched, water still dripping from me, and tapped two fingers against the ground. She was about five metres away.

“Two.”

I tapped again.

“Three. One. Now you just slammed your palm against the ground.”

I looked at my palm, pressed against the rock, and my eyes followed the path of rock transmitting the vibration all the way to Ricca’s feet. As a child, I used to play with spiders, dropping bits of dust onto their webs to see how they reacted to even the slightest vibration, sensing its source. “But when we talked about alterations…”

“There was no reason to say anything, until now.”

Why didn’t you tell me, I wanted to ask. Why did you lie? But not here, now. It would have to wait for the end of the day, preferably when liquor was introduced into the mix. “How clear is it?”

“Like you were tapping against my skin. It’s not guesswork when I say that there’s no rock under this pool. And I’m not sending you to blow anything up.”

“What’s under it?” Krentz gravelled, her tone neutral, as far as I could tell.

“Either air or still water. I would have felt the vibration if it were running water, but otherwise I’m not sure. What I do know is that if you blow up the separating layer, you’re going to find yourself in the middle of a strong current as the pressures equalise, flushed down into sharp fragments of rock. I will not allow that.”

There was a moment of silence, broken only by a surprising hiccup, the last remnant of my transition.

Moloch cleared his throat, a troubled, wet sound. “Do you know why I’ve chosen to come down here, Sergeant?” He spoke slowly as if it were truly difficult for him to say the words. “Because I have no more work to do, up there. The influx of Crystal has dried to such a degree that my assistants, whom I once had to work to exhaustion, are all on leave. I have no more need of them. The armies of the Espanish Empire are marching on our borders, and without bombs to stop them, without the flow of Celestine’s Crystal needed to manufacture said bombs, they will overrun us. When our queen is taken in chains, Sergeant Ricca McCray, will you look back on your actions today and know that you have done whatever you could?”

Ricca looked at him intently, and I saw once again the commander that I’d learned to admire. A shudder ran through her, as if she was suppressing the urge to dance one of her little arachnid taps. “Private Reynolds will place the bomb.” She turned to me, her voice stern. “After we’ve made absolutely sure you’ll be nowhere near the water when it goes off. And if you somehow find a way to die I swear to whatever gods are listening that I will follow you into Hades and kill you again. Do you understand me?”

It was touching, truly. “Yes, Sergeant.”

“What about me,” Moloch asked. “Am I allowed to die?”

She turned to him, her scowl making it clear that he can go sit on a stalagmite, as far as she was concerned. “You’re a national hero, Sir Moloch. You can do whatever you like.”

Miles spoke for the first time, looking pleadingly at Moloch. “It really is as bad as they say, isn’t it?” The only unaltered voice in the cave, and it sounded so strange. Fragile. I wondered what this place would turn him into.

“These are your orders,” Ricca said, after Moloch made it clear he was not going to respond. “Eat. Rest. Then return inside and mark the lowest point. Then we’ll see—”

“We already marked it,” Moloch said. “Jill measured thirty two metres beneath the surface of the water.

When she looked at me, there was a distance in her many eyes that made me want to run to her and hug her, or get my lute and sing, or fetch another bottle of Nord. Anything so that she wouldn’t look at me as someone who wasn’t her friend. She turned to Krentz. “Sergeant, after they rest and eat, please show them which charge should be operated, and how.”

“Sergeant,” Krentz grunted.

“Much obliged, Sergeant McCray,” Moloch said, and his words sounded more like an apology than an expression of gratitude. Instead of going to sit by the fire, he went for his backpack.

We stood there in silence for a moment, Ricca and I, before she turned from me and put her boots back on. I suddenly realised how cold I’d been all this time.

Moloch retrieved a wool blanket from his pack and, to my surprise, tossed it over my shoulders. “Come sit by the fire, Ol’daughter,” he said, perhaps noticing my shivering. When I was in the water, I was cold as the water was, and there was no discomfort in it. Outside, though, the warmer I became the more I felt the cold. I hugged the rough blanket around my chest.

“Are you hungry?” Miles mumbled. “The beans and ham are almost warm.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the fire, even after all the years that had passed. Mine no longer sought the fire as they once had; instead, I couldn’t take them off the water, aching to return to where my movements felt natural.

I nodded, sensing that I would be hungry soon. I sat by the fire on the other side of Krentz and arranged the blanket so the heat would dry the front of my body, my numb fingers in front of me, shaking in the heat.

It was only Krentz’s eyes that moved, when she turned to Ricca. “I didn’t know, Sergeant. If I had…”

Ricca waved a hand, as if swatting the apology away.

Miles pulled a long spoon out of the bubbling red stew, and put it in his mouth. “A little stingy on the salt, aren’t they?” he said after swallowing, as if to alleviate the tension, but I doubted he’d ever learned that kind of subtlety. “How costly can salt be that they’d spare it on beans and ham?”

“I have acquaintances in logistics,” Moloch said dryly. “I’ll let them know you are displeased with the cuisine.” He stood, still in his briefs, unbothered by the cold, and peered back at the pool.

“When I was on-ground we had properly salted rations,” Krentz said.

“It’s not stinginess,” I said finally. Krentz’s eyes rose to meet mine. “It’s the depths. Smell and taste are affected by the pressure.”

“Or maybe it’s that the beans are altered.” Ricca sat beside Miles, on the other side of the fire from me. “Nothing else seems to stay the same.”

Miles was taking it all in, sitting silently as if trying to memorise it all so he could pen it down in a letter home. Still not knowing what to say to Ricca, I turned to Krentz again. “How long have you been in the caves?” I said. It was uncommon for one to have such drastic alteration before growing accustomed to the ration’s blandness.

Krentz’s eyes glowed over the fire. “This is my first time in the caves. I transferred as soon as I altered.”

I raised an eyebrow. Miles visibly fought the urge to ask. He must have been sitting on that one for a while.

“I was in Toulouse on the day of the bombing,” she explained, and none of us enquired further. It had been eight days prior, maybe nine, when we had been telegraphed the news that an entire city had been lost in an instant. If that was when Krentz had been altered, and eight days in the sun had done so little to bring back her form… There was a long wait ahead before she could feel human again.

She took the cans of beans and ham off the fire with her bare hands, serving each of us one. All except for Moloch, who received a can of what seemed like shelled clams, which he didn’t warm over the fire. Miles gave the rest of us one spoon and one fork each, a couple of long crackers and a smaller can of peaches in nauseatingly sweet syrup. Not for the first time, I lamented that it was so often ham in our rations, but left my complaints unvoiced. Eating pork was a sin, but sinning was allowed when the only other option was risking one’s life, and so my mother made sure my sister and I had grown accustomed to pork since childhood—even buying some for the house, so the neighbourhood butcher won’t have his own suspicions. I blessed the forbidden food with the blessing for any meal that contained meat -“Blessed are you, my Lords, that all has become by His word.” I prayed silently and quickly, making very sure my lips didn’t move as I recited the holy words.

“I wasn’t there when it fell,” Krentz continued, her voice low. “But my force was close by. We were riding Centipedes, which a couple of months before had been nothing more than a barracks bedtime story. Unbelievable animals, terrifyingly large and surprisingly quick, even when covered in armour. Clever, too. Smarter than any animal I’ve seen.”

“I heard they are made from cows, fed Crystal dust mixed into the fodder,” Miles interrupted, glancing at Moloch, who was raising his can of clams over his head and tipping the slippery contents into his mouth, his throat widening and contracting.

“We were never told how they were made,” Krentz continued, not impatiently. “Only how to ride them. I was riding second from the front, meaning I was prepared for the pilot to die, and to take control of the reins, a pair of electrodes going right into its brain. The only question that occupied me was whether or not it’d eat me if I fell.” Krentz held the can and spoon in front of her but didn’t eat.

“We were riding southward to the front line, when we heard the bomb whistle in the sky. The sound itself was faint, but the feeling as the bomb landed was undeniable. You couldn’t see it, but your guts twisted, as if they knew… something was not as it should be. Radio Command notified us that we should put aside one ‘pede to search for survivors, and to my questionable fortune I happened to be on said beast. We knew it wasn’t the first bomb to be dropped by the enemy, but all we heard were rumours. We didn’t know what to expect.”

She looked at Haggard, and so did I. He was gazing into the dark, still face of the water, the can in his hand, as if he could not stand to listen to her story and look at her at the same time.

“What did it look like?” Miles said, blissfully unaware of the silence and its reason.

“The structures of the city were unharmed,” Krentz continued. “That seemed peculiar to me—that there wasn’t a devastating blast, that the city wasn’t flattened. The furthest and closest areas to the bomb site had no need of rescue. As we entered the city, we were greeted by a dog with pondweed growing out of one of its ears. It looked at us and gave a little shake of the head, completely natural,” she mimicked it, tilting her head from side to side, “getting bits of it to drop on the ground so it could eat them. On the outskirts, the alterations were as mild as yours and mine. It was a bright autumn day, and I think people felt that they were going to heal.” She paused again, and looked around. “These caves wouldn’t be so bad if you could get a little sunlight every once in a while.”

Miles’ awed eyes were on Krentz. McCray squatted on her rock, her shoulders reaching forward, lower than her knees, and nodded. Moloch put down the empty can, washed his hands in the ware, and grunted in agreement. I didn’t respond, even though I disagreed—for me, the caves, with their still water and forms of rock growing one into another, were fine the way they were.

“The city blocks nearest the impact site were relatively lucky. The alterations were so quick, so explosive, that anything in that range died instantly. We saw a cat there that had stalactites, just like these ones, sprouting out of its belly, and were relieved. It was an improvement from the things we’d seen up to that point.”

“What… what was between the impact site and the outskirts?” Miles stammered. Haggard didn’t take his eyes off the water, but his body stiffened. As much as it was able to, anyway.

“What would you like to know?” Krentz turned sharply to Miles. She didn’t wait for his response. “That we saw a woman whose arms and legs turned into gigantic, colorful worms, all with gaping maws and sharp teeth? That I turned back and ran, before my Sergeant caught up and slapped some sense back into me? That I threw up when I noticed the little hairs on what used to be her forearms, the vestiges of fingers and knuckles right around where the mouths were? That they bit her, taking chunks of flesh, and when we finally started shooting them dead, she begged me not to hurt them? They were a part of her, she insisted. I shot them anyway, but it was too late. She had bled too much by then. If I hadn’t fled, perhaps…”

She shook her hard, heavy head, and when she spoke again, her voice was calm. “Later, Sergeant Mieville told me that he’d found a star of David on the body, so we would have killed her either way, but I suspect he made that up to alleviate my guilt.”

I swallowed another bite of ham before putting my spoon down, mastering an expression that was just as interested as before, and in no way shocked or disgusted. However accustomed you were to it, it was never pleasant being reminded that your dinner companions with would kill you if they knew.

“The closer we got in,” Krentz said, “the more trees there were, and the more they moved. Some swaying with a gentle, hidden vigour, others—the ones with eyes—”

McCray raised her head to look at Krentz with her four pairs. “Did you say eyes?”

“Eyes, yes. Not like mine, or even yours. More like the eyes of a fish, or a frog, but eyes, larger than my fist. They looked at you, and I mean, truly looked, following you as you walked past. Ever been stalked by a tree? It’s not the kind of thing you forget, especially when you’re trying to fall asleep. Mieville shot one of the trees and it bled, just like you and I would. Well, like I used to, anyway. The ‘pede, spurred by the smell of blood, sprang into action, ignoring the rider, and even with its sawed-off mandibles managed to cut the tree in two. Do you know what we found inside?

“Organs; Guts and livers and hearts. The ‘pede just kept mauling them, and only after it was clear the tree was dead, the ‘pede returned to its machine-like stillness, and responded to the electrodes again. After that point there were no more people, only plants, casting everything into grey shadow. The bomb had hit in the middle of a garden, which seemed out of place in the city centre—the long, tall weeds shading the street, wedging their roots between the sidewalk bricks, climbing out of the street drains. As if one designer wanted a city street, and another a botanical garden, and their designs warred with each other. We went into the garden’s depths until our vision blurred and our gums bled. There was no one there, not a single person or animal, not even corpses or insects. Just that one type of pale, leafless weed. We couldn’t understand where all the people had gone, or how they’d been lucky enough to have the bomb land where it had. Then we saw the Crystal.”

Miles opened his mouth as if to ask a question, but instead made only a small sound of astonishment and resumed his silence.

“You see, I had thought that a Crystal bomb was something complicated. No offence,” she said to Moloch, who made the smallest gesture with his hand, urging her to disregard him and carry on. “I thought there had to be something or other to do with physics or electronics. But in reality, all it takes is exposing the Crystal to sunlight. It doesn’t explode, so I don’t think it should be called a bomb at all. It was sitting in the shade, when we finally found it. I remember thinking that it was so small that I would have missed it if it hadn’t been for the way the vegetation was circling around it, the same colour as algae growing on the walls here. It was sitting alone at the centre of the clearing like a shiny, translucent apple. The weeds were branching, twisting into each other, and it was dark and cool there. There was even a little stream, and I remember thinking, just for a moment, how strange it was that the bomb fell from above without ripping the canopy apart. Everything fit so perfectly, it seemed like the Crystal had been guided to drop into this strange landing site. But that couldn’t be. Perhaps I’d lost my sanity for a moment there because it seemed like the Crystal had formed this garden just to shade itself.”

Lydia Krentz, long black hair falling unkempt over granite forehead and jaw, sapphire-blue eyes staring intently, shrugged her boulder shoulders and began eating.

Miles visibly hesitated before finally asking. “So where did all the people go?”

Haggard coughed. “Maybe give it a think-over later, old son. What did you do then, Krentz?”

She swallowed, a loud, visible process. “There was no one left to be saved, so we did the only thing that we could do. We burned it all down.” She grinned joylessly, alabaster teeth shining in the fire. I understood the primal drive to torch that which you did not understand. “We ran before the fire took its cover away and re-exposed it to the sun. But we’d already had our fair share of exposure, by then. By the time we got back on the ‘pede my skin was so thick you couldn’t cut it with a knife. Sometimes I think that was the Crystal’s revenge on me.”

Haggard’s tone was soft when he spoke. “And after all that, you agreed to come down here? If I’d known…” He paused. I suspected that if he’d known, he’d still have asked her to come. “I can’t be cut with a knife, either, if I tense my skin just right,” he looked at his fingers, and I may have detected a ripple going through his skin. “Curious, ain’t it?”

“I didn’t just agree,” she said, sapphire reflecting the flames. “I wanted to come here. When we got back, they wanted to send me to a nursery on some sunny beach—they weren’t sure if an alteration caused by a bomb would be any different from the sort you get down here. But I didn’t need healing. I was a better soldier, then. I wanted to be on the front line, to let the bastards get a close look at what they’d done. But I couldn’t stay in the infantry.”

McCray’s brow rose. “How come?”

“I wouldn’t pass the physicals. I can’t run.”

McCray and Haggard laughed bitterly, sharing in her pain. Miles just barely managed not to gasp. “That’s it?” he said. “That’s why they didn’t let you on the front line?”

Krentz shrugged. “Not the one that I wanted to go to, anyway. Again, no offence.”

“None taken,” I assured her. “We all got assigned here. We make of it what we can.” I finished my meal and stood up. Haggard was long done, and I didn’t want him to wait. “Hopefully you’ll find that you can be as useful down here as you would have been up there. Can you show us the device we’re going to use?”

She got to her feet, surprisingly quickly, and fumbled with her backpack. “The longest fuse I managed to fit inside the sealed compartment takes a hundred seconds to burn. There’s a string on the outside. You hold it and pull, just like you would with any other bomb.” She looked at me for a moment. “You pull as hard as you can.” She retrieved a rope, a knife, a sheet of rubber, and an unfamiliar object: a rectangle of grey rubber sealed with glue. The bomb, I guessed.

Unlike the Crystal, which made its presence known, even when you couldn’t touch or see it, this bomb had no such aura. Just a flat envelope, stamped with a large, red ‘100’, which indicated the number of seconds it took to detonate. In the centre of it was a piece of rough rope, just long enough to wrap around a fist for better grip.

She held it in her hands in a way that made it very clear it should not be touched. “You’ll see the rubber begin to inflate with gas. If you need to abort the explosion, take a knife and slash it open. The water should get inside and kill the fuse. Understood?”

Should? someone else might have asked, but not me. “Loud and clear,” I said.

Ricca straightened from her crouch. “Unfortunately, Jill is the only one who can get out of the water in time. But, as I have no intention of explaining to Jill’s family why she won’t be coming up for solstice, we’re going to perform a test dive first. You will dive to the deepest point you found, and come back before a single minute—sixty seconds or less—passes. If you cannot, you will put the explosive at a higher point, and find out from the safety of the shore whether that was deep enough. Understood?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” I said.

“Aye,” Moloch grunted.

“A question, McCray?” Krentz gravelled.

“Yes?”

“You said we are on a rock shelf. If it does break, what does it matter if someone’s on land or not?”

“Good question,” Ricca said, glancing at Moloch and me as if admonishing us for our lack of survival instinct. “Even if the shelf snaps, the fracture should be somewhere along the part that’s covered in water. Staying here is dangerous, but it’s a risk I find reasonable. Staying in the water as it begins to drain, however, is not. If that satisfies, Sargeant Krentz, I trust that you will drill Private Reynolds thoroughly.”

Krentz nodded, and took the piece of rope in her hand. “Private Reynolds, why don’t you show me how hard you can pull on this rope without using your weight?”

The drilling process was as thorough as it was quick. Once she was satisfied that I could pull hard enough to activate the bomb, even lying on my back, even when it was wet, she tested me on cutting open the leather sheet, in air and again in water. Moloch watched closely, but said nothing. Finally, she gave me the bomb, her movements slow and confident. I took it, and we looked at each other. “Slow and steady,” she said, surprisingly softly. “Don’t make any mistakes, and you’re going to be fine. If you’re not sure if something is a mistake, come back up. Understood?”

Not a command; just a question, expressed curtly. I nodded. “Understood.”

I did everything in my power to consider the risk I was taking a worthy one. If what we found down there stopped even just one bombing like the one Krentz had described, wouldn’t it be worth the life of one woman who barely had anyone waiting for her? ‘Jill family,’ as Ricca said, was made of just one person, my older sister. She would cry, sure, but so would the sister of anyone who died in the next bombing that I didn’t prevent.

Above all else, I wished for the war to be over as quickly as possible; to be on the other side of it, whatever might wait there.

I got back into the water, no longer afraid of it but still tense. I swam down and crawled again into the deep, following the string I’d left behind, and pulled up my clock. Only then did I realise that I could crawl half of the way down and start the clock from there, tricking Ricca into thinking it was safer than it was. Was it out of loyalty or cowardice that I decided not to lie? Neither: it was simply forbidden to lie. It was her decision whether or not we set the bomb, not mine, and thinking about it any more would only serve to distract me when I needed to focus.

I set the clock running and started squirming backwards, pushing with my arms and pulling with my feet, squeezing through a particularly narrow turn as quickly as I could and finally swimming in desperate, wild strokes. Just at the edge of the water, still inside, I stopped the clock, measuring my return at 58 seconds. A success.

Moloch was standing in knee-deep water. Ricca was crouching on the shore, talking to him, and I listened, hearing only the odd word here and there as most were lost through the translation from air to water. He passed on the message in signs.

She wants to see five attempts. Measure time of each.

Ricca looked down at the water sternly and raised an open palm at me, fingers spread out.

I would have sighed if I had any air in my lungs, but I didn’t, so I gave her a thumbs up and went back into the crevice.

The attempts took me 54 seconds, 52, 59 when my ribs got stuck against a particularly troublesome knuckle of rock, then 54 again. By then, Moloch was securing the straps of his backpack around his shoulders, already prepared for the next phase. Krentz walked just to the edge of the water, as if afraid to set foot in it, and gave Moloch the bomb, who gave it to me.

I took it and swam before I had a chance to hesitate, entered the entry point and crawled inside, the path intimately familiar now. My body seemed to move so slowly, my hands shaking when they were not pushing against some surface, like the hands of a groom walking towards his veiled, foreign bride.

I reached the mark and allowed myself a long moment, akin to a long breath, before taking the bomb in both hands, holding it against the rock with my left while my right wrapped the rope around itself, ready to pull hard and decisively, just like I’d practised with Krentz. Pull, I told my hand. Just yank it. But I hadn’t counted on my own being a coward, when it came to taking a real risk. Had McCray known? Perhaps that was the reason she’d been so against this operation in the first place: she’d been embarrassed by how much of a coward I was. If that was the case, I’d make her proud.

Then came a thought that I hadn’t had in a while—that one nameless, wordless thought that comes before taking a great leap, or leaning in for a kiss (or so I imagined). The one that every human being, if they had truly lived, thought before doing something they would later come to regret, or remember as a great heroic deed. Whatever happens, happens, I thought, and drew my fist back hard enough I worried something might have torn.

The rubber immediately began to swell.

I thrust it away, deeper into the chasm, and squirmed back, shimmying and pushing, my shoulders straining with effort—five metres, a dozen, until they encountered resistance that made me stop. It was the same tightening as before, that same protruding knuckle, I was absolutely certain, but something had changed. Either the passage had narrowed, which was impossible, or I widened, which was likewise impossible. My palms slipped against the rock. Below me, the bomb was swelling against the rock and stretching even further. If I couldn’t move, I coldly realised, the explosion would kill me. I’d known before that the bomb could kill me, but it had only now become real, manifest.

If I can’t go up, I should crawl back down and cut the rubber open, abort the detonation. I might still have time. But If I’m too late, that means I’ll be closer to the detonation once it happens. If I hadn’t wasted my time trying to escape, I could have made it to the bomb. Has it been a minute already? Why didn’t I start the clock as soon as I set the fuse?

I heard a low voice but didn’t know whose it was or what they were trying to say.

Should I go now? A hundred seconds is a long time and time must be moving slower. I’ll go instead of dying here: come on, push, and I did, and it was easier to move down towards the bomb than it had been to retreat, but just as I began to slide forward I felt a soft but intensely firm grip around my ankle, slimy against my skin but not slippery, and I kicked and struggled to get Moloch off, he should not be so close to the explosion, he should get away, save himself, I won’t stop the explosion in time, we waited too long and there’s nothing to do now but put my hands over my ears and scream, scream, scream. Almighty Gods, Sovereign of the World, if you can hear me down here, protect me, I beg of you.

The world broke.

NEXT