The diver has seen something. Either that or he's into swimming head down into the depths beside a decaying defense station just for the hell of it. He's heading parallel to the pillar and he's got something in his arms. I glance down and see Ramona below me her skin a silvery flash like moonlight on ice, circling the pillar. My chest tightens. A stab of anger: **What the hell are you playing at?**
**Hanging my ass out to give you a clear shot.** She sounds lighthearted, but I can tell she's wound up like a watch spring inside. I taste the overspill of her uncertainty: Is he up to it? And my blood runs cold, because under the uncertainty, she harbors the rock-solid-conviction that, if I'm not up to it, we're both going to die.
Outmaneuvered.
The guy above me is turning in tight circles as he descends, keeping an eye open for signs of an ambush as he heads towards Ramona, who is feigning a false sense of security, her back to the outside of the cliff next to the point where the pillar merges with it in a jagged mass of crumpled volcanic rock. I shelter in the cleft between pillar and cliff as he strokes steadily down, hugging the far side of the pillar from Ramona. In his arms he's clutching something that looks like a shotgun, if shotguns had viciously barbed harpoons jutting from their muzzles. Just great, I think. What was it Harry the Horse tried to beat into my head? Never bring a dagger to a harpoon duel, or something like that.
My luck runs out while he's still about three meters above me, ten meters above Ramona. He slows his corkscrew, peering into the shadowy cleft, and I see a change in his posture.
Shit. Everything happens in nightmarish slow-mo. I've got my feet braced against the pillar and I let go like a spring, kicking straight up towards him, knife-first. Something sizzles past my shoulder, drawing a hot line across my chest, then I ram him with my shoulder. He's already tumbling out of the way of my knife and I try and bring it back round towards him. I can't breathe — I'm out of range of Ramona's gills — and in a bleak flash of clarity I realize I'm going to die here. The pressure in my chest eases as he takes a swing at me with a knife I sense rather than see, but I'm inside his reach and I grab his forearm and we go tumbling. He's strong but I'm desperate and disoriented and I somehow manage to get my other arm around his neck and something snags my knife. I yank on it as hard as I can, as he tenses his knife arm — we're arm-wrestling at this point — and something gives way. He thrashes spasmodically and lets go, kicks towards the surface, and there's a silvery stream of bubbles rising above him that's much too big and bright to be normal.
Ramona's right below me. **Let's go,** she gasps, tugging at my ankle. **Deeper!**
**But I just — **
**I know what you just did! Come on before they do it right back to us! Nobody in their right mind dives alone.** She lets go for a moment, kicks out, and moves her grip to my arm. **Let's move it.** She rolls us round and pulls me away from the pillar, back up towards the murky gloom beneath the defense platform. I feel her fear and let it pull me along behind her, but my mind's not home: I'm not feeling queasy, exactly, but I've got a lot to think about. **We've got to get back to the tunnel,** she says urgently.
**The tunnel? Why?**
**They'll have searched it first. And most divers don't like confined spaces, caves. I figure they'll concentrate on the open waters outside the reef, now they've got the sighting.
We just wait them out.**
**In the tunnel.** What are we doing here? I shake my head. What's it all for?
I keep rerunning the video stream captured in my mind's eye, the silvery parabola of bubbles rising above the drowning diver — **We're missing something important,** Ramona muses darkly.
**How did they find us?**
**Not sure. They've opened a channel to let them bring their minions in, but the core defensive wards are still working, you're cleaner than — ** She blinks at me. **Oh. That's how.** The ceiling is right above our heads now, the dome set into it framing the deeper blackness of the tunnel. **What is it?**
**I was wrong about them planting a tracker on you.
They don't need to bug you,** she says tersely. **They can find you anywhere. All they have to do is zero in on the eigenplot. Except here, right where you're shielded by the defense platform's wards, even if they have hacked a tunnel right through them to let their associates in ...
**What is this eigenplot you keep talking about?** I ask.
I'm dangerously close to whining. I really hate it when everyone else around me seems to know more about what's going on than I do.
**The geas Billington's running. It's the occult equivalent of a stateful firewall. It keeps out intruders, unless they run through the approach states in a permitted sequence. The sequence is determined by the laws of similarity and contagion, drawing on a particularly powerful source archetype.
When you run through them, that's called 'walking the eigenplot,' and you're doing it real well so far. Only a few people can do it at all — you can but I can't, for example — and there's an added catch: You can't do it if you know what the requirements are beforehand, it doesn't permit recursive attacks.
That's why you're just going to have to be brave and ...** she trails off**... shit. Forget I said that bit. I mean forget it.
You'll just have to see for yourself.** She centers herself under the pitch-black rectangle of the tunnel mouth. **C'mon.**
**But you said — **
**lf we're outside the tunnel we're not shielded. You want to learn how to breathe with a harpoon through you?**
**No way.** I swim closer to her, until we're both right under the mouth. **I nearly drowned last time we went through here.**
**The effect's attenuated only a couple of meters in.
Closer. Hug me. Not like that, like this.** She wraps her arms and legs around me. **Think you can swim? Straight up, until you don't feel like you're drowning?**
**Like I'm going to say no?** I look into her eyes from so close that we're almost touching noses. **Okay. Just this once. For you.** Then I kick off straight up, into the black heart of the drowning zone.
Bands of steel around my chest. A pounding in my ears.
Then the clean air of a spring meadow, Ramona's arms cradling me, her legs entwined around me, her lips locked against mine like a lovesick mermaid trying to kiss the drowned sailor back to life — or infuse his blood with oxygen through force of proximity alone.
Ob. We're in the tunnel. Totally black, walls either side of me, five meters of water between my head and the heavy iron grating, nothing but delirium's arms holding my sanity together. Distracting me. I am distracted. It's incongruous.
There are divers out there hunting the waters for us, and here I'm getting an erection. Ramona's tongue, tentacular, searches my lips. She's aroused, I can feel it like an itch at the back of my mind.
**This is a really bad idea,** I overhear her thinking.
**We're feeding off each other.** I'm drowning. I'm horny. I'm drowning. I'm — feedback. Too far apart and I start to choke, too close together and I start noticing her body, and whichever I'm paying attention to bleeds through into her head. **Got to stop.**
**Tell me about it.** An uneasy thought. **How much of this before the Other notices?**
**It's not ready yet — I think.** She pulls back a few centimeters while I concentrate on not thinking about drowning. **How long do you think we've been down here?**
**I've lost track,** I admit. **Half an hour?** I lean back against the rough wall of the tunnel that shouldn't exist. **Longer?**
**Damn.** I can feel the clockwork of her thoughts, tasting of rusty iron. It's like there's a weird tube of pressure squeezing us together down here; the tunnel is a flaw in the countermeasure wards, but outside it there's an almost unimaginable amount of power chained down and directed towards the exclusion of occult manifestations — like our own entanglement. Threatening to crush us to a bloody paste between walls of concrete. **Can we leave yet?**