(Now—) she thought, gathering herself, reaching and falling away, out of the everywhere, into the here….
Vanamoinen saw the alien light fade from Tammis’s eyes, saw awareness and control come back into his body with a shudder.
Tammis clung to the wall, still dazzled by the vision of the place where his mind had taken and held him. He shook his head, clearing out his sight. He stared at the face he found abruptly in front of him, Reede Kullervo’s face. Vanamoinen saw Tammis’s expression change. “What’s wrong?” Tammis asked. “Reede—?” He broke off, as something jarred them from below.
Looking down, Vanamoinen found Silky butting their drifting feet with hard insistence.
“Look—” Tammis waved his arm. “They’re gone! The mers are gone.”
“It’s over,” Vanamoinen whispered hoarsely. “The tide’s turning… .”
“Then we have to get out.”
Vanamoinen nodded, clenching his teeth over the sudden, desperate need to vomit. He shoved Tammis in answer, propelling him down and away toward the opening through which they had entered the cave. Tammis began to swim, the mer circling him in absurdly graceful corkscrew motions, urging him on. But Tammis hesitated, looking back as Vanamoinen let his own pain-wracked body begin to fall through the water, making no effort to follow. “Reede?” Tammis called. “Lady’s Tits, come on! We’ll be trapped!”
Vanamoinen felt Reede Kullervo’s terror fling itself against the iron cage of his restraint like a berserk animal, begging him to move, move—even though he was doomed anyway, even though it had all been meant to end here, and his fate was unfolding as it should… .
“Reede!” Tammis shouted again, his voice rattling inside Vanamoinen’s helmet.
Reede’s body swung toward him, kicking its legs, forcing itself into motion. Vanamoinen surrendered to Kullervo’s frantic desperation, granting him the dignity of choice, no matter how quixotic … realizing that if he did not follow, Tammis would not leave.
Reede forced his arms and legs to propel him forward, his mind fighting its way up through a cloud of disorientation, his body floundering through the liquid atmosphere in Tammis’s wake. The cavern seemed endless. Only the last straggling handful of mers were still departing, barely visible far ahead. The direction of the water’s flow had begun to change now, as the fluid driven into the system of hollowed-out chambers by the action of the tide began its return to the sea. The changing tide did not oppose him, at least, sweeping him in slow motion toward the entrance, through the eerie incomplete darkness that the other in his mind still saw as filled with light. He pushed on, feeling with every forced movement as if some muscle would tear loose from bone, feeling as if a knife went through his chest with every breath.
Silky swept back from her circling of Tammis to butt him impatiently onward as the gap between their swimming bodies began to widen. He swore in agony, the ungentle collisions driving him to more speed in his efforts to escape her.
Up ahead, the last of the other mers had already disappeared through the narrow passage where the turbines waited; he saw Tammis reach it, saw the dark, impossible gleam of metal—
“Hurry!” Tammis called, his voice rising. “I see movement. Reede, come on—”
“Go through!” Reede shouted, hearing his voice corrode. “Go on, damn you, go on!” Tammis swam on into the passage. Reede struck Silky hard across the nose with his fist, driving her away, ahead. He watched her follow Tammis. The water was beginning to surge unnaturally around him; he felt the throb of heavy machinery vibrate through the caverns, as the turbines began to take up their work once more. The blades had begun to turn, slowly coming together to seal the access their brief rest had created, for another two and a half centuries.
Gods … He prayed, not sure to what he was praying, or even for whom, as he watched the shaft of Tammis’s helmet light spear the darkness of the tunnel ahead of him. But somewhere he found the madman’s courage to start his own journey into the blackness where the Render’s jaws were closing. He swam blindly, his eyes shut against the sight of what lay ahead of him, his nose filling with blood from a sudden hemorrhage.
The water was becoming more turbulent, making his progress harder; forcing him to open his eyes and search the way ahead. In the distance he saw Tammis’s headlamp, through the maelstrom of the waters; saw its light turn back toward him, searching the closing passage.
“We’re through!” Tammis called. “Reede? Reede! You can make it—”
Reede coughed and spat; blood blurred the inside of his helmet. “I can’t. …” He gasped out the words, barely intelligible even to himself. He could see the distance between them expanding, the gap through which he passed shrinking. The heavy heartbeat of’the turbines filled his head; the liquid through which he moved seemed to thicken as its churning violence increased. He was not going to make it.
He felt the last of his strength leave him, along with all resistance; let the water possess his body, binding him for sacrifice. He watched the blades rising, falling … his mind filled with the epiphany of death. The turbulent water battered his body, forcing him to acknowledge every agonizing symptom of his deterioration; forcing him to admit, in his terror, that he welcomed this end, the moment of blinding pain when his body was torn to pieces and his soul at last set free.
“Reede!” Something collided with him—someone. Tammis’s arms were around him, pulling him frantically toward the tunnel’s end, the mer pushing him from behind, urging him to try to struggle, move— “No!” he cried, half a paincry and half a warning, as they wrenched his body in their insane determination to save him. “Leave me, damn you, you’ll kill us all!” He beat at Tammis’s faceplate with his fists. “Get out!”
“No,” Tammis gasped, locking an arm around his neck, pulling him through the white vortex as if he were a panic-stricken drowning victim. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“It was meant to end this way!” Reede shouted. “Let me die.”
“No!” Tammis’s voice rang inside his helmet. “Not again, I won’t let someone else die down here because of me—”
Reede felt his body twisted and heaved forward through the maelstrom of metal and white water, spewed helplessly out of the tunnel by a final spasm, into the emptiness beyond.
Something collided with him, spinning him. He reached out, groping frantically. “Tammis—?” But it was the mer’s face his hands found. He turned back, fighting the current’s momentum. “Tammis!” he shouted, seeing the boy suddenly in the beam of his headlamp, the glare of metal; reaching frantically toward the hands flung out to him. He caught them, pulling—felt them jerked from his grip. He thought he heard his name in the scream that pierced his soul, as Tammis was sucked down into the churning whiteness.
His own raw cry of denial drove through his senses as he lunged toward the turbines. But Silky was there in front of him, colliding with his body, driving him away, against all his efforts, herding him on through the tunnel.
Reede surrendered, as the last of his frenzy died like the echoes of Tammis’s death scream, which should have been his own. … He was helpless against her singsong bullying; he closed his arms around her long, sinuous neck, feeling the shock of her warmth, the softness of her fur under his numb, cramping fingers. He let her carry him away from the white waters of death, borne on her back; away from the heartbeat pulse of the turbines, into silence and darkness, and finally upward toward the waiting air.