Halciday, 24th of Frostember, 1788

  The hatch opened with a low hiss, and the ocean did not come in.

  A shimmering barrier held across the aperture, bowing faintly under several atmospheres of pressure but declining to yield. On one side, the Nautilus’s corridor lighting. On the other, gloom and the ocean floor.

  Divina crouched at the edge and studied the field with proprietary satisfaction. “Stable at depth,” she said. “Told you the second coil would hold.”

  Vera gave a nod that, from Vera, constituted a standing ovation. The two of them had spent three days in the Nautilus’s workshop building the barrier generator. Wylan had heard the arguments through the bulkhead. He had also heard the silences, which were longer and more productive.

  “Not bad,” Vera said. “For a first deployment.” She stepped back from the hatch. Her job was the ship. Divina’s was everything on the other side of it.

  Divina’s grin suggested she intended to discuss the second deployment at length. In private. Once they were done here.

  Wylan uncorked his water-breathing compound and passed the rest along. The taste was chalk and iron and something faintly vegetal that he had not been able to eliminate from the formulation. He chose to find this character-building rather than investigate the alternative.

  They dropped through the barrier one by one, the field rippling around each body and sealing behind it. The ocean received them with indifference. It had been killing people for longer than civilisation and saw no reason to make a special effort tonight. It was cold. It was dark. It pressed against the jumpsuit fabric with patient, comprehensive weight.

  Wylan counted four patrols in the first two hundred metres.

  The sirens moved in pairs, their bioluminescent tattoos tracing slow arcs through the water. Blues and greens that pulsed in a rhythm not quite biological. Sentry markings. Wylan catalogued the patterns automatically: interval, direction, the slight lag when one turned to check behind. Professional, but not paranoid. Guards who expected the ocean to do the guarding for them.

  They moved low along the seabed in single file. Laila led. She had been navigating dark and hostile spaces for fifty years; some of them had been ballrooms. Divina followed with tools arranged by likely use, each one secured against her belt so nothing clinked. Lambert brought up the rear, because someone had to, and Lambert had drawn the short straw by virtue of being the tallest.

  He had not been built for stealth. The cassock was gone, replaced by orange cotton, but the body inside it still expected rooms to make way. He moved through water as he moved through cloisters: upright, unhurried, profoundly visible.

  His shoulder caught Wylan on a turn. Wylan’s arm hit the coral shelf, and the edge, which had been sharpened by centuries of current into something between a blade and a suggestion, opened a cut along his forearm. The impact dislodged a pebble. It tumbled down the shelf and struck a barnacle with a sound that was, in the absolute silence of the deep ocean, approximately the volume of a cathedral door.

  The nearest siren paused. Her tattoos flared from cerulean to pale gold. Wylan pressed flat against the coral and did not breathe. Blood threaded from his forearm into the water in a thin ribbon. He clamped his hand over it.

  She held for two seconds. Then the glow subsided and she moved on. Her shift ended in an hour. Nothing she found now would be worth the paperwork.

  ? Undertow Keep operated with a skeleton crew. Most of the security work was done by the ocean, which had never once requested leave.

  By the time they reached the vent, his nerves had settled into a dense, clinical awareness behind his eyes.

  The vent rose from the seabed like a blister on the coral: an engineered dome, what Wylan’s professional eye assessed as competent but uninspired structural work. It was designed to do one thing, which was not explode, and it did this with grim determination.

  The problem was immediate. Open the hatch without displacing the water above it, and the ocean would pour through with the enthusiasm of a creditor who has just discovered the front door unlocked.

  Divina was already kneeling at the dome’s surface. She pulled a portable disc from her toolkit, smaller than the generator on the Nautilus but limited. She pressed it to the hatch rim and activated it.

  The force field spread across the hatch in a thin, shimmering membrane. The ocean withdrew, pressing against the boundary with personal offence. The dome’s hatch, relieved of several atmospheres of downward force, shifted freely for the first time in what was probably months.

  “It won’t hold long,” Divina said. She was already feeding picks into the locking mechanism. She had been opening things that did not want to be opened for most of her professional life. A soft click. A low mechanical groan as the hatch yielded. “Got it.”

  They dropped through one at a time. Wylan went last. Divina retrieved the disc and the field collapsed. Every nerve in Wylan’s body held its breath. Please hold. Please hold.

  The hatch held. The ocean, denied entry, settled back over the dome with the comprehensive patience of something that had nowhere else to be.

  The tube was briny, dank, and built from coral that had been engineered into regularity. Veins of mineral deposit ran through the walls in patterns that pulsed faintly, carrying the Keep’s life through its structure. The air, such as it was, tasted of damp stone and salt. Somewhere ahead, water dripped with the regularity of a clerk stamping documents. Even prisons at the bottom of the ocean had their quiet bureaucracies.

  Wylan inspected his forearm. The cut was clean and shallow, still bleeding freely. He pulled a strip of fabric from his belt and wrapped it tight. It would hold. He could deal with it properly on the Nautilus.

  They emerged at the far end of the tube onto a ledge of coral that should not have had a view, and did.

  Below them, the Keep opened.

  An inverted dome of translucent material stretched across a space the size of a tournament ground. Not glass. Something grown rather than built, secreted into panels and fused at the seams with a precision that was organic in origin and industrial in intent.

  Through it, the ocean was visible: a wall of dark water pressing against every surface, patient and total, separated from the air inside by a hand’s width of engineered coral.

  Stress fractures ran through the older panels in pale threads. They had been patched. They would need patching again. The whole structure hummed faintly with the effort of existing where it should not.

  Inside, a pocket of trapped air held the ocean at bay. Inside that, people moved.

  Catwalks threaded the upper reaches of the bowl, suspended on struts that looked too thin for the weight they carried. Guards walked them in pairs, unhurried, unsearching.

  Below the catwalks, coral tubes radiated outward from the central dome toward what Wylan took to be dormitory accommodation. Two larger passages led away in opposite directions: one deeper into the Keep, one toward what was probably the main prisoner intake.

  The courtyard itself was populated. Figures in orange milled across the open space with the aimless circulation of people who had nowhere to go and all day to get there. Guards on the catwalks watched them the way bored supervisors watch a factory floor: present, technically attentive, profoundly elsewhere.

  ? Undertow Keep’s detection grid did not look for magic or theurgy directly. It looked for unusual levels of expectation, which were naturally out of place in the deep.

  They could see everyone inside the fishbowl. They could not reach any of them.

  Observation without access. Wylan catalogued the geometry from the lip of the vent. The worst kind of intelligence.

  He scanned the courtyard. Grid pattern, left to right, section by section. Most of the figures below were unremarkable: humans, a handful of other races, all in the same orange. He was looking for iridescent scales. In a population of dull cotton and duller expressions, siren colouring would be difficult to miss.

  It was not difficult to miss.

  Isabella was near the centre of the courtyard. She moved with the others or appeared to. Her kelp-green hair caught the filtered light through the dome. She was the only siren among the prisoners, and she walked through the courtyard the way a person walks through a dream they cannot wake from. She looked up at nothing, then down at nothing, and continued in a direction that might as well have been chosen by the current.

  Wylan had expected captivity to mark her. He had expected anger, or exhaustion, or the careful composure of someone biding their time. He had not expected this. Whatever was wrong with Isabella went deeper than imprisonment.

  We’re here, Izzy. We’re getting you out.

  He kept scanning. The grid demanded it. And the grid, which did not care about his feelings, delivered a second result.

  Phaedra.

  The gorgon was in an orange jumpsuit, mingling with the general population as though she belonged there. Phaedra did not belong anywhere by accident. Her stone-grey skin made the jumpsuit a poor disguise for anyone who knew what they were looking at. It was not meant for them. But the jumpsuit was faded from washing. The creases had been worn out of it. However long Phaedra had been here, it had not been days.

  She moved through the prisoners with the easy circulation of someone who knew the patrol schedule by heart. She positioned herself in the blind spots between catwalks without appearing to think about it. She had studied their routines and decided to wear them.

  She’s not a prisoner. She’s working.

  Wylan’s hand tightened on the lip of the vent. The betrayal had nearly broken his mother. The rage that followed had not.

  Beside him, Laila was focused on Isabella. She had not looked at the rest of the courtyard. She had not seen.

  Wylan kept his mouth shut.

  One goal. We have one goal.

  If Laila saw Phaedra, fifty years of spycraft would collapse into maternal rage, and the mission with it. Isabella first. Phaedra later. Maman doesn’t find out until we’re back on the Nautilus with the hatch sealed behind us.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  He pointed to Isabella. Only Isabella.

  There. He signed to the group, gestures tight and precise. Centre courtyard. Green hair. She’s alive.

  He did not sign the rest.

  Laila was already working. She uncapped a vial from her belt and smeared viridian oil across her fingertips. The colour bled from her fingertips in slow tendrils, and she shaped them with slow gestures, threading an illusion down through the dome toward Isabella’s ear. Wylan could not hear what she whispered into the weave, but he could guess. Don’t be alarmed. We’re here.

  Isabella did not react. For a long, terrible moment, Wylan thought the enchantment had not worked.

  Then Laila reached further.

  It was not a gesture Wylan could name. Her hand extended, palm down, fingers spread, and something in her posture shifted from sending to listening. She was reaching into Isabella’s mind. Reading her.

  What she found, Wylan could not know. But he saw the moment it hit her. Laila’s hand snapped back as though she had touched something scalding. Her face went blank. Everything locked down. She steadied herself against the coral ledge. Her breathing changed.

  She said nothing. Wylan waited. She still said nothing.

  That’s worse.

  Below, Isabella stirred. She looked up at the wrong point first, scanning too high, then correcting. Her gaze swept the upper reaches of the dome. She had been told not to react. She was managing it badly. She found the vent. She found them. Wylan saw the recognition land in her eyes: a gasp, quickly smothered, one hand pressed to her mouth.

  A guard on the nearest catwalk paused. Wylan went still. The guard looked down at Isabella, then at the prisoner beside her, then at nothing in particular. He moved on.

  Isabella, to her credit, did not gasp twice. She began to drift toward the base of the vent, pretending to have nowhere specific to go.

  The problem remained geometry. They were above. She was below. Twenty metres of open air separated the ledge from the courtyard floor, and every metre of it was visible from the catwalks.

  Wylan reached for his reagents.

  Wylan swallowed the reagent and felt the lapis respond. His joints first, then his spine, then the unsettling looseness spreading through every limb. It never got easier. He chose not to think about it.

  Laila drizzled umber oil over the edge of the grate. It fell in a thin dark ribbon toward Isabella, finding her shoulders and hair, and attention slid away from her like water from oiled cloth. She splashed the rest across Wylan’s back. Go.

  He lowered himself through the grate. His arms extended downward, stretching past any length a human skeleton should have permitted.

  His hands reached Isabella. She took hold. His arms flexed under her weight, and he braced against the grate with legs that had wrapped twice around the nearest strut.

  “Hook,” Lambert said quietly, producing a length of fishing line from somewhere on his person that Wylan chose not to investigate. He looped it through Wylan’s belt and pulled, adding his weight to the lift. The line held.

  Isabella rose. Slowly, incrementally, her body limp and unresisting. She did not help. She did not hinder.

  She was barely off the ground when Phaedra appeared.

  The gorgon stepped out of the crowd below. She had been counting. She crossed the courtyard floor to the base of the vent, and her hand came up with a metallic glint that Wylan registered a full second before his brain assembled the meaning.

  A needle. Pressed into Isabella’s shoulder before the umber could pull her out of reach.

  Isabella went limp.

  She came up through the grate like something being drawn from deep water. Boneless, her head lolling. Wylan’s arms strained to hold her, his joints flexing dangerously, and Lambert hauled on the line.

  Phaedra looked up and found Wylan’s face through the vent grate. She had known exactly where to look. She raised one hand in a slow, deliberate wave.

  Something detonated behind Wylan’s sternum.

  His hands moved before thought could intervene. The signs came fast, precise, and vicious. You are going to die. It is going to be me. I will put you in the ground.

  Phaedra’s lips curved. She turned back into the crowd and let it swallow her.

  Beside him, Laila had gone very still.

  She had seen. Not the injection; that had happened below her line of sight. But Isabella’s sudden limpness, the changed weight in Wylan’s arms, and through the grate, a gorgon walking away.

  Laila’s fingers had already been moving, gathering magic that glowed at her fingertips with a colour Wylan associated with things not surviving.

  Divina’s hand closed on Laila’s wrist. “The detection alarms, darling.” Her voice was low and very steady. “One spark too bright and they flood the vents with us still in them.”

  She stopped. The glow died. Her hands returned to her sides. The composure reasserted itself, slower than usual.

  “Fine,” Laila said. The word was a door closing on something vast. “Then Phaedra is going to provide us a distraction.”

  She reached for the cerulean oil. The colour spread from her fingers and she drove it downward through the dome with cold, surgical control. It found Phaedra in the crowd and took hold.

  Below, the gorgon’s body jolted. Her composure cracked in a way it never had voluntarily. She turned on the nearest prisoner and lashed out, her stone fist connecting with a jaw that had done nothing to deserve it. The prisoner went down. The one beside him swung back. A guard shouted. Another prisoner, who had been minding his own business with admirable dedication, caught an elbow and responded with a chair.

  The courtyard erupted. Guards mobilised from the catwalks. Prisoners scattered or joined in, depending on temperament. The fight spread outward from Phaedra like a wave, and every eye in the Keep turned toward the violence below and away from the vent above.

  Laila’s expression held nothing that could be called satisfaction. It held nothing at all.

  Isabella lay on the coral ledge where they had pulled her, and she was dying.

  Wylan knew poisons. The compound Phaedra had used was not a sedative. Sedatives slowed the breathing. This had stopped it. Isabella’s chest rose in shallow, irregular catches that were getting further apart.

  “Lambert.”

  His brother was already there. Lambert knelt beside Isabella and placed both hands on her shoulders.

  Lambert prayed.

  It was quiet. Lambert’s prayers were always quiet, even in the cloister, even in the cathedral. He spoke to Invictus the way some people spoke to old friends: without performance, with the trust that the words would arrive. His hands glowed. The light spread from his palms into Isabella’s shoulders, her chest, her throat, tracing the path of the poison through her blood.

  But it was less than it should have been.

  Wylan knew what Lambert’s healing looked like at full strength. The light had always been warm and immediate and certain. This was not that. This was the same light, dimmed. The same warmth, thinned. As though Invictus were answering from further away, or through a door that had been left ajar rather than thrown open.

  He pressed harder. The glow flickered, steadied, held.

  Isabella’s breathing evened. The intervals between breaths shortened, found a rhythm, became something that could sustain a body rather than abandon one.

  She did not wake up.

  Lambert sat back on his heels. He looked exhausted. Not physically. Something had been asked of him, and he had given it, and the exchange had not been equal.

  Wylan was already working. The antivenom came from a pouch on his belt. He administered it with steady hands. Belt and braces.

  “She’s stable,” Wylan said. “Not awake. But stable.”

  The alarm vibrated through the coral and the air and the water beyond the dome simultaneously. Somewhere in the Keep’s detection grid, Lambert’s theurgy had registered. Divine magic, unscheduled, in a facility that ran on arcane systems and did not appreciate uninvited theological contributions.

  Below, the courtyard chaos doubled. Guards who had been dealing with Phaedra’s riot now received new information. A commanding voice boomed through an intercom Wylan could not see, cold and procedural. Lockdown protocol. Containment. The words were muffled through the dome, but the meaning carried.

  “We need to go,” Divina said. She had been quiet through the crisis, present without needing to be noticed. “Now.”

  Lambert lifted Isabella. Wylan’s hands were occupied. Laila’s were sustaining the enchantment that was keeping half the courtyard too busy to look up. Divina needed her hands for the hatch.

  She weighed nothing. Not the comfortable lightness of a sleeping child, but the wrongness of something hollowed out from within.

  Lambert did not comment on this. He adjusted his grip and moved toward the tube.

  The coral tube had been built for the slow passage of maintenance workers who had all day and no motivation, not for a Cleric carrying an unconscious siren at speed while an Alchemist and a spymaster and an engineer scrambled behind him.

  They made noise. They could not help making noise. Lambert’s boots on the coral. Divina’s toolkit against her hip. The drip, drip, drip of the tube’s ambient moisture, which had been atmospheric on the way in and was now simply in the way. Behind them, muffled through layers of engineered coral, the lockdown continued. The intercom voice had not stopped. Wylan did not listen to what it was saying. The words were for people inside the dome, and they were no longer inside the dome.

  Divina reached the hatch first. Her fingers found the locking mechanism without pause, working it from the inside with the same economy she had applied on the way in. The locking pins withdrew. The hatch shifted.

  She pulled the disc from her toolkit. It had already been deployed once. Portable field generators were not designed for repeat use at depth. Divina knew this. Everyone who had helped build the thing knew this.

  She pressed it to the hatch rim and activated it.

  For a terrible, elastic moment, nothing happened.

  Then it did.

  The field formed. It held. It was enough.

  Wylan stared at it. Zero displacement. That’s not supposed to work twice.

  It worked, apparently, when the engineer was good enough and the alternative was drowning.

  Divina cracked the hatch. Cold, pressurised air rushed in, carrying the mineral tang of the deep ocean. One by one, they climbed through. Wylan uncorked the remaining water-breathing compound and passed it to Lambert and Divina. Laila took hers without comment. Isabella, being a siren, needed nothing except to keep breathing. Her body remembered how, even if the rest of her did not.

  They sealed the hatch. The field dissolved. The ocean reclaimed its territory with the quiet satisfaction of a landlord who has been patient long enough.

  Wylan led the prowl out. There was no formation now, no careful single file. They moved as fast as the water and the weight of Isabella’s body would allow, keeping low against the coral shelf, heading for the coordinates Navarro had given them.

  They kept moving.

  The Keep fell behind them. The patrols did not follow. The lockdown had turned the facility inward, its attention consumed by the riot Laila had planted and the divine signature Lambert had left, and the ocean outside its walls returned to the indifferent darkness it had been before they arrived.

  They reached the coordinates and stopped.

  There was nothing to do now but wait. Wylan checked on Isabella: still breathing, still shallow, still unconscious. Lambert held her against his chest. Laila stood apart, composure rebuilt. Only her eyes betrayed what was underneath: fixed on Isabella’s face, cataloguing every breath.

  Divina stood watch. The darkness pressed in from all sides, the phlogiston lamp on Wylan’s belt casting a small, stubborn circle of amber light that the ocean tolerated without enthusiasm. Beyond the circle, nothing. The continental shelf dropped away somewhere to their left, and the deep began, and in the deep there was only pressure and cold and the patient awareness that they were very small and very far from home.

  Wylan’s arm throbbed. He looked down. The wrapping had darkened, soaked through. Blood seeped from beneath the fabric, threading into the water in thin ribbons that curled and dispersed and carried his scent into the current.

  He watched the ribbons unspool into the dark, and a cold understanding arrived.

  You’re chumming the water.

  Something moved in the dark.

  Large. Fast. It resolved into shape just outside the lamplight and began to circle.

  A shark. Bigger than anything Wylan had seen in warm water. Its flank passed close enough that the displacement pressed against his chest like a hand.

  It circled again. Closer.

  Laila’s fingers twitched toward a weave. Wylan caught her eye and shook his head. Wait.

  It circled again. Tighter. The displacement rocked them. Divina braced against the coral. Lambert shifted Isabella’s weight to one arm.

  On the next pass, the lamplight caught it full. The skin was wrong. Too smooth. Too pale. The eyes, when they caught the amber glow, held something that was not animal.

  That’s not a shark.

  Lambert stepped forward.

  He moved slowly, one hand still supporting Isabella, the other reaching for the holy symbol beneath his jumpsuit. His lips moved. The prayer was quiet, barely a murmur in the water, and Wylan braced for the same diminished answer he had witnessed in the vent.

  It did not come.

  Something else did.

  The prayer spread outward from Lambert like a tide coming in. It was warm. It was certain. It was the full, undiminished presence of a god who had been asked to protect rather than to heal, and who answered without hesitation. The water itself grew still, deep and deliberate, settling over the shark and the group like a blanket drawn over restless sleepers.

  The shark slowed. Its circles widened. The aggression, such as it had been, drained away like heat from a cooling engine. Its massive body tilted, rolled, and began to sink toward the seabed with the slow grace of something that had decided, quite firmly, to sleep.

  Laila caught the moment. Cerulean oil left her fingers and threaded into the water, finding the gap the prayer had opened and settling into it. The shark’s eyes closed. Its body continued its slow descent, and as it sank, it changed.

  Fins contracted into limbs. The broad tail narrowed and split. Pale skin darkened, reshaped, and what settled onto the coral floor was not a shark but a man. Unconscious and slack-featured, blond hair drifting in the current like pale weed.

  Wylan’s mind went blank.

  Augustine? He thought the bit about the shark transformation was a joke. What in Lilith’s name are you doing down here?

  He looked at Lambert. Lambert looked at him. Neither of them had an expression that fit. The questions stacked up and none of them had answers and there was no time to find any.

  They gathered Augustine between them. Two bodies to carry now. Isabella, hollowed and wrong in Lambert’s arms. Augustine, heavy and oblivious, slung between Wylan and Divina.

  Laila walked ahead, her senses extended into the dark, scanning for the Nautilus’s signal. She found it. She pointed.

  They moved. No formation, no caution. Just five people carrying two bodies through dark water toward a mechanical squid that, for the moment, qualified as home.

  The Nautilus found them before they found it. Its sleek shape emerging out of the gloom, causing a moment of panic before it resolved. The hatch opened, and the ocean let them go.