Completely disarmed, they stepped into Desjardins's parlor. Clarke led Lubin with soft words and an occasional touch. She didn't dare speak her mind, even in a whisper. But she gave his arm the slightest squeeze, and knew after all their long years together that he'd know what she meant: He didn't buy it for a second.

Lubin replied with a blind glance and the twitch of a bloody lip: Of course he didn't.

All according to plan. Such as it was.

She had to take the physics on faith.

She could buy everything else that Lubin had laid out on the way up. It didn't matter whether Desjardins believed their story, so long as he thought they might be useful. He wouldn't try to kill them outright until convinced otherwise.

Which didn't mean that he wouldn't still try to disable them. He wasn't about to let anyone into his secret lair without taking precautions—disarming them, confining them, cutting their strings.

Nothing lethal, Lubin had predicted, and nothing that will damage the structure. That limits his options. We can handle it.

Fine, as far as it went. It was how they were going to handle it that she couldn't quite get behind.

A good half-liter of water sloshed through the plumbing in Clarke's chest, unable to drain because of the tape on her electrolysis intake. Five hundred milliliters didn't sound like much. When she swam through the deeps a steady current of seawater flowed through her implants, endlessly replenished. It hardly seemed possible that the stagnant dregs trapped there now would last more than a moment.

Four hundred fifty grams of molecular oxygen, Lubin had said. That's almost what you'd get in two thousand liters of air.

Her head couldn't argue with the numbers. But her gut was no mathematician.

A rank of elevators stood before them. One set of doors was open; soft light spilled from the compartment behind.

He'll confine us first.

They entered. The doors slid shut. The cage began to move.

Down.

This is insane, she thought. This can't work. But already, she imagined she could hear the soft hiss of gas from hidden nozzles...

She coughed and tripped her implants, praying to some indeterminate deity that Lubin hadn't fucked up his calculations.

He hadn't. A familiar, subtle vibration started somewhere in her chest. Her guts writhed and flooded with their own private stock of isotonic saline. The liquid rose in her throat and filled her mouth. Brief nausea accompanied the flooding of her middle ears. A salty trickle ran down her chin before she remembered to clamp her lips together. The world muted, all sounds suddenly faint and distant except for the beating of her own heart.

Just like that, she lost the urge to breathe.