This bottom level of the building extended out into open-air pools, but they were farther away, on the other side of a large chain-link fence. Inside, there were regimented rows of closed and open tanks. Eve climbed the ladder to the first one and used her flashlight. She shook her head and jumped down.

The next, farther on, was a closed tank with a plastic curved lid over it and some kind of sliding port for taking samples. Claire’s turn to climb, and she slid open the port, gagged on the smell that issued forth, but she couldn’t see anything in the cloudy, foul water. If Shane was in there, he couldn’t have made it.

She jumped down next to Eve. Eve didn’t even ask; Claire guessed she didn’t have to.

They kept going. Five more tanks, some closed, some open. Nothing.

The draug were nowhere to be seen, thankfully. Maybe Michael had been right. Maybe they’d ignore the humans in favor of Michael’s wild-goose chase …

“Out there,” Eve whispered. “Look.”

Michael. He was outside by the pools, running over catwalks, and the pools were bending, twisting, shuddering, reaching.

The draug were after him, but he was giving them a game.

“We have to go faster,” Claire said. “Come on.” She swarmed up the next ladder and looked in the pool.

A dead face looked back at her, eyes pale and blind in the dim light.

She screamed, and her scream echoed and echoed and echoed through the dark, loud as an alarm, but she didn’t care because oh God, she’d been wrong …

“Move!” Eve shouted in her ear. She’d climbed up next to her, and had her arm around Claire’s waist. “Go on, get down! Now!”

“He’s dead,” Claire whispered. “Oh, God, Eve—”

Eve gulped, visibly gathered her courage, and turned her gaze on the dead face in the pool. And then she said, “That’s not Shane.”

“But—” A bubble of hope rose up, fragile as glass. “Are you sure—”

“I’m sure,” Eve said. “That’s not him. Come on. We have to move it. If they didn’t hear that—”

They jumped down, landed with simultaneous thumps on the metal grating, and headed for the next tank.

But just ahead, the darkness rippled.

And then a white face emerged from that blackness, eyes that weren’t eyes, a mouth that moved all the wrong ways, that wasn’t human at all except when she looked at it straight on.

Magnus. There were others with him, but she could somehow tell when it was him; the others looked like bad photocopies. They didn’t have the same … gravity.

Magnus said, “You. The girl with clear eyes.”

“Yeah, me. You want me,” Claire said. “Because I can tell who you are. I always could. I just didn’t know it. So give Shane back, and you can have me.”

“Child,” he almost purred. “I can have you in any case.” Magnus’s whole face distorted into something so monstrous and evil that she screamed, couldn’t help it, and all the others copied him like reflections, because that’s all they were, shards and fragments of him.