“No one touched the lithophiles in the overhang. The militia sent divers to the edge of the guyot, and pumped in primer to make the lithophiles degas the reef-rock just above the basalt. Water flooded in – and the surface rock at the center is heavier than water.”

She smiled sunnily. “I look at it this way. We’ve lost a city. But we’ve gained a lagoon.”

PART FOUR

Chapter 29

The camp was in jubilant disarray. There were thousands of people out in the moonlight, checking each other for injuries, raising collapsed tents, celebrating victory, mourning the city – or soberly reminding anyone who’d listen that the war might not be over. No one knew for certain what forces, what weapons, might have been concealed far from the city, safe from the devastation of the center’s collapse – or what might yet crawl out of the lagoon.

I found Akili, unharmed, helping with the marquee which had fallen onto the water pumps. We embraced. I was bruised all over, my face was caked with blood, and my thrice reopened wound was sending out flashes of pain like electric arcs – but I’d never felt more intensely alive.

Akili pulled free of me gently. “At six a.m., Mosala’s TOE will be posted on the nets. Will you sit up with me and wait?” Ve looked me in the eye, hiding nothing – afraid of the plague, afraid of facing it alone.

I squeezed vis arm. “Of course.”

I went to the latrines to clean up. Mercifully, the sewage conduits remained open – and the raw waste previously discharged hadn’t been forced back up to the surface by the compression waves of the quake. I washed the blood off my face, and then cautiously unbandaged my stomach.

The wound was still bleeding thinly. The cut from the insect’s laser ran deeper than I’d realized; when I bent over the washbasin, I could feel the two walls of flesh on either side of the gash – some seven or eight centimeters long – slide against each other, disconnected except at the ends. The burn had cauterized tissue all the way through the abdominal wall – and now the dead seam had split open.

I looked around; there was no one else in sight. I thought: This is not a good idea. But I’d already been pumped full of antibiotics against the risk of internal infection—

I closed my eyes and forced three fingers deep into the wound. I touched the small intestine, blood-warm not snake-cold, resilient, muscular and unslick beneath my fingertips. This was the part of me which had almost killed me – subverted by foreign enzymes, mercilessly wringing me dry. But the body is not a traitor: it only obeys the laws it must obey in order to exist at all.