“Why are you asking me? One whisper and you could turn me to stone.”

Ramus frowned again as if listening to voices she could not hear. “What we did to each other was in another world.”

The echoes of the Sentinels' approach passed them and muttered around the great cavern.

Nomi dropped the knife and held out her hand.

THEY WOULD DROWN before they reached the island, or the things breaking the water's surface would kill them, or the Sentinels would arrive and take them down before they had a chance to move. Ramus had those words, but perhaps he would be too scared to use them in here, too fearful that the cavern's acoustics would distort them into something else, over which he had no control. He seemed alternately fearful and ecstatic, and Nomi could not help feeling that he was now much more than he had ever been.

The dying Voyager walked around the edge of the cavern, climbing over fallen rocks, leaping dark crevasses, ducking beneath an overhanging gallery of stalactites whose ends looked unnaturally sharp in the weak light. The moss grew thick around the shores of the lake, exuding a low illumination and providing a soft carpet on which they could walk.

Nomi's leg screamed with every step, and she bit her lip to stop from crying out. Blood was already drying into a stiff scab across the side of her head and cheek, and every time she worked her jaw she felt the wound reopen and fresh blood flowing. I'm badly hurt, she thought, but it was a vague idea, as though this too mattered only in another world.

Nomi looked to her left at the island and the building that stood there. It seemed incongruous down here, its square edges the only unnatural things in sight. How do we get out there? she thought.

She was about to ask Ramus that same question when she heard the Sentinels arrive.

They emerged from the mouth of the tunnel and started hooting mournfully at the sight of the island. They pressed themselves against the wall of the cavern, as though trying to force themselves back through the stone, and for a moment they looked nowhere else. The enormity of what they were seeing seemed to steal their purpose.

Nomi was looking at one particular Sentinel, when it turned its head and stared at her. Its mouth fell open, its long arm rose and it bellowed in rage.

“This way,” Ramus said. He walked directly toward the water.

“They're coming,” Nomi said.

“They won't follow.” Ramus stepped out into the lake. Ripples spread from his feet, slow and shallow as though the water were something thicker. He walked out several more steps and did not sink.

“How are you doing that?” Nomi asked, aghast. What magic is this? What curse?

“Follow me,” Ramus said. “I know the way.”

The Sentinels were scampering around the edge of the cavern now, leaping over stones she and Ramus had climbed, loping across beds of luminous moss and throwing sparks behind. She had no choice.