Nomi still held Lulah's knife. She took a painful step forward, wincing at the pain in her leg. Something was broken in there, she could feel it like a white-hot dagger slicing into her shin every time she moved. She'd slid down onto one of the stairs, found a chunk of it missing and fallen down three more. She was amazed she had not cracked her skull or broken her back.

“Did you fall?” he asked, and the question carried so much weight.

“Who are you asking?” Nomi said. “You're looking at me, but are you asking something else?”

And then she heard the noises behind her. Feet shuffling across stone, whispers, the soft crackles of Sentinels. They may well be terrified, but that could only make them even more dangerous than before.

“It's fooled you,” she said. “And the Sentinels are coming.”

“Then you can't go back.” Ramus held out his hand. “Come with me.”

Nomi took a few more painful steps forward until she and Ramus were almost in touching distance. He lowered his hand but smiled, his offer standing.

“Out there?” she said. She looked over his shoulder, across the surface of the lake, past steam cones and stone pipes, and things rippling the surface. “Out there to that?”

“There's nowhere else to go.”

“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.