The Sleeping God had saved Nomi from the Sentinels, and there had to be a reason for that. The shadow in his mind bade him wait.

There was movement to his left. Nomi made the roof and stood, swaying slightly, wiping blood from her mouth. She still carried his knife but seemed to have forgotten about it. She glanced across the rooftop, the smooth stone with the circular mark at its center, the places where the thick tubes joined like fluid limbs sprouting from a solid body. When she had taken it all in, she looked at him at last.

“It's so close,” he said. “You and I, we can see it.”

“I don't want to see it,” Nomi said, but her voice betrayed her. Either she had given up hope of avoiding what must happen, or she was submitting to her true desires. The result would be the same.

Ramus wasted no time. He stepped to the center of the roof and knelt beside the circular shape. He plunged his fingers into the groove and pulled them around, dislodging a thick drift of loose dust as he went. “Help me,” he said.

“No.” Nomi knelt at the edge of the roof and watched.

Ramus dug out the whole circle, then drew his spare knife and began working at the crack with that.

“It can't be this simple,” Nomi said.

“Of course it can. It wants us in.”

“But whatever put it in there didn't. Can't you see that?”

Ramus shook his head. It doesn't matter now, he thought. I'm so close. Nothing matters now but this.

The stone beneath his knees was suddenly almost too hot to touch, and he rose into a crouch. A tendril of steam escaped the circular crack he'd cleared, hanging in the air like a condensed breath.

Ramus gasped again as his head pulsed with white-hot pain, and the presence there expanded quickly to smother it, casting it down and showing him the way.

“Ramus?” Nomi said, but her voice seemed very far away.

He put his knife into the groove and levered, and the circular stone slab rose easily. “That side,” he said. “Do the same. Push, lever.”

“No.”

“Nomi.” He saw her indecision, but also the knowledge that she could not turn back now. “Please.”

She knelt opposite him, gasping at the pain from her damaged leg. When she probed with her own knife, the stone slab seemed to rise almost of its own accord, and Ramus pushed at its revealed edge, sliding it onto the surface of the smooth roof.

Behind and below, the Sentinels hooted and clacked as more of them reached the shore of the island. No more crab things came, but they would if they were needed. Events were flowing now, histories being forged, and whatever his intrusion had awoken in the Sleeping God must surely be growing with every beat.