Silverclad Cat splashed through the ocean’s skin, plummeting toward a darkness that paled all color: moonlight shafts ended in the shadows below, embedded in the flesh of a beast too large and cold to care.

Cat sank. Bubbles clung to the Suit, and as she kicked they slipped free, tickled up her flanks to form a whirling trail. Justice’s song buzzed beneath her conscious thought. She was far from the community of cops. Seril’s light followed her, warm inside her mind, a caress she couldn’t call a mother’s—not her mother’s, anyway.

She did not have to breathe while wearing the Suit. Blood rushed in her ears, and the water’s pulse twinned her own.

She heard a splash as Raz dove into his element. The speed of his descent slicked back his hair. Naked from the waist up, he joined her as she fell. He swam with beautiful efficiency.

Westward rose the continental shelf, steeper than any cliff could be in air. When Cat was a kid, old Father Clemson at the Quarter parish who owed gambling debts to half his congregation told myths during weekend services. Cat would have beaten up any kid who suspected how much she loved those stories. She had no time for sermons, which were one more way folk told you to sit down and listen, but she liked the strange tales and weird poems, and one line returned to her thoughts as she looked down into the black: something about spirits brooding on the abyss.

She pointed down and shot Raz a questioning glance. He gave her the thumbs-up. Pointed down. Thumbs-up again.

Great.

She brooded on the abyss like a champ.

Water pressed her in an embrace tighter than the Suit’s used to be before Seril came back, and the Suit stiffened to match.

Cat’s heart beat faster. Raz kicked into the deep, somersaulted, and waved up at her with a smile.

Pressure at this depth could warp a body from within. The City Aquarium displayed the corpses of dead things divers dredged from the deeps, spiny and toothed, many-clawed, tentacular. Special care had to be taken, the exhibit’s brass placards read, in recovering such specimens, due to the pressure difference between ocean floor and surface. If she removed her Suit down here, she’d die.

Her eyes adjusted. No human eyes could have, there wasn’t enough light, but human limits did not bind the Suit. Raz’s white pants flashed when he kicked.

They passed few fish at this depth, and no vampires she could see. They’d almost reached the bottom. Sharp grim coral towers jutted from the murk below. White flakes of sea snow flitted between the peaks. Could Raz have been mistaken? He’d sounded so sure.

The coral towers moved.