Earthquake was her first thought, though there were no quakes in Alt Coulumb. The movement’s scale was too great for anything else. It could not be a living thing—nothing so large could live, on land.

But they weren’t on land anymore.

The towers swelled and reddened as they approached, sharp pitted texture filling out with roseate skin. Blue sparks crackled beneath a translucent surface. High-pitched cries filled the deep. Arms the length of Alt Coulumb’s coastline coiled, wreathed by clouds of dust. Currents tossed her as the thing beneath bloomed, the coral forest transformed into a city-sized mantle. The Suit fed liquid beauty through Cat’s vein, but chemical confidence was little help. As she grasped and failed and grasped again at the sheer inconceivable scale of the thing coming oh gods toward her, its displacement current pulled her down, tossing Raz head over heels—

And what she’d taken for wrinkles on the creature’s skin were blade-sharp ridges—

She caught Raz and pulled him close as the star kraken crashed into them.

Blade-flesh drew sparks as it scraped her Suit; she tumbled into a canyon-sized wrinkle, bounced off a rubbery wall, pushed herself away—Raz tugged her out of the groove before it snapped closed, mouthlike. She kicked off and down again, and realized they were not alone.

Nearly human creatures slipped through the water around her. She’d taken them for snow at first, decayed dead things fallen to the benthic plane. They swam, long limbed and webbed, skin every color she had seen, jaws distended with curved teeth. Darting about the kraken, they pierced its flesh with spears and carved broad wounds with knives. She saw a slick naked girl unhinge her jaw and sink fangs into punctured kraken flesh. Blue blood leaked from the seal her lips made. The girl swallowed convulsively, released the monster, and howled.

Not all the shapes were human, or humanlike: Cat saw sleek bottle-nosed bodies, fangs curving from their open beaks. Hundreds streaked through the night—tiny beside the kraken, but pale corruption spread where their spears bit, and their teeth, and the kraken shriveled as it rose.

The kraken hit her again. She sprawled on its mantle as a translucent sack of flesh inflated overhead. That bloodred mass held many eyes, their pupils figure eights within which Cat could have stood upright.

Then the mantle collapsed and they fell, propelled down by the kraken’s jet. Cat stared up into a beak that could crush mountains, ringed with lightning, and within that gnashing mouth a furnace. The speed of the kraken’s retreat slapped its arms and tentacles together, and Cat and Raz and all the hunters tumbled down, down—

To land dust-clouded on a stony plain.

Raz recovered first, which pissed her off. He offered her a hand. She ignored it and stood on her own.

Around them the dust curtain settled, unveiling an ancient city.