She offered her wrist to the priestess, who accepted, and bent her head.

Her teeth dipped through Suit and skin with equal ease.

A line of incandescent pleasure shot through Cat’s heart, spread out and up and so much more dangerously down, to her crotch, through arms and legs, fingertips, toes. Joy rattled the cave of her skull. Her thoughts came to pieces in a single pulse.

Her taste of Raz in the ruined tower had been strange, surreal, exciting, but Cat had felt like this before. She knew to ride the feeling. She did not collapse or go mad. She’d felt weaker versions of this rush in Paupers’ Quarter backstreets or on the Business District’s rain-slick rooftops.

The priestess was not drawing her, thank gods. Cat felt enormous hunger behind the woman, old and overwhelming, deeper than the ocean. The priestess tasted Cat’s soul, that was all, savoring her need, and through her the Suit’s, and Seril’s.

Cat followed that taste back and in, to a network of which the priestess was but a piece—the blood of all assembled here in the sea’s night ran through her, and hers through them, joined to a throbbing heartbeat greater than any one alone and wiser, a mind that shook her to ecstasy with its faintest touch. She could offer herself to that hunger, fall into its perfection, let herself be hollowed out and worn as a glove by God—

No, she told the hunger.

The priestess lifted her fangs from Cat’s wrist, and the connection broke.

Cat fell. She tried to gasp, by reflex, and choked when the Suit did not let her.

After timeless time, she calmed.

The priestess’s head declined and rose again, in a slow, gentle nod.

The priestess drew a line across her own wrist with her thumbnail. A stream of blood snaked through the water and curled into a cloud rather than dispersing. The priestess took the cloud in her palm, and squeezed. When she opened her hand, she held a smooth oval of red jade that caught the not-light strangely. She offered it to Raz. He drew back at first, as if the sun lay in her palm. Then he looked at Cat, and sagged, and accepted.

It was done.

Cat had wondered how they would return to the surface—Raz could swim on his own, but even the Suit might tire with the strain of bearing its own weight back. Two from the congregation—the girl who drank the star kraken, and a slender man who had been Dhisthran before he became this—bore her skyward.

Rising, she heard the music again: a choir of superhuman voices howling praise in the abyss, their meld an imperfect reflection of the living web she tasted through the priestess. It echoed undersea. No, she realized as they rose, those were not echoes but other songs, the ocean chanting glory and blood through eternal night.