Each deeper penetration of Set into Hermia’s body displaced Hermia’s own ka, and yes, there was the momentary flash of hope, as she misunderstood what Danny and Pat were doing. And then she understood.

“Hermia, I’ll tell you when,” murmured Danny.

Hermia shuddered. But Danny knew that it was Set shuddering, as, for the first time in his sojourn in Mittlegard, he was actually feeling something of what the body felt. Hearing with ears, breathing with lungs, seeing with eyes.

“Oh God,” Hermia’s voice murmured. “Oh, God, so much, all at once.”

And then it was complete. Set was attached to this body as if it were his own, and Hermia was almost separated from it.

Almost, but not quite. “It will still go with you,” said Danny, “even though it belongs to Set now, because whatever you’re attached to travels with you.”

Danny sensed the grim determination in Hermia now. And something else. Yes, he knew that aspect of the ka. Hermia was filled with love.

Then she was gone.

But Danny knew where she was. Danny was still with her, and Pat too, not possessing the body, but observing. They were at the bottom of the ocean—a few hundred miles out into the Atlantic. Instantly Hermia’s body was crushed by the pressure. Drowning was out of the question; her lungs couldn’t draw breath. Life functions stopped almost immediately.

Too late Set realized the trap. They had bonded him to the body, making it his own. He had consented to it, and the flood of sensations had confused and distracted him. Too late, he tried to pull away from Hermia’s body, the way that Enopp had withdrawn his ka from Eluik. But by then he was too deeply connected to jump free as easily as he always had before. For a few seconds, Set had actually been alive in that body, and now it was crushed and he was dead. He had no power to jump to another body. There was only one destination he could leap to.

Hermia, too, was dead, but her ka had already been withdrawing from her body as Danny and Pat guided Set in displacing her. The choice Danny had offered her was to lose herself in order to save the world from any further interference by the monster she had so recently invited to dwell within her. Now she knew that she was not strong enough to master him. Nor could she have tricked him; that was Danny’s and Pat’s work. The only choice she had was to allow the death of her own body, after first surrendering it to Set. She had lost all, yet had one more act she could perform to change the world, and she did it. Instead of transporting her crushed body to a place with normal atmospheric pressure, thereby healing it, she let go of her body.