“Augustine’s dropped the whole station in the River,” he said. “We’ve crossed over physically—body, soul, everything.” And, irrelevantly: “Wish he’d given me the packet.”

“What does that mean—”

“This,” he said.

We’d reached another ring. The plex here was solid—the shutters had peeled up with the force of the drop, but the plex hadn’t given, not yet—and we were tilting so far forward that we were nearly walking on the window. The River stretched out before us: some light source from the station lit the water’s gloom like a spotlight.

We were falling fast, and deeper, and deeper. Sad crunchy noises kept going off overhead, as though we were a suit of armour squeezed between enormous hands. The featureless River almost made it feel as though we were hanging still—the only thing that gave context to our movement were the little figures in free dive outside.

Augustine and the Emperor—God—the man who’d contributed half of me, unknowing—wrestled as they sank, sucked down by some invisible slipstream. The water churned around them. Maybe it was some titanic necromantic battle, but up here, falling sidelong, the River water boiling away from their bodies, it just looked like they were punching each other. I saw the slim, trailing white ghost that must’ve been Ianthe, diving down after.

I said: “What do we do? Abandon ship? Swim to the top?”

“No,” said Gideon. “Augustine’s dropped us deep. I think we’re already all the way down to the barathron. That’s a long way from the surface.”

“I can hold my breath.”

“Funny. Breath’s not the problem … You don’t need to breathe in the River.”

“So let’s goddamn swim for it, I hate this—”

“Listen to the station. Hear that creaking? There’s pressure down here. It’s not water pressure, it’s the weight of … whatever the River is, we never really knew. It’ll get a normal person in seconds. You and I won’t last much longer. And then there’s the ghosts. Number Seven’s gone, so they’ll be back soon.”

The station listed again. I said, “Okay. You’re a necromancer. Are you going to do something, or what?”

“My necromancer is dead,” said Gideon.

He took my sunglasses off his craggy, blasted face, and he looked down at me with eyes that would’ve surprised me first thing if I’d bothered to look at your memory files. They were a deep brown, with a kind of red spark to them; the brown of fractured rock glass, all mixed in with dark pupil, eyes that gave very little away. They suited the face better than the scintillating green ones you’d last seen.

“He fought it alone for hours,” said the stranger. “Then with some ragtag cavalry led by that mad sweetheart Matthias. They almost had Number Seven … almost. Gideon never could walk away from a losing fight.” Before I could respond to this, they added, “He and your mother alike.”