God had stumbled; he was pressed against the wall. Light flooded the room—weird, unearthly, poppling light. Alarmed bubbles and rills of air flattened themselves against the plex window as the whole Mithraeum was driven into increasingly dark, brownish, bloody water.

The plex buckled, shivered, then gave. The River burst through the window in a high-pressure torrent. The Emperor was sucked out into the water, and Augustine dove after him, and Ianthe waded after him. Harrow, the only reason we weren’t pulled out too was because I was yanked back into the muscular, lean-beef arms of the saint who shared my name. He was wrestling me out of the gush as the station listed upward, you under one of his arms, him clambering into the foyer that was quickly angling upward as I held on to my sword.

“Fuck off,” I bawled, affrighted—

He said, “Can you do necromancy?”

“No, I can’t do necromancy—”

“Then come with me,” he said.

The water surged and roared behind us. The Saint of Duty wrested open the door to the Emperor’s private rooms—slammed it shut behind us as we crawled out into a topsy-turvy corridor, where a wash of water was already sliding down the halls from some trickle point. Another far-off moan of metal, a cracking, crushing noise; we scrabbled upward—ricocheted down the corridor—I followed him up a narrow passage, and then I stumbled and fell into him as the station listed another way, falling on a memorial that was now the wrong way up.

“Outer ring. More stable,” he said.

“But—”

“Move. We’re sitting ducks.”

I moved. The station kept rocking back and forth as it was swept through the water, pressure nudging it back and forth from the sidelines. An alarm was wailing somewhere. I panted, “The hell happened—”

“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.