You were too curious to resist. You wrenched the opaline hood from your face and were startled all the way to your soul. Turbid, filmy water was filling up the shuttle at a rate of knots. The floor had gone entirely, and you were affrighted by its wet and corporeal reality: you were soaked through almost to the ribs by tepid, greasy waves. Ianthe had sat up—she never could follow instructions—but she was staring, glassy-eyed, at some point you could not see, rigid and uncomprehending. You scanned around, but the Body was nowhere to be seen.

It was just water. It soaked the hems of the Emperor’s trousers—he sat calmly flicking at his tablet as though it were no inconvenience. You could not quite see the other Lyctor, except her arms, bathed in the glow of the cockpit switches. The water seeped around your neck and started trickling into your ear canals. This did not fill you with the rigid terror it apparently produced in Ianthe: as a child you had been plunged into water by your mother and father, so the sensation was old and familiar, if wretched. The waters swirled and rose. They brushed against your cheeks, and you reflexively held your breath.

“Let that go, Harrow,” said God, tapping on the tablet with his stylus. “You don’t need to breathe.”

You exhaled, trickling it out of your nose and mouth. Your brain panicked briefly as you took a shy lungful of warm, muddy water. The fluid went down your throat in a peculiar and unreal way: it sat there, seething in your craw, peristalsis not coming into play. You filled up with water like a rubber doll dropped into a well. It was with very little joy that you saw this was distressing Ianthe a great deal more than it was you: she had wrapped one arm around herself, leaving the rightmost to trail abandoned in the water, and was shaking in a kind of convulsive spasm of the soul. It was only the memory of the knife and the palm that prevented you from being moved to pity.

God was saying, quite encouragingly: “You’re fine, Harrowhark. You’re doing very well,” which put you in a paranoid panic that you were not, in fact, doing well at all. Something brushed past your ankle, and the water closed over your head. You did not float: you stayed stuck to the bottom like a concrete weight, without buoyancy. Something floated in the water quite close to the pilot’s seat where Mercymorn sat. A long skein of abandoned skin, fresh and virgin, as though taken from someone’s flank and carded of its flesh and fat. The water in which it floated felt warm against your eyeballs, and smarted a little going up your nose.