Dyeawan blinks, her focus recovering from the painful contact with that fish. Her body is quaking and she can feel the residual touch of the creature in the ends of her hair. She struggles to both push the oar rings back in place while also holding the rowboat over her, a task that seems completely contrary and is starting to feel impossible to enact as her stinging hands begin to numb.

However, it’s the loosening of those rusted rings that plants an idea in the back of her mind. If everything in this chamber has been erected deliberately, then all these fish are no different, and Dyeawan is quickly becoming convinced their purpose is not to provide her with sporadic light. That grain of an idea becomes a fully formed plan, but it’s one that calls for a possibly lethal amount of conjecture.

In that moment Dyeawan has to decide exactly how much she believes in her own mind. If she has as much faith in herself as Edger claims to, then there should be no doubt she’ll choose the right course of action.

Dyeawan hooks one arm around the large plank at the rowboat’s bottom to steady the vessel while her other arm delves deep beneath the water. It’s difficult untying the cords around her legs with one hand, but it gives her time to take deep, measured breaths and steel herself for what’s to come.

Dyeawan spent most of her life in the Bottoms, next to the ocean, and much of that while blessed with motion solely from the waist up. Every brief friend she made in the streets, every drunken sailor who took pity on her, they all warned her never to fall into the water. A cripple without the use of their legs would surely drown, they said. She never believed it. She’s seen a dog with no back legs paddle to safety. She’s seen motionless hunks of wood float perfectly well, not to mention more than a few still bodies.

She’s also learned never to trust others’ opinion of what she can and cannot do.

Dyeawan, free of her makeshift tender, draws in as much air as she can hold and seals her lips shut. She abandons the oar rings and drops below the surface of the water, letting the rowboat float away. She strokes her arms against the depths, letting her legs float weightless behind her as she moves her body easily through the water. After a lifetime of pulling herself across the earth, swimming underwater is like a dream.