“Decatur is big for her class,” I say.

“Big for anything walking,” he replies. “But this was bigger.”

We trade glances. “What peels plating like this?”

“A monster. Bigger than anything else.” He spares a glance for the two of us. “Watch my back.”

With that, he slings his shotgun, sets both hands on the fallen door and heaves himself onto it. He doesn’t get far.

“You should take a look at this.”

We follow in his footsteps, gritting teeth. The static fizz grows as I get closer, running through my hands when I go looking for grip. It drives a shiver through my bones and sets every muscle twitching to the same electric beat.

But now that I’m up here, I can’t do anything but stare.

The face of the door looks burned, rusted and pitted, then polished to an acid-wash sheen, showing hidden depths and odd colours in our helmet-lamps. Every part of it has been carved, a field of shapes that might be empty eye-sockets, rows of things that look like teeth, thickets of grasping fingertips. Howling, reaching, dying.

“Christs,” mutters Hail. “What do you think it is?”

“The end of all things.”

I don’t realise that I’ve said it out loud until I feel the other two staring at me.

“You don’t see it?”

Hail shakes her head. “Show us.”

I walk to the top of it, where I trace odd outlines and the curves of unfamiliar hulls, ship-shapes rimmed with jagged lightning bolts. “The skies are dark”—I shift, mark the shape of an eclipse—“and something is blocking out the sun.” I sweep wide. “Stars are falling, and the ground is splitting open.” A few steps over, and cities crumble, towers toppling. “See that?”

Salt sets himself on his haunches. “They look like the glassy shells outside.” He runs a finger across them. “Arranged in a battle line.”

“And before the middle of the scene, every single one of them is dead.” Halfway down, swirling patterns cut the image in half, twisting everything around them. “The waves cover everything. Below them, all the faces of the drowned.”

Hail finds the last of it. A strange, oblong shape that breaks through the clouds in one corner. “And this is the boat that got them out.”

Salt frowns. “There’s a story like that.”

She watches him. “About drowning?”

“In part.” He taps his helmet on the chin. “But that isn’t the point of it. Not if I remember right.”

“It’s about the boat?”

“About a boat, and an angry god with a reset button.”

I’ve heard it, even if I don’t remember where. Something old, carried with us all the way from Ancient Earth. “A god that floods the world so it can start over.”

“Maybe that’s what this is,” says Salt, aiming a glance down the passage ahead of us. “The final resting place of the boat that brought them out.”