“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.”

Hail matches his look. “If you’re right, they had the boat before the flood. No reason to record it on the door.” She squints into the dark. “It might be a tomb for all of those they couldn’t save. A memorial.”

But I’m shaking my head. “Sigurd didn’t risk a dreadnought trying to break into a graveyard.”

Salt shrugs. “Depends what got buried.”

Hail looks over her shoulder at me. “What makes you say that?”

“Think about it. You don’t put a door like this on a grave, not for one person and not for a thousand. Same as you don’t put rail-slugs or shrapnel on a jockey’s funeral mark. You drink a beer and leave a name in the paint, maybe drop one of your badges as a memento. You cheer when someone says their name, but you don’t waste time remembering how they went out.”

“You don’t put it on a lifeboat, either.”

I click a finger at her. “Exactly. It wouldn’t fit. The boat is all the symbol it needs to be. You could put it up on a block and remember all of the people it saved. This here—” I tap a toe on it, single out a twisted, howling face. “This is about the dying.”

Salt weighs it out. “So what is it, then?”

“It’s just like everything else in this place,” says Hail. She’s got it now; I can see it in her eyes. “It’s made to hide something, to keep it locked tight and impossible to reach.” She kicks the metal. “Almost impossible.”

“And probably trying to kill you,” I add.

Salt watches us. “So is this the angry god? You think they caught up to it—decided they’d bury it, put it in a cell and make it pay for all it did?”

“Almost,” says Hail. “They meant to keep it buried.”

“But you’ve got the wrong story.”

I take it all in with a sweep of my hand. Millions of lives sketched out, given the twisted shapes of their last moments. All around us, the same strange pattern, repeated over and over. Coils and constellations, and six barbed stars above all else.

“There are no gods here. There’s only the flood.”

Twenty-Five

TWENTY-FIVE

THE PASSAGE IS almost perfectly dark, the featureless walls so smooth they’re almost reflective. The floor would be the same if not for all the dust crackling under my boots. Together, they give no sense of distance, or progress.