Blood on his fists. Rage in his heart. One of Candlefly’s teeth stuck in the meat around his knuckle. The poison runs through him, turning his blood to slush. Squeezing his muscles so hard they lock up tight and lose all sense of tension. He stands. Still awake. Still aware. But he can’t do anything. His mind is unmoored from the rest of him. His body adrift, a boat on an ocean without a sail or a rudder – him the captive captain, unable to command his ship. And then one more bite and no more punches and Candlefly wipes his messy face on his nice suit and puts one finger on Mookie’s chest and pushes. It doesn’t even feel like he’s falling. It feels like the world is lurching upward. Like the train next to you is drifting backward when really you’re the one moving forward.

The ground hurries up to meet him.

There, flat on his back. He sees Nora. Now up and crawling. The man, Candlefly, is yelling at his Snakeface friend – something about being slow, no hurry, while he was getting pummeled to a pulp. Then Haversham, that weak-kneed weasel, points to Nora and sounds a cry of alarm–

She’s getting up now, getting her legs under her–

Run, baby, run.

But Candlefly stalks toward her. Gun out. As she tries to stand he bashes her in the back of the head. Mookie tries to scream, tries to tell Candlefly he’s going to rip his spine out his mouth and reinstall it through his asshole, but all he can do is whimper and mewl as Nora rolls over–

Candlefly straddles her–

She holds up her hands like that matters–

Then Candlefly puts a bullet into her gut. Bang.

Mookie bites through his own tongue.

Tastes blood. Smells gunpowder. Sees darkness.

Chapter 22

22

We are lost in the Tangle. Its labyrinthine passages confound. Passages up, holes down, tunnels east, caverns west – endlessly looping upon themselves. Direction has no meaning. Nor does time. It’s like outer space – or, perhaps, its opposite. I’ve seen many places – rooms, if you will – that are distinct. Rooms of stalagmites and stalactites that look like bloodied teeth, grottos with rock outcroppings that look like faces, old goblin nests filled with the remnants of stolen humanity: a child’s tricycle, a stop light, a fireman’s mask. Dangers abound, too: pools of stinking sulfur, drips of snotty acid from stone above, pockets of gas – some that choke, some that conjure sleep, some that will strip the skin from your bones. Cerberus, who I’ve since learned is really named Danny, is still leading us forward, but though he claims to know the way, his roving gaze tells me we’re lost. To my mind, we have only one important direction to reach the Expanse: down, down, always down.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below