He dragged her deeper into the water. Mahlia started to struggle. Tool said, “Breathe deep,” and she did, just as he pulled her down below the waterline. Warm seawater swallowed her. Distant waves and gunfire. Tool drew her onto his back, and then he was swimming.

He swam out through a broken window and into a canal, and still he swam. Water dragged at Mahlia as he accelerated, swimming hard. Mahlia clung to him and tried not to be torn loose by the pressure of the water streaming around her.

Her lungs began to heave with a need for air, but still Tool swam. She needed to breathe. Had to surface. Tool didn’t stop. The half-man didn’t seem to care. Still he swam. Mahlia started to panic. She tried to let go, to try to surface, but Tool seized her.

I’m going to drown.

She fought to surface, but the half-man pinned her arms, and kept her down. He pulled her close. His great face loomed before her. Blew a stream of bubbles in her face.

For a second, Mahlia was so surprised that she almost drowned herself. And then she understood. Tool had more than enough air for both of them. She steeled herself, and let herself exhale. Nodded to him, knowing the half-man’s plan.

Tool’s maw gaped wide, showing teeth. He pressed his mouth over hers. Breathed. Mahlia inhaled. Oxygen and carrion. Life and death, all at once. Mahlia’s lungs filled to bursting with the half-man’s breath.

Tool drew away, and motioned for her to hold on once again.

They swam.

Above them a firefight raged, but down deep in the water, they passed unnoticed. Canal after canal. Block after drowned block. They slipped through the city like fish, unremarked by the warfare that raged above.

At last, they had crossed the final battle lines, and Tool found shelter. He swam into a new building, and they surfaced to the sound of sloshing, salty waves and distant remote gunfire. Mahlia sucked clean air, desperately grateful to be breathing something that hadn’t come out of the lungs of the killer. Clean oxygen. She gulped at it, coughed, and gulped air again.

“Do you know where we are?” Tool asked.

Mahlia swam to a window. It was half above the water level, so she could see a bit of the world outside. She peered out, then jerked back with a hiss. A floating boardwalk was right outside, at eye level. People outside, straining to drag a barge, slave laborers, under the eye of UPF soldiers. The barge was full of scrap. Rolls and rolls of wire and cable. Even through the glass, she could hear the groan of the scavenge laborers.

She waited until they were past and scanned the canal again, getting her bearings. “Yeah. I know where to go. We still got a ways.”