The ancient lock was pushed aside; the door clicked open.

I turned back to the battle in the field. “Lantern-Eyes! Indigo!” I shouted, but my voice was almost lost beneath the roar of the rain. “TAMARA! INDIGO!”

Lantern-Eyes ran towards me first, limping through the rain, blood on her club, blood on her face. She wiped hair and rainwater out of her eyes and smeared black blood there instead.

“Come on,” I said, and held open the door. She started to step through, then hesitated, looking back.

Indigo was retreating towards us backwards, not daring to turn away from the manikins.

“Go,” Lantern-Eyes said to me, and shoved my shoulder, pushing me through the door first. I stumbled into dryness, shocking in its suddenness.

And shone my flashlight on half a dozen gleaming eyes.

There were more manikins in here—outwaiting the storm, perhaps. I tried to turn back and ran into Lantern-Eyes. “Go back,” I urged.

She looked past me and swore. “We can’t.”

Everything happened very quickly after that. Perhaps the whole encounter lasted no longer than a few moments. I saw things in images like camera flashes, my flashlight jerking over Lantern-Eyes with her club, Indigo surrounded, and hating, hating eyes.

And then my beam fell upon a thick pipe directly above me, the surface of it brown and flaking with corrosion. Moisture dripped from it at the seam.

The rain had to get to the ceiling somehow, I reasoned.

That would do.

“Watch out!” I warned my companions, shouting loudly enough to be heard over the roar of battle, and then I slammed the pommel of Lantern-Eyes’ fuck-you knife into the fragile old pipe.

It burst.

Water sprayed out with enough force to knock me over. It was impossible to hear anything over the roar of the water, and impossible to see much through the spray. I pushed myself up, gasping, and felt something sharp close around my ankle. The manikins—their lives were in danger from the water as much as ours, but they were still trying to kill us. That didn’t seem like hunger, or territorial possessiveness. That seemed like hate.

The room was full of water, echoing, roaring. I pulled my ankle free of the monster, found my feet, and looked around for someone: Indigo or Tamara, or both. I thought I saw the glow of Indigo’s collar light and moved towards it, but an ominous rumble traveled through the wall. The ground underfoot, weakened by a millennium of decay, bent from the weight of the flood—and then collapsed, taking us all down with it.

CHAPTER THIRTY SIX:

The Deer and the River

There was a creek behind my friend Kenny’s house back on Kystrom. It wasn’t the most extraordinary water to look at; there were bigger rivers nearby, or prettier ones; there were waterfalls and whitewater and long lazy shallows darting with emerald fish. Kenny’s creek was so narrow that, with a running start, you could jump clean across it.

But the creek was deeper than it was wide, maybe deeper than it was long. Some crack in the earth had been opened, and the water had come to fill it: you could not see the bottom looking in, only dark water. My mother and father had forbidden me and Brigid to swim in it, because although the water looked slow and still on the surface, we had all heard rumors of dark currents deeper down, of things going into the water and never coming back up. I swam in it anyway. The water was slow and lazy at the top of the river, and I could drift without my feet scraping sand.