“The range is only a few hundred yards, less with the interference from the walls and the solar radiation.” Indigo lowered his hand.

“So unless we happen to wander within a hundred yards of them, you don’t know what happened to them,” I said. Indigo was alone, then, too. Just as alone as Lantern-Eyes. Or me. “Do you even know how to get to Zhu’s office?”

Indigo rose to his feet. “We should move,” he said.

He didn’t know. He probably didn’t even know where we were right now—I didn’t either, I realized, though if Lantern-Eyes had been here I was certain she’d know. My heart clenched painfully, an unfamiliar sentiment in the face of a Minister. Here was Indigo, surrounded by the horrors of his own creation, lost, alone, and going the wrong way.

Maybe it was pity that made me say it. Maybe it was gratitude. Maybe it was simply the imp. I said, “It’s not even there, Indigo.”

“What isn’t?” Indigo said tersely, in a Shut the fuck up, Sean, there are monsters around sort of tone.

“The data isn’t in Zhu’s office. Lantern-Eyes already checked.”

That got his attention. He turned sharply to look down at me, his collar-light reflected palely in his dark eyes. “Where is it?”

“Ah,” I said. “Well, that—that I can’t tell you.”

“Can’t?”

“Won’t,” I admitted.

I saw a frightening thing when the current dragged me deep into that underwater cavern.

The rope worked as it was intended—at least, as well as such an ill-conceived safety measure could work under the circumstances. It arrested me only a few feet deeper, digging painfully into my stomach, until I could get my fingers in the algae-slick wall and out of the immediate pressure of the current.

I was almost out of breath. I pushed myself upwards, off the wall, ascending back towards the sunlight, and below I caught a glimpse of something pale jolting back and forth in some invisible deep current. Something that had been caught, as I nearly had.

And as I ascended, I saw it tear free of whatever bound it, and began to rise as well.

I emerged into the afternoon with popping, aching ears, gasping wildly for breath. Kenny was hauling on the rope and calling my name, saying something else that was lost to my ringing ears and the irregularities of memory. I hauled myself onto the shore, feeling the rope bite into my gut, and gasped and gagged until I had enough air that I could bend over the surface of the water again.

That pale shape breached the surface of the river a few feet from where I had surfaced, and caught in an eddy where the current turned aside from stone. It was as big as we were, pale but matted, with branches sticking out of it, bent to the side. Kenny gagged from the stench and I covered my nose while the current turned it slowly around. It was brown on the other side, and a mat of seaweed was tangled around the smooth arch of a branch. A pile of wood and debris, I thought at first, and then I saw the base of the branches was attached to waterlogged brown fur, a narrow muzzle, hollows where rot had eaten out the eyes. The deer’s long neck bent gracefully out into the water as the current caught the crown of seaweed it had tangled in its antlers; the rest of its body turned in the river to float white belly-up again, slender legs sticking like broken branches out of its bloated corpse.