I only broke eye contact when I felt something wiggling on one of my calf muscles. Looking down at my naked body, I was shocked to find it was covered, not in tetrodotoxin gel, but with foot-long leeches! These slimy black creatures were bloated from sucking my blood—the revelation of which instantly made me woozy, and I toppled forward—only to be caught by my cephaloped guardian, who gently returned me to the cool embrace of the underground stream. Lacking the strength to move, I laid my head back against a rock and watched as the creature delicately plucked a ripe leech from my right calf muscle, revealing an ant bite the size of a quarter, the raised flesh badly bruised.

The ceph’s using the leeches to suck out the ant toxin …

Before I could even weigh the implications of that thought, I caught a glimpse of the underside of its tentacle—hairless pink flesh adorned with two rows of suckers.

I held up my right arm—the telltale welts matched.

My mind raced in its delirium. The cephaloped had rescued me from drowning, it had somehow restored the use of my appendage … and it had saved me from the ants!

“Thank you.”

The startled land squid moved so fast I could not track it, the massive creature somehow disappearing from view. Sitting up, my eyes scanned every square inch of cave before and around me.

It was gone.

What the fuck, Eisenbraun?

Vertigo sent me sprawling back into the water, the disturbance igniting the stream in shimmering waves of fluorescent orange light. Triboluminescence is a geological feature of both sphalerite and tremolite; friction applied to these two minerals actually causes the rock to glow. The entire bed of the stream must have been composed of one or both of these minerals, the rapid movement of the rushing water across its surface bathing the entire underground passage in its ethereal orange light.

Lying back, I stared at the cave ceiling thirty feet above my head. Stalactites hung like twisted canine teeth, the smooth crystal rock twinkling as it reflected the glowing stream.

Giddy, I recited a rhyme that traced back to my Cub Scout days: “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”

The words echoed throughout the passage, dispersed into God knows how many connecting tunnels. Lying gently in the stream, I was stuck in my Omega dream, far from merry.

Was it a dream? How could it not be? Nearly every episode, every near-death experience since my “awakening” could be traced back to something I encountered before I had been forcibly frozen, from the giant bats on Dharma’s sexy emerald moonscape surcoat to my imagined rescuer—an evolved land octopus—no doubt conjured from my brief yet satisfying first encounter with Lara and her two intelligent pets.