The last thing Kaden saw before the water folded over him was Rampuri Tan, his teacher and tormentor, the last and hardest of the Shin monks, fighting desperately, viciously, trying to hold back the Ishien for another heartbeat, and another, and another, fighting to buy Kaden time to escape. In the blankness of the vaniate, Kaden watched as the monk fought and staggered, watched, but could not care.

The darkness of the flooded levels of the Dead Heart was cold, absolute, and crushing. Even deep inside the vaniate, Kaden could feel fear prowling the edges of his mind like a winter-starved wolf, could feel his muscles wanting to buck, kick, thrash. Normally he would have taken deep, long breaths to quell the faint agitation, but there was no breath to be had in the watery maze, and so he counted the beats of his heart instead, feeling the muscle contract and relax, contract and relax, and he moved forward with careful strokes of his arm, measured kicks of his legs below the knee, keeping one hand fixed firmly on Triste’s ankle.

Her flesh was so cold beneath his touch that she might have been dead already, drowned beneath the great weight of water and stone, save for the occasional jerk or spasm when Kiel bumped her up against some hard, invisible corner. Kaden tried to envisage the darkness around them as halls and rooms, corridors and entryways, the normal architecture of human habitation, but it was no good. There was only the darkness, and the cold, and the salt, and the stone. It didn’t feel like the world at all, but like the weightless, shapeless dreamscape of nightmare.

For all his recent training with the vaniate, the trance felt tenuous, as though a sharp jolt might shatter it. He tried not to think what would happen if he slipped from the calm into the relative clamor of his own mind. The vaniate was keeping him alive during the slow, creeping passage, but more important, it would allow him to pass the kenta at the end. Without it, the gate would annihilate him.

Feel the water on your face, he reminded himself. Feel the wet cold on your skin. This is the world. The future is a dream.

Around his eight hundredth heartbeat, Triste began to twist and jerk. At first the motions were just spasms, like the twitch of a leg from one on the edge of slumber. Within a few dozen heartbeats, however, she had begun to thrash and flail, kicking her legs madly as the panic seized her, heel striking Kaden in the head, the eyes, over and over as he struggled grimly to hold on to her ankle and the vaniate both.