Tanner’s heart froze as billows of red coiled to the surface.

"Your knife!" he shouted to Hedrigall. "Give me your fucking knife!" He threw off his shirt and ran, without hesitating.

He leaped, his tentacles unwrapping from him, Hedrigall bellowing something unheard behind him. Then his long, webbed toes broke the surface, and with a burst of cold, he was in the water, and then under it.

Tanner blinked frantically, sliding his inner eyelid into place and peering down. In the middle distance, obscured by the sea, the shadows of submersibles prowled clumsily under the city.

He could see the last of the men clambering desperately toward the light, appallingly slow and clumsy in their suits. He saw places where great patches of blood discolored the water. A chunk of cartilage was drifting down through a haze of flesh, where one of Armada’s guard sharks had been torn apart.

Tanner kicked down, swimming fast. Some way off, at the base of a huge sunken pipe, sixty or more feet down, he saw a man clinging, immobilized by fear. And under him in the shadowy water, flickering this way and that like a flame, was a dark body.

Tanner balked, appalled. The thing was massive.

Above him, he heard the flattened reports of bodies hitting the water. Armed men were descending, lowered from cranes, standing in harnesses, bristling with harpoons and spears, but they moved slowly, edging down by inches, at the mercy of the engines above them.

Bastard John streaked past Tanner, startling him, and from hidden corners of the city’s underside, Tanner saw the silent menfish of Bask riding slip through the water toward the predator below.

Emboldened, he kicked and plunged down again.

His mind rushed. He knew that attacks by big predators occurred sometimes-red sharks, wolfish, hooksquid, and others smashing into the fish cages and attacking the workers-but he had never experienced one. He had never seen a dinichthys, a bonefish.

He hefted Hedrigall’s knife.

With sudden disgust Tanner realized that he was passing through a cloud of blood-fouled water, and he could taste it in his mouth and across his gills. His stomach lurched as he saw, sinking slowly beside him, the ragged remnants of a diving suit with indistinct shreds waving within it.

And then he reached the bottom of the pipe, a few bodies’ lengths from the bleeding, motionless diver, and the creature beneath rose up to meet him.

He heard the pounding of water and felt an onrush of pressure, and looked down and screamed silently into the brine.