There was only the wheeze of breath and a faint percussion as they moved their cramped limbs and knocked them against metal or each other. The whisper of pumped air. The engine was not running-gravity took the vessel down.

Johannes listened to his own breath, and that of those around him, and realized that they were unconsciously synchronizing. Which meant that after every exhalation there was a pause, a moment when he could pretend for a fraction of a second that he was alone.

They were far beyond the sun’s reach now. They warmed the sea. Heat leached through from the boilers into the cabin, through the vessel’s metal skin into water that ate it hungrily.

Time could not survive this unbroken dark heat and monotonous susurrus of air and creaking leather and shifting skin. It was broken and bled. Its moments did not segue into each other, but were stillborn. I am out of time, Johannes thought.

For a shocking instant he felt claustrophobia like bile, but he held himself still and closed his eyes (uncomforted by the darkness he found there, no more or less profound than that he had shut out), swallowed, and defeated it. Stretching out his hand, Johannes found the glass of the porthole, and was shocked by its cold, condensation-wet surface-the water outside was like ice.

After uncountable minutes, the darkness outside was momentarily broken, and the crew gasped as time returned to them like an elyctric shock. Some living lamp was passing them by, some tentacular thing that inverted its body with a peristaltic wave, enveloping itself in its luminescent innards and shooting away, its austere glimmer snuffed out.

Chion ignited the lamp at the bathyscaphos’s front. It stuttered on, its phosphorous glow casting a cone of light. They could see its edges as clearly as if they were marble. There was nothing visible in the lamp’s field except a soup of minute detritus, particles that seemed to eddy upward as the Ctenophore plunged. There was nothing to see: no ocean floor, no life, nothing. That crushing emptiness they had illuminated depressed them more profoundly than the darkness. They descended unlit.

The iron carapace began to creak under the pressure. Every ten or twelve seconds there would be another sudden shuddering creak, as if the pressure increased in sudden, discrete zones.

The percussive stroke became stronger the lower they went, until suddenly Johannes realized that it was not just their own craft, not just the metal around them that shook, but the sea-the whole sea, the tons of water to all sides-vibrating, spasming with sympathetic shock, in echoes of the thunderous strokes rising from below.

The avanc’s heart.

When miles of wire had been played out by the huge wheel on the Hoddling, a safety catch snapped into place and halted their plunge. The Ctenophore jerked, buffeted by the arterial booming around them. The avanc’s heart felt solid through the metal.