The outlines of the city rose, ominous like storm clouds. Tanner was counting down in his head, allowing Shekel twenty seconds of stored air. Tanner peered through the Hidden Ocean’s dusk, still watching for the shaft of the cable.

When he veered up and hauled the boy into the air, Shekel was smiling.

"It’s fucking brilliant, Tanner," he said, and coughed, swallowing seawater. "Do it again!"

Tanner took him deeper. Seconds moved slowly, and Shekel showed no discomfort.

They were ten feet below, by the crusted slope of the Hoddling. Some shank of moonlight splashed down, and Shekel pointed. Forty, fifty feet away, the submersible’s cable was momentarily clear.

Tanner nodded, but turned his head to the blackness con-gealed below the factory ship. He had heard a sound.

Time to rise,he thought, and turned back to Shekel. He touched Shekel and pointed up, reaching out with his hands. Shekel grinned, parting his lips and showing his teeth, even as air slipped from his mouth.

There was a sudden spurting rush of water, and something sinuate and very quick punched in and out of Tanner’s vision. It was gone and there and gone like a fish flashing in to feed. Tanner blinked, stunned. Shekel still stared at him, his face collapsing into perturbation. The boy frowned and opened his mouth as if to speak, and in a great belching roar released all his air.

Tanner spasmed with shock and reached out, and saw that something followed the racing bubbles from Shekel’s mouth, billowing up darkly. For a moment Tanner thought it was vomit, but it was blood.

Still staring with an expression of confusion, Shekel began to sink. Tanner grappled with him, hauling him up with his tentacles, kicking out for the surface, his mind filled up with a shattering sound. And blood smoked up ferociously not only from Shekel’s mouth but from the massive wound on his back.

It seemed so far to the surface.

There was only one word in Tanner’s mind. No no no no no no no no no no no no.

He shrieked it without sound, his suckered polyp arms gripping Shekel’s skin, pulling him fitfully toward the air, and indistinct shapes gusted around Tanner, in and out of shadows, baleful and predatory as barracuda, jackknifing and twisting away, there and gone, moving with an effortless piscine ease that made him feel clumsy and heavy, fumbling with his boy, fleeing the sea. He was an intruder, disturbed and making an escape, cowed by real sea-things. His reconfigured body was suddenly a terrible joke, and he cried and floundered with his burden, struggling in water suddenly quite alien to him.

When he broke the surface he was screaming. Shekel’s face came up in front of him, twitching, leaking brine and gore from his mouth, emitting little sounds.