She lost consciousness for a few seconds maybe and came up, gasping for air, shaking the water from herself. The suction was gone, but the water was still rising. It was up to her chest now. A hardsuit went floating by like a corpse. There was bobbing debris everywhere. And the Neptune itself…or at least the Entry Lock…was leaning precariously to one side. Either the baseplate itself had been ruptured or one of the support legs beneath was badly damaged.

But, dear God, she thought then, what could possibly have hit the habitat with enough force to jar one of the legs? Each of them weighs over six tons…

And maybe the answer would have come to her, but that’s when she realized that she was not alone in the flooding Entry Lock. Something had come up out of the moon pool from below.

Shit.

Something brushed against her and she let out an involuntary cry.

She caught a glimpse of some serpentine and almost phosphorescently white object in the water with her. And whatever it was, it was damn big and damn quick, easily the size of a monstrous python. There were many of them, she soon saw, in front of her, looped around behind her, filling the water like some peristaltic tangle of worms, immense and obscenely fleshy.

The first thing she thought, almost abstractly, was: sea snakes.

It was ridiculous, of course, down here in this primordial lake beneath the glacier. But that was her first impression. There was a school of sea snakes in the water with her.

Her second impression was a little closer to the truth: tentacles.

She saw them. And if for one fleeting moment she had been thinking anything as prosaic as squid or octopus, she knew better now. No earthly, ordinary cephalopod had tentacles like this. They were white, shiny, rubbery, and flattened out like oars. And she was lost in a forest of them. They bumped her. Nudged her. Whisked against her legs. Some were two- and three-feet across, others were the size of her arms or legs. And they just kept coming, more and more and more of them until they not only filled the water, but rode up out of it in spirals and undulant loops. It was like being trapped in a nest of mating vipers. She did not even want to think of what they might be connected to.

Please, oh please, Lord above, help this sinner, help this poor lost soul in my final—

(STOP IT ALICE)

(YOU CANNOT PRAY)

(YOU WERE BORN WITHOUT A SOUL)

But that was wrong, oh, it was so wrong. She wasn’t like her mother, she was not at all like Regina, who, at that ugly moment, was filling her head with images and ancestral memories that she plucked from the depths of Javy’s own mind, informing her and schooling in this final hour.

(IT IS THE WOMAN THAT SPAWNS LIFE IN THESE GREEN DEPTHS)