That’s when he’d cried out and the others came running to find him standing there, his face greased with sweat, his body trembling, eyes opaque with fear.

You better hide it from them or they won’t trust you anymore, he’d thought.

But could he hide it from Javy?

In the city, something impossible and downright insane had happened. He’d blanked. Inside his suit, he’d felt something, a change in pressure, a sense that the self-contained atmosphere had become poisoned. He tried to tell Javy about it, but she wasn’t there. One moment, she’d been five feet away and then she was just gone. He found himself trapped in an encompassing bank of seaweed or hydroids, perhaps even both. They were formed of countless yellow-green spirals that wound around him, sharp pink tendrils erupting from them. They brushed against his suit, dragging over the view plate bubble like hundreds of tapering pink fingers. He had panicked, trying to fight his way free, but they held him, snaring him up like the net of a fisherman. The terrible thing was, that he could feel them inside his suit, stinging his arm like the tentacles of a jellyfish.

It was impossible.

There was no way they could have gotten in his hardsuit, yet he could feel them, the burning sensation in his forearm. The tendrils felt rubbery, sticky, their tips sharp as needles.

Then they were gone and Javy was asking him if he was okay. What could he say? Threaded with terror, he told her he was just fine.

But he couldn’t tell the others about that. It was simply too far out. Yet, for all that and as absurd as the idea was, he couldn’t stop itching at his forearm incessantly.

9
NIGHTMARE

That night, Hubbs slept uneasily, tossing and turning, limbs trembling and sweat beading his face. His body jerked stiff as a post, then folded up like a jackknife. He was unaware of any of it, of course, or that there was a presence in the room, watching him, water dripping from it steadily.

He dreamed he was approaching the city and Javonivic was at his side. They moved together, slowly jetting forward over the rubble and ruin of the outskirts that were not shattered walls and arches and broken domes, but leaning gravestones like those in some medieval European cemetery. They were encrusted with barnacles and draped with green kelp that undulated in a secret current, waving side to side. They pushed on, the beams of their lights like yellow swords cutting through the murk and suspended sediment. Then the city was right before them and it looked just like the witch’s castle in a book of fairy tales from his early childhood—tall, narrow, grotesque and twisted, a collection of sharp-peaked roofs and skeletal spires.