Something touched my leg, then pressed out, pushed, and I felt the strength of it. Not a human hand or anything similar. A tendril.

No sooner did I recognize it than I felt it pull away. My leg was pulled after it by the force of the water moving in its violent wake.

Blue lights began to fill the space. Motes of light appeared, leaving trails and lines behind them. The illumination was murky, everything cast in one or two shades of blue and more pitch black. Objects were unrecognizable, the side and top of a table ten feet away looked much like a folder of papers floating within my arm’s reach. Both moved violently—I hadn’t expected just how turbulent this water would be, or how much.

This time around, I had my orientation, but I didn’t have the ability to do anything with it. I exhaled slowly, letting bubbles slip through my lips, a way of measuring my time limit.

I searched through the oppressive, near-opaque gloom, a world of sluggish and violent movements, of chaos, and I saw nothing.

The movement of the water wasn’t as intense as it had been in the first few seconds, but for every small amount that it slowed and calmed, I felt waves of stress and strain, my breath pushing against the inside of my chest, wanting out and wanting more.

Not hard edges. Look, Victoria! Look! Where are they!? Look for human shapes, for the lines of the human body!

Motion caught my attention, almost invisible in a swirl of computer chips and boards. I moved to intercept before I’d fully verified who it was. Rain, swimming through the water.

I flew to him, grabbing him, helping him along. I saw his head turn, his eyes wide.

I could fly, and flying was better than swimming. Holding him, I flew us both toward the door, toward the tunnel where someone would have to swim further than the length of a swimming pool to get to the hole we’d made. They would then have to get up through that hole.

Tristan drew outlines, and made dense material that fit within those outlines. Byron drew outlines, but the condensed material was something that uncondensed, expanding out to fill space, vastly disproportionate to the outlines made.

Rain slipped from my grip. He’d stopped abruptly. I turned myself around.

He pointed.

Hair, floating free in the water, and a form that wasn’t really trying to swim.

I nodded confirmation, and Rain kicked, propelling himself toward the door, the eddies and flows in the water flipping him belly-up. Leaving me to it, even as my pulse joined the dull roar of water in my ears, each beat a delivery of a swiftly dwindling oxygen reserve.

More blue lights surrounded Rain, surrounded us. It still felt like two shades of blue and black, but the blue was lighter, the black filling less space.