She tried, though, dammit, even as the hairs on the back of her neck stood up and her skin charged with the memory of fire.
A stone hand pulled her into a side tunnel. The thunder ate her squawk of protest. She brought her knife around, brilliant in the shadows, before she recognized Shale in stone form—though not the healthy sculpture she remembered. Moonlight bled from deep wounds, from the missing corner of an ear and a hole in his right wing.
Red lightning carved grotesque shadows from the dark. Tara woke her glyphs, more for reassurance than out of faith they’d save her if whatever-it-was in the tunnel struck them.
Lightning jumped between crystal veins in the tunnel wall. Another bolt followed, and a third, and then they came too fast to count, arc after arc crisscrossing fractal dense. Her brain constructed figures from their dance: bison-headed men and goat-legged somersaulting acrobats, artifacts of spark and flame, the roar their laughter.
She did not know until the lightning passed how bright it had been, or loud. Her ears rang. For a long time all she saw was the red that endures when the eye is overwhelmed.
She returned to herself through the silver of Shale’s wounds.
Light seeped from him. His stone felt cool as ever, but the light, when it dripped onto her fingers, was warm. He pulled back from her touch, bared his teeth, snarled; her ears had not recovered yet, but she felt the sound in her bones.
“Thank you,” she said.
She heard his voice as if through a pillow: “One second.” His stone twisted, inverted, melted to skin again. “There.” His voice was not so loud as before, but her hearing had recovered to match.
“I didn’t know it was that bad,” she said.
His grin would have had a different effect were his teeth still long and curved and sharp. “They don’t hurt as much when I’m like this.”
“You should have stayed home. Taken care of yourself.”
“Aev and the others are resting before the battle. I can work in flesh, for a while.”
“How long?”
“Long enough.”
“No macho jerk answers, please. Be honest with me.”
“This stone, unworked as it is, helps a little. I can handle another day. Which is all we need, one way or another.”
She tried her ankle. “Fuck.”
“Lean on me.”
“I’ll use the wall.” If she couldn’t quite walk, at least she could hop. “Slower than I’d like. Let’s move.”
“Down?” As if he hoped she would give up. Not tonight. Not with gods and goddesses and friends counting on her two thousand miles away. Not with so few hours remaining. Her watch lay heavy in her pocket.
“Down,” she said.
52
Silverclad Cat splashed through the ocean’s skin, plummeting toward a darkness that paled all color: moonlight shafts ended in the shadows below, embedded in the flesh of a beast too large and cold to care.
Cat sank. Bubbles clung to the Suit, and as she kicked they slipped free, tickled up her flanks to form a whirling trail. Justice’s song buzzed beneath her conscious thought. She was far from the community of cops. Seril’s light followed her, warm inside her mind, a caress she couldn’t call a mother’s—not her mother’s, anyway.
She did not have to breathe while wearing the Suit. Blood rushed in her ears, and the water’s pulse twinned her own.
She heard a splash as Raz dove into his element. The speed of his descent slicked back his hair. Naked from the waist up, he joined her as she fell. He swam with beautiful efficiency.
Westward rose the continental shelf, steeper than any cliff could be in air. When Cat was a kid, old Father Clemson at the Quarter parish who owed gambling debts to half his congregation told myths during weekend services. Cat would have beaten up any kid who suspected how much she loved those stories. She had no time for sermons, which were one more way folk told you to sit down and listen, but she liked the strange tales and weird poems, and one line returned to her thoughts as she looked down into the black: something about spirits brooding on the abyss.
She pointed down and shot Raz a questioning glance. He gave her the thumbs-up. Pointed down. Thumbs-up again.
Great.
She brooded on the abyss like a champ.
Water pressed her in an embrace tighter than the Suit’s used to be before Seril came back, and the Suit stiffened to match.
Cat’s heart beat faster. Raz kicked into the deep, somersaulted, and waved up at her with a smile.
Pressure at this depth could warp a body from within. The City Aquarium displayed the corpses of dead things divers dredged from the deeps, spiny and toothed, many-clawed, tentacular. Special care had to be taken, the exhibit’s brass placards read, in recovering such specimens, due to the pressure difference between ocean floor and surface. If she removed her Suit down here, she’d die.