The water mover lay on the stone at the edge of the shaft, and she didn’t get up.
The bone eel was already coiling to strike her again. Mav reached it before it could. He drove his harpoon into its skull, between the empty holes of its eyes, and he felt the point go through. The eel should have died, but it didn’t care. It turned its long body around the shaft of the harpoon and tried to pull it out of his hands.
Mav held on. Up close, he could see the thread at the back of its skull. It was pulled so tight that it hummed. It ran across the floor of the ring and into a crack at the foot of the wall, then down, into the stone.
Without thinking, he let go of the harpoon with one hand and grabbed the thread.
It was dry and cold, like an old root. But when he pulled, the bone eel jerked with it, its whole body, the way that a dog jerks on a leash.
’That’s what moves you,’ Mav thought. ’Not your body. This.’
He still held Drill, from the room of light. He put the point of his harpoon against the thread and used it. The steel turned in his hands. With a soft, dry sound, like paper tearing, the thread parted.
The bone eel fell apart.
It didn’t die, because it had never been alive. It simply stopped. The bones came loose from each other and dropped to the stone in a long gray heap, clattering. On the floor, the cut end of the thread curled back on itself. Then it slid away, fast, into the crack at the foot of the wall, and it was gone.
It had gone down, toward the heart of the ruin.
-----
’Twelve!’ Mav called. ’The threads! Go for the threads at their necks!’
Twelve understood at once. She always did.
Her needlefish stopped going for legs and turned for the backs of the dead crabs. It sounded simple, but it was hard. The threads were thin and moved with the crabs. Every time a needlefish came in close enough to cut one, a bone leg swept at it. But Twelve sent them in pairs. One went in low, to make the crab turn, and the other came from above, with Drill, at the thread.
The first crab fell apart in the middle of the shaft. Its shell turned over slowly and drifted down. The second fell a moment later.
Then a needlefish was too slow.
Mav felt it as a small, cold shock in his head. A crab’s leg had caught it against the wall of the shaft and crushed it there.
[A Subject has died. Killed by: Hollow Crab, Rank D.]
Even the Status called them hollow.
He didn’t have time to grieve. He went back into the water with Dart and came down on the next crab from above, the way that the needlefish did. The harpoon went through its thread at the first try. The shell rolled away from him in pieces.
On the dry floor of the ring, Moss had understood it too. She came out of the gold wall behind the third bone eel and bit through its thread with her hooked teeth. It fell in a heap at her feet. Then she stood over it, looking down at the bones with her flat head tilted, as if she were disappointed that there was nothing to eat.
Sela and the other water mover held the last two eels against the wall with a sheet of water, pressing them flat. Mav cut their threads one after the other.
Then the ring was still.
Mav swam to the bottom of the shaft, where the pieces of the first crab lay. He turned the empty shell over with his hand. On the inside, there were old marks, small and even, like the marks that Sela’s builders left when they cut stone. Someone had cared for this shell once. Someone had mended it.
These had been someone’s Subjects, as Six was his. Somebody had fed them and led them, and maybe named them. Now something at the heart of this place was moving their bodies like toys. Mav felt sick with disgust, more than he had during the fight.
-----
They had lost four needlefish. Mav felt each of the empty places among the points that were left. He felt them more sharply here, where there were so few points to feel.
He had brought 20, and he had lost a fifth of them in his first fight. But there was nothing to call to replace them. He went over that thought once, then put it away. There were worse things to look at.
The youngest water mover was lying on the stone at the edge of the shaft, with Sela kneeling beside her.
Mav knelt on her other side.
Her chest was broken. He could see it in the way that she breathed, shallow and fast, with a soft, wet sound under every breath. Her large dark eyes were open, but they kept closing, then opening again, as if she were fighting to stay awake.
On its own, that shouldn’t have frightened him. Her green collar of seaweed was tight around her neck, and every seaweed gave its host Sap and Regeneration. He had seen his Subjects get up from wounds that would have killed any wild beast. By now, the bone in her chest should already have started to knit.
It hadn’t moved at all.
Mav laid his hand on her chest, very gently, and he felt why.
Something was in there with her. It was a gray root, no thicker than a hair, that had broken off the eel’s thread when it hit her. It had gone in through the broken skin, like a root into soft earth. Now it was spreading through her, cold and slow, toward her neck and the seaweed there. Wherever it went, her Regeneration stopped, as if a hand had closed over it.
It wanted her. It was trying to do to her what had been done to the crabs.
"Can you take it out?" Sela asked.
Her voice was flat and dry, the way that it was when she was very frightened and didn’t want anyone to know.
"I’ll try," Mav said.
He took hold of the gray root with Telekinesis, as carefully as he would have pulled out a splinter, but the root didn’t come. Instead, it slid deeper, away from him. When he pulled harder, the water mover cried out, and the green collar shook around her neck as if something had bitten it. He let go at once.
Sela didn’t say anything. She took the water mover’s small hand in both of hers and held it.
Mav sat back on his heels. Rage rose in him, hot and useless, at the ruin, at the door, at himself for saying one hour. He made himself breathe slowly until it went down. Being angry wouldn’t get that thing out of her.
’Think,’ he told himself. ’What do you have?’
He had his harpoon, his fish, five skills that he could borrow and three that were his own. None of them could reach inside her.
He had his canteens.
-----
He had almost forgotten them.
The four canteens hung at his belt, as they always did now, with a free seaweed in each. One held the last of the seaweeds that had sprouted when his World reached rank D. The other three held new shoots, which had come up around his Heartstone in the peaceful days after the trial. He hadn’t opened them since the door closed. There had been no reason to.
They felt strange.
He took the first one off his belt and held it up to the gold light of the wall. It was warm. The canteen had always been cold, as cold as the water that it held. Now it was warm, like something alive.
He opened it.
The seaweed inside had changed. It had always been green, as green as One, the color of new leaves. Now it was pale, like a leaf that has been kept in the dark too long. It moved slowly in the water of the canteen, uncurling, the way that a sleeper turns over. He had never seen a seaweed that color, not even a dying one.
Mav opened the second canteen. That one was pale too. So was the third.
He opened the last one, the oldest, the seaweed that had sprouted when his World reached rank D.
He looked at it for a while, without moving. Beside him, the water mover breathed her soft, wet breaths, and Sela held her hand.
His seaweed had turned white.