The world turned white.
Mav had known that it would. It was the one part of the plan he could do nothing about.
Everything else had worked. Six had needed a day and a half to dig the tunnel. At dusk, Mav had waited in the open water until the eel came straight at him. He had reached the tunnel a few lengths ahead of its jaws. He had thrown himself into the hollow that Six had dug at the closed end, around the corner, where the teeth could not follow. The eel had come in after him, all four meters of it, and it had found out too late that it could not turn around.
It was trapped. That had been the whole idea.
But a trapped eel could still use its electric skill. And in the tunnel, its head was less than two meters from him.
The flash was nothing like the other times. It did not strike him from outside. It went through him. Every muscle in his body clenched at once, so hard that he felt something tear in his shoulder. His jaw locked. His back arched against the rock. There was a roaring in his head, and under the roaring, a stutter where his heartbeat should have been.
His heart had stopped.
He knew it very clearly, and he was more afraid than he had ever been. He hung there in the white light, unable to move, and waited for it to start again.
It did not start.
He remembered what his uncle had said at the door.
Then something at the back of his neck burned cold.
It was One. The seaweed in his neck seized his body, the way it had seized him when he pushed Five. But this time, it did not hold him still. It struck. Something like a fist closed inside his chest, once, hard.
His heart jumped. It stopped. The fist closed again.
His heart jumped again. But this time, it kept beating, bump, bump, bump.
The white light went out. Mav lay folded in the hollow, in the dark, with his heart hammering and every nerve screaming. He was alive.
’One restarted my heart. I didn’t know it could do that.’
He could not move a finger. He could not shape a single thought clearly enough to make it an order.
And the eel was leaving.
The blunt white head was sliding backward, away from the corner, a little at a time. The eel could not turn, but it could back out. In a minute, it would be free. Then it would wait outside the tunnel until Mav came out, and he was in no state to fight again.
There was one more piece of the plan.
Above the closed end of the tunnel, there was a gap in the roof, as wide as a claw. And on top of the roof, Six had been waiting since the afternoon, as still as a boulder.
Six was supposed to strike at Mav’s order. Mav could not give one.
’Six. Six, now...’
It was not an order. It was barely a thought. It would not have moved a seaweed on its first day.
But Six moved.
Above him, stone scraped. Through the gap in the roof, a gray claw came down into the tunnel, as long as his forearm. It closed on the lower jaw of the eel.
Six’s claw could bend metal, and a jaw was much softer.
The claw squeezed.
There was a crack. It was a deep, wet sound, and Mav felt it through the rock against his back.
The eel went mad. It threw its whole body from side to side. Boulders shifted. The roof jumped, and dust poured down. A second flash went off, but it was weak and yellow, and it died at once. The eel had spent all its power on the first one. It needed more than 100 seconds to get that power back.
Six did not let go.
Then, little by little, the thrashing slowed.
The head of the eel sank to the floor of the tunnel, an arm’s length from his face. Its jaw hung sideways, broken. A dark cloud of blood drifted from its mouth.
-----
For a while, Mav only lay there.
Feeling came back in pieces. His left leg came back first, and he wished it had not. A tooth had caught his calf when the eel first lunged, and it had opened the skin from knee to ankle. His shoulder burned. His hands shook so badly that he could not close them.
He was alive, though. He checked that twice.
Something touched his foot.
It was Two. The fish had come into the tunnel, squeezing along the body of the eel, and now he hung beside Mav’s ankle. Five was right behind him. Mav had told them both not to come near the tunnel, whatever happened.
But they had come.
’I told you... to stay out.’
Neither of them moved, and he didn’t mind.
He could feel the others, too. Six was above him, still holding on with all his strength. The five seaweeds behind the wall were as bright in his head as lamps. And the same thing was running through all of them. The fear was gone, and what they felt now was what a crew at the foundry felt at the end of a hard shift, when the job was done and everyone was going home.
Pale letters appeared in the dark.
[The affinity of your Subjects has risen to Good.]
Mav read the line twice, and warmth spread through his chest.
He had not planned for that. He had only tried to keep his word. He had put himself in front of the eel, and not one of them, and they had seen him do it.
’So that’s why. I took the risk myself, and they saw it.’
He would think about it later. There was no time now.
He looked at the eel.
It lay an arm’s length away, pinned by the claw, bleeding into the dark water. It was still alive. He could see its gills moving, slowly. It was a rank E- beast, the strongest creature in his sea, and it could not even close its mouth.
The eel was trapped. Its jaw was broken. It was as weak as it would ever be.
It was weak enough for a seaweed to take.
Around his left wrist, Seven had begun to stir. It was the seaweed he had carried into the tunnel for this moment.
Mav’s eyes were closing. He forced them open.
Now he only had one thing left to do.