sea of sunlit white above—or below, depending on how you wanted to look at it. And dark figures moving against all that light, coming this way.
Fey, I thought sickly. They must have arrived in time to see where we went. Which meant—
“That we’re fucked, if you don’t get on!” Ray yelled.
I did not understand what he was talking about, since the river was upside down. It was in the cave ceiling, not running through the darkness below. There was nothing to get “on” to.
Yet he was clinging to the raft, nonetheless, gripping it with his legs and holding out an urgent hand to me. I took it because I did not know what else to do, and he gave a heave, dragging me up behind him. And as soon as he did—
The strangest thing happened.
I had been bobbing upside down, my head and arms sticking out of the water like a human stalactite. But when Ray hauled me onto the raft, it was as if the world suddenly flipped. I found myself right side up, clinging to his waist in an underground river that ran along the bottom of a large cavern.
Suddenly, everything made sense. The waterfall crashed over rocks that looked darker where it flowed, and sprayed out at the bottom as gravity demanded. The huge echoing space was now above us where it belonged, with the witchy fingers of limestone hanging downwards instead of spearing up. A few bats also hung properly down from their perches, instead of looking as if they’d gone to sleep standing upright.
I nonetheless stayed where I was for a moment, my head against Ray’s back, my mind spinning as it slowly adjusted to this new reality. He started to paddle, hard, and we began to move down what appeared to be a perfectly normal river. Well, perfectly normal if you ignored the sunlight sparkling below us, and the dark silhouettes swimming upward toward us.
And gaining.
These might not be water fey, but they almost moved like it, bulleting towards us at speeds that almost looked enhanced, as if a human-like body could not attain them unaided. But we were moving, too, with a motivated master vampire leaning into every stroke. The raft was in no way aerodynamic, but it almost seemed like it for the moment, shooting ahead as if we, too, had a motor.
In front of us, maybe a few hundred yards away, I saw another vortex. It was churning in the middle of the stream, but with nothing around it to explain why. The rest of the water on this side of the river could best be described as gentle fluctuations, or at most small wavelets. They did not even crest, yet the furious, white-edged mouth of the vortex started dragging us forward.
I looked behind us again, and the number of fey had grown. Where there had been only a few before, now there were dozens, a continuous line of divers heading toward the surface. I saw the first break through the water and sweep long, wet, silver hair out of his eyes, and thought that he would take a moment to reorient himself as I had done.
But I’d hardly had the thought when he began swimming after us. The strokes were worthy of an Olympic athlete, digging hard into the water, the light from below gleaming off his hair and water-slick muscles. And that was despite the fact that, to him, it must feel like he was swimming upside down.
But the vortex’s current had a firm hold on us now, and we were speeding ahead, so quickly that Ray no longer bothered to paddle. He glanced back at me, his face flushed and wet and strangely savage. “You don’t talk much!”
“What would you like me to say?”
“Most people would be yelling at me for an explanation!”
I thought about it. “I assume we are going back up top, because the fey are down here now?”
He laughed, and oddly considering the circumstances, it sounded genuine. “Right in one!”
And then we were falling.
The trip through the second watery escape hatch was no easier than the first, and I came no less close to drowning. But when we popped up in a deserted stream, I felt the same slightly mad smile stretch my face that had been on Ray’s. We had made it!
The world was upside down again, and despite the fact that I had expected it this time, it was still bizarre to see blue sky below us and trees above. The whitewater rush