and you were affrighted by its wet and corporeal reality: you were soaked through almost to the ribs by tepid, greasy waves. Ianthe had sat up—she never could follow instructions—but she was staring, glassy-eyed, at some point you could not see, rigid and uncomprehending. You scanned around, but the Body was nowhere to be seen.
It was just water. It soaked the hems of the Emperor’s trousers—he sat calmly flicking at his tablet as though it were no inconvenience. You could not quite see the other Lyctor, except her arms, bathed in the glow of the cockpit switches. The water seeped around your neck and started trickling into your ear canals. This did not fill you with the rigid terror it apparently produced in Ianthe: as a child you had been plunged into water by your mother and father, so the sensation was old and familiar, if wretched. The waters swirled and rose. They brushed against your cheeks, and you reflexively held your breath.
“Let that go, Harrow,” said God, tapping on the tablet with his stylus. “You don’t need to breathe.”
You exhaled, trickling it out of your nose and mouth. Your brain panicked briefly as you took a shy lungful of warm, muddy water. The fluid went down your throat in a peculiar and unreal way: it sat there, seething in your craw, peristalsis not coming into play. You filled up with water like a rubber doll dropped into a well. It was with very little joy that you saw this was distressing Ianthe a great deal more than it was you: she had wrapped one arm around herself, leaving the rightmost to trail abandoned in the water, and was shaking in a kind of convulsive spasm of the soul. It was only the memory of the knife and the palm that prevented you from being moved to pity.
God was saying, quite encouragingly: “You’re fine, Harrowhark. You’re doing very well,” which put you in a paranoid panic that you were not, in fact, doing well at all. Something brushed past your ankle, and the water closed over your head. You did not float: you stayed stuck to the bottom like a concrete weight, without buoyancy. Something floated in the water quite close to the pilot’s seat where Mercymorn sat. A long skein of abandoned skin, fresh and virgin, as though taken from someone’s flank and carded of its flesh and fat. The water in which it floated felt warm against your eyeballs, and smarted a little going up your nose.
From the shifting, refracting ripples within this tide, you beheld the ward upon the wall: it was steaming. Its bottom whorls sizzled and sparked like malfunctioning machinery where they touched the water. Showers of blue sparks pattered into the greasy water like rain.
“The ward has lasted for one minute, forty seconds,” said Mercymorn. “One minute forty-one.”
God said, “Two commendations for the lieutenant.”
She called out, “One minute forty-four.… One minute forty-five,” and in the space between forty-four and forty-five, the ward exploded. The dried blood came off the wall in flakes of brown confetti. It left behind a burnt, warped indentation as it slithered away to dissolve in the rising current. Next to you, Ianthe arched her spine so acutely that she folded up in the middle, as though she had been electrocuted. The light from the panels limned her in amber; her hood had come loose and her long pale hair floated about her shoulders like a caul. You propped yourself up on your elbows, distracted by something nudging against the plex viewing panel where Mercy sat piloting the shuttle. The star-pocked blackness of space had retreated entirely: the shuttle looked as though it were sinking down into a murky, obscure ocean.
Another nudge. Then something slapped two wet and rotting hands on the plex.
“Ick! Bleff!!” said Mercymorn, quite calmly. “Three minutes remaining.”
“I hate this part,” said God.
A nude, fish-eaten body thudded down hard atop the plex, leaving a momentary bloom of blood before it bounced off again. Another hit a few seconds later, but this one stayed put; it was a torso with the legs gone and the face eaten away, leaving the shiny skull to bang against the surface. It pressed one hand down, as though beseeching, but was sucked away again into the deep water outside the shuttle. The water inside now sloshed up to the Emperor’s shoulders, washing over Mercymorn’s hands. She did not bother to take her fingers away from the controls.