Ara shuffled forward in a kind of broken jog, groaning every time she misstepped on the uneven ground and jolted herself. Nona kept pace with an awkward gait, crippled by the pain in her head and swinging her injured leg around stiffly, unwilling to bend it.

‘Hurry!’ It was clear that Clera was moments from speeding away to leave them to it. ‘Faster!’

‘We’re not going to the Seren Way!’ They would never make it that far, Clera was right about that. ‘We just need to reach the holothaur chamber and the ring.’ Nona held the shipheart higher. ‘With this!’

‘So you can die somewhere more familiar?’ Clera shrieked. She turned to go.

‘The ring’s a gate. A magic gate. This is the key!’ Nona tried to speed up but her body seemed unwilling to listen to her.

Clera held back, waiting for them. Too terrified to stand still, her nervous energy had her bouncing off the walls. ‘Hurry! Hurry!’

Nona drew close to Clera with Ara a few yards behind. The girl started to back away. It said a lot for the shipheart’s aura that even knowing it was the key to her salvation Clera didn’t seem in the least bit tempted to snatch it and run off.

The distant thunder had definitely become less distant. An intensifying roar echoed their way, punctuated by a series of booms. The air rushed past them so fast now that it seemed to push them along, almost lifting them off the ground.

Ara’s breath grew ragged, drawn in in great despairing gasps. Nona felt the knife in her leg every time she set her weight upon it, and hot blood trickled down her back. Clera danced ahead of them, wild with fear, screaming at both of them to hurry up. Nona retreated into her core, her world reducing to a monotony of pain and running, one agonizing step after the next. Back along the tunnels Lano Tacsis had died. A sudden death and better than he deserved, but Nona’s spite had burned itself out on the father, Thuran. The cruel end she had given that old man, who lingered even now, was a stain on her soul. She knew that. One that all the rushing water aimed in her direction would not clean away. With death so hard upon her heels she wished she could have been a better person, wished she could have saved her friends.

‘Which way?’ Clera waited for her where the tunnel split.

‘Here!’ Nona forced the shipheart to burn bright and turned a corner into the holothaur’s cavern. The creature that they had banished long ago had been one of the few things to have scared Nona more than what was currently rushing up behind them.

As Nona turned she saw something. At the far end of the long passage they’d run down a white wall was rushing towards them. And halfway between Ara and the fury of that flood something dark and terrible raced forward, almost as fast as the water. One black figure whose lack of definition somehow suggested things far worse than any detail could.

‘The Singular!’ Clera tore into the chamber ahead of Nona.

Of all their pursuers somehow the dark heart of the Noi-Guin had kept ahead of the deluge and was now within moments of catching them. The shadows that surged ahead of the Singular carried a new terror with them, a threat that made the white fury behind seem a kindness.

‘Ara!’ Nona started to sprint, working her wounded leg, careless of what new damage the knife embedded in her thigh might wreak upon her. ‘Run!’

The great ring loomed ahead of them. Clera reached it first and turned, howling at them, ‘Run, you bitches!’

The Singular broke into the chamber, a dark fury of shadow boiling around a void, nightmare shapes reaching forward to rend flesh and slice souls. Ropes of darkness lashed out to coil around Nona, sinking midnight teeth through her habit. She staggered on as if dragging a laden wagon behind her. She found herself screaming and every devil in her screamed just as loudly. The Singular’s anger beat at her like hammers.

‘Run!’ Clera howled from the ring.

Just yards remained between Nona and Clera. She heard the whoosh as the Glasswater’s untold gallons hammered around the corner, jetting out into the cavern. She slapped a hand to the ring, crashed into its side, and turned. Ara was a spear’s length behind her, snared and flailing, a red froth around her gasping mouth, the Singular the length of three spears behind her, the talons of his shadows closing around her legs. And behind him, the first surging wave of the flood.

‘Run!’ Clera screamed again, her speed breathtaking as she unleashed a barrage of throwing stars into the void where the Singular should be.

Somehow Ara tore free of the Singular’s shadows and launched herself headlong at the ring. Nona leapt forward in the same moment, knocking Clera through ahead of her. The flood’s roar swallowed their screams. The coldness of the water as it hit them was shocking.

Suddenly there was only Clera screaming. She drew another breath, cried out, and fell silent. All that remained was Ara’s gasping and rattling, and Nona’s own panting, barely audible over the deafening pounding of her heart. As she had stepped through the gate Nona had felt the Singular battling her for control of the shipheart, his mind reaching for it. Somehow she had torn free though and sealed the gate in the instant she fell out into the emperor’s palace.

Relief hit Nona, not as a striking of bonds but as a constriction of her throat, a sob, the grief for Ara and Clera’s deaths escaping only now that they were saved. She forced herself to hands and knees, crawling clear of the others, taking the shipheart away before collapsing again. Clera stopped screaming and even Nona’s devils were quiet in the moment of silence that followed.

All three of them lay sprawled in several inches of freezing water in the small square chamber from which Nona had departed Crucical’s basement.

Clera patted weakly at the water, now running out into the corridor. ‘Sorry, probably my mess. I think I wet myself.’ She levered herself up. ‘What in all the hells was that? And where are we?’

Nona rolled over, groaning. ‘The emperor’s palace.’ She pushed herself into a sitting position, her back to the wall, injured leg stretched out before her. Blood clouded the water around the knife hilt. ‘Ara?’

‘Aren’t I dead yet?’ Ara didn’t move a muscle, just lay on her front in the draining flood, her chest heaving.

‘Sorry,’ Nona said, ‘no time for that. I have things for you to do.’ She tapped out the code that activated and deactivated the blade-wall outside. ‘You need to learn this.’ She tapped it out again. As her fear, exhaustion, and pain started to subside from the heights reached in the extremes of the escape Nona began to feel Ruli’s distress again, echoing down their thread-bond.

‘One question.’ Clera got to her feet, dripping. ‘Wouldn’t it have been better to start your flood once we got to the ring?’

‘Nearly cracked my skull trying it from the vault. I don’t think I could have done it from the holothaur cave. Too far.’ Nona drew in a breath, trying to undouble her vision. ‘Have you got the pattern?’

‘Yes.’ From Clera.

‘No.’ From Ara.

‘Good enough. I have to go.’

‘Go?’ Clera splashed towards the doorway, wanting more distance between her and the shipheart. ‘Go where?’

‘Don’t leave!’ Nona added a layer of marjal coercion to the alarm in her voice. ‘Check the trap’s not on first.’ She pulsed instructions to Ara along their bond. It was easier than talking.