Doreen curses when she sees me coming. “Don’t you dare rip my leg off.”
“Then stop trapping it.”
“I’ll add that to my calendar.”
Water slams a crate into my hip. I shove it aside hard enough that it splinters against the wall. Doreen’s face is pale, pain making her lips blue. Her cybernetic ankle is wedged beneath a collapsed shelf support, and the housing has begun sparking faintly where water reaches the connection seam.
“This will hurt,” I say.
“Everything hurts.”
“More.”
“Great. Love that for me.”
I grip the support and bend it upward. Metal groans, then tears. Doreen screams through clenched teeth as I free her leg and lift her before the current can sweep her sideways.
Her hand fists in my coat. “My kit.”
“No belongings.”
“It has my joint tools.”
I keep moving. “I will replace them.”
“With what, your charm?”
“I have very little.”
She coughs a laugh that becomes a gasp when pain catches her. I carry her to the ledge and hand her up to Renn’s brother, who appeared sometime in the chaos with a rope around his waist.
The water is higher now.
Mid-thigh for me. Chest-deep for some humans. Deadly for children, the injured, the old.
Maren’s son cries from the ledge. He clutches her neck so tightly she can barely breathe.
“Kauss!” Maren shouts. “Al was near the coil!”
The chamber narrows.
I turn toward the dead heater area.
The water there churns with debris, dark and broken by intermittent sparks. The coil housing has come loose from the wall. A section of collapsed conduit lies half-submerged near the pillar. I see no one.
“Al!” I roar.
No answer.
A memory rises unbidden: Horus IV, smoke, a little girl’s hand going slack against my armor, my voice shouting names that would never answer.
No.
Not again.
I dive.
The water closes over my head, filthy and cold, filling my ears with thunder. My eyes sting, but Vakutan sight cuts through the murk better than human vision would. Shapes move around me. Cloth. Crates. A floating shoe. Broken boards. My hand sweeps beneath the coil housing.
