is a square opening in the middle of a room-sized dome under the middle of the flat ceiling. Off to the sides I can just about see other black silhouettes, support pillars of some sort that vanish into the murk below. Beyond them, the turbidity speaks of open seas.
**I thought it was poured onto the bottom?**
**Nope. The reef comes to within meters of the surface, but offshore it falls away rapidly; the bottom hereabouts is nearly sixty meters down. They built it on the edge of an undersea cliff and jacked it off the bottom with those pillars.**
**Right, right.** I experiment, pushing off and swimming a little distance away from her until the tightness in my chest begins to return. I can make it to about eight meters out on my own, down here in the penumbra of the coastal defense ward. I turn and drift slowly back towards her. **What was it you were wanting to tell me? Before we got interrupted.** Her face is a ghostly shade in the twilight. **No time.
The bad guys are coming.**
**Bad guys — ** I hear a distant churning rumble and look up, out from under the poured concrete ceiling. **Let me see. They've got spear guns?**
**Good guess, monkey-boy. Follow me.** She swims out towards one of the pillars and I follow hastily, afraid of being left behind by our bubble of entangled metabolic processes.
The pillar is as thick as my torso, rough-pored concrete covered with lumpy barnacles and shells and a few weird growths that might be baby corals. Beyond it, the open sea: greenness above us — we must be at least ten meters down — and darkness below. Ramona pulls her knees up and rolls head down, then kicks, spearing into the gloomy depths. I swallow, then turn and clumsily follow her. My inner ear is churning but I can almost fool it into thinking I'm climbing alongside the fat, gray pillar. I feel a bit breathless, but not too bad — all things considered. **Are you doing okay?** I ask.
**I'm okay.** Ramona's inner voice is tense, like she's breathing for two of us.
**Slow down, then.** There's a great beige wall looming behind us in the gloom, bulging closer to the pillar. In the distance I see the streamlined torpedo silhouettes of hunting fishes. **Let's get between the pillar and the cliff face.** Distant plopping, bubbling noises from above. **Here they come.** Ramona peers up towards the surface.
**C'mon.** The cleft between the pillar and the rock face is about a meter wide at this depth. I swim into it then reach out and take her hand. She drifts towards me, still staring up at the distant sky, as I pull her into the shadow of the pillar.
**How long can we hide down here? If they figure we're just skinny-dippers, they may not think to come this deep.**
**No such luck.** She closes her eyes and leans back against me. ** Have you ever killed anyone, Bob? **
**Have I ever ...?** It depends what you mean by anyone. **Only paranormal entities. Does that count? **
**No. Has to be human.** She tenses. **I should have asked earlier.**
**What do you mean, has to be human?**
**That's an oversight,** she says tightly. **You were supposed to be blooded.**
**What are you — **
**The geas. You have to kill one of them.** She turns round slowly, her hair swirling around her head like a dark halo. Here we are under twenty meters of seawater and my mouth's gone as dry as the desert. **There are steps you have to carry out in sequence in order to adopt your role in the eigenplot. Jeopardy in a distant city, meet the dark anima, kill one of the other side's assassins — at least one, more would be better — and then we have to figure out a way around my — damn, here they come. We'll have to cover this later. Get ready.** She shoves something hard into my hand. After a moment's confusion I realize it's the handle of a vicious-looking knife with a serrated edge. Then she vanishes into the shadows lining the cliff face. I glance round as a shadow glides overhead: tracking up and over I see a diver in a wetsuit, head down, peering into the depths.
I pass through a moment of acute disbelief and resentment.
I've been in mortal danger before, but I'm not used to being in mortal danger from humans. It feels wrong. Any one of Alan's mad bastards is probably capable of whacking half a dozen al Qaeda irregulars before breakfast and not working up an existential sweat, but I'm not prepared for this. I can shoot at targets, sure, and I'm death on wheels when it comes to terminating cases of demonic possession with extreme prejudice, but the idea of killing a real human being in cold blood, some eating breathing sleeping guy with a job on a rich man's yacht, makes all the alarm bells in my head go tilt.
Trouble is, I also have a deep conviction in my guts that whatever the hell Ramona is on about, she's right. I'm here for a purpose, and I've got to move my feet through the occult dance steps in the right sequence or it'll all be for nothing. And it doesn't matter what I want or don't want if Angleton's right and Billington is gearing up to drop the hammer on us. When you come down to it, if there's a war on, the bombs don't care whether they're falling on pacifists or patriots. And speaking of bombs ...
The diver has seen something. Either that or he's into swimming head down into the depths beside a decaying defense station just for the hell of it. He's heading parallel to the pillar and he's got something in his arms. I glance down and see Ramona below me her skin a silvery flash like moonlight on ice, circling the pillar. My chest tightens. A stab of anger: **What the hell are you playing at?**
**Hanging my ass out to give you a clear shot.** She sounds lighthearted, but I can tell she's wound up like a watch spring inside. I taste the overspill of her uncertainty: Is he up to it? And my blood runs cold, because under the uncertainty, she harbors the rock-solid-conviction that, if I'm not up to it, we're both going to die.
Outmaneuvered.
The guy above me is turning in tight circles as he descends, keeping an eye open for signs of an ambush as he heads towards Ramona, who is feigning a false sense of security, her back to the outside of the cliff next to the point where the pillar merges with it in a jagged mass of crumpled volcanic rock. I shelter in the cleft between pillar and cliff as he strokes steadily down, hugging the far side of the pillar from Ramona. In his arms he's clutching something that looks like a shotgun, if shotguns had viciously barbed harpoons jutting from their muzzles. Just great, I think. What was it Harry the Horse tried to beat into my head? Never bring a dagger to a harpoon duel, or something like that.
My luck runs out while he's still about three meters above me, ten meters above Ramona. He slows his corkscrew, peering into the shadowy cleft, and I see a change in his posture.
Shit. Everything happens in nightmarish slow-mo. I've got my feet braced against the pillar and I let go like a spring, kicking straight up towards him, knife-first. Something sizzles past my shoulder, drawing a hot line across my chest, then I ram him with my shoulder. He's already tumbling out of the way of my knife and I try and bring it back round towards him. I can't breathe — I'm out of range of Ramona's gills — and in a bleak flash of clarity I realize I'm going to die here. The pressure in my chest eases as he takes a swing at me with a knife I sense rather than see, but I'm inside his reach and I grab his forearm and we go tumbling. He's strong but I'm desperate and disoriented and I somehow manage to get my other arm around his neck and something snags my knife. I yank on it as hard as I can, as he tenses his knife arm — we're arm-wrestling at this point — and something gives way. He thrashes spasmodically and lets go, kicks towards the surface, and there's a silvery stream of bubbles rising above him that's much too big and bright to be normal.
Ramona's right below me. **Let's go,** she gasps, tugging at my ankle. **Deeper!**
**But I just — **
**I know what you just did! Come on before they do it right back to us! Nobody in their right mind dives alone.** She lets go for a moment, kicks out, and moves her grip to my arm. **Let's move it.** She rolls us round and pulls me away from the pillar, back up towards the murky gloom beneath the defense platform. I feel her fear and let it pull me along behind her, but my mind's not home: I'm not feeling queasy, exactly, but I've got a lot to think about. **We've got to get back to the tunnel,** she says urgently.
**The tunnel? Why?**
**They'll have searched it first. And most divers don't like confined spaces, caves. I figure they'll concentrate on the open waters outside the reef, now they've got the sighting.
We just wait them out.**
**In the tunnel.** What are we doing here? I shake my head. What's it all for?
