I keep rerunning the video stream captured in my mind's eye, the silvery parabola of bubbles rising above the drowning diver — **We're missing something important,** Ramona muses darkly.
**How did they find us?**
**Not sure. They've opened a channel to let them bring their minions in, but the core defensive wards are still working, you're cleaner than — ** She blinks at me. **Oh. That's how.** The ceiling is right above our heads now, the dome set into it framing the deeper blackness of the tunnel. **What is it?**
**I was wrong about them planting a tracker on you.
They don't need to bug you,** she says tersely. **They can find you anywhere. All they have to do is zero in on the eigenplot. Except here, right where you're shielded by the defense platform's wards, even if they have hacked a tunnel right through them to let their associates in ...
**What is this eigenplot you keep talking about?** I ask.
I'm dangerously close to whining. I really hate it when everyone else around me seems to know more about what's going on than I do.
**The geas Billington's running. It's the occult equivalent of a stateful firewall. It keeps out intruders, unless they run through the approach states in a permitted sequence. The sequence is determined by the laws of similarity and contagion, drawing on a particularly powerful source archetype.
When you run through them, that's called 'walking the eigenplot,' and you're doing it real well so far. Only a few people can do it at all — you can but I can't, for example — and there's an added catch: You can't do it if you know what the requirements are beforehand, it doesn't permit recursive attacks.
That's why you're just going to have to be brave and ...** she trails off**... shit. Forget I said that bit. I mean forget it.
You'll just have to see for yourself.** She centers herself under the pitch-black rectangle of the tunnel mouth. **C'mon.**
**But you said — **
**lf we're outside the tunnel we're not shielded. You want to learn how to breathe with a harpoon through you?**
**No way.** I swim closer to her, until we're both right under the mouth. **I nearly drowned last time we went through here.**
**The effect's attenuated only a couple of meters in.
Closer. Hug me. Not like that, like this.** She wraps her arms and legs around me. **Think you can swim? Straight up, until you don't feel like you're drowning?**
**Like I'm going to say no?** I look into her eyes from so close that we're almost touching noses. **Okay. Just this once. For you.** Then I kick off straight up, into the black heart of the drowning zone.
Bands of steel around my chest. A pounding in my ears.
Then the clean air of a spring meadow, Ramona's arms cradling me, her legs entwined around me, her lips locked against mine like a lovesick mermaid trying to kiss the drowned sailor back to life — or infuse his blood with oxygen through force of proximity alone.
Ob. We're in the tunnel. Totally black, walls either side of me, five meters of water between my head and the heavy iron grating, nothing but delirium's arms holding my sanity together. Distracting me. I am distracted. It's incongruous.
There are divers out there hunting the waters for us, and here I'm getting an erection. Ramona's tongue, tentacular, searches my lips. She's aroused, I can feel it like an itch at the back of my mind.
**This is a really bad idea,** I overhear her thinking.
**We're feeding off each other.** I'm drowning. I'm horny. I'm drowning. I'm — feedback. Too far apart and I start to choke, too close together and I start noticing her body, and whichever I'm paying attention to bleeds through into her head. **Got to stop.**
**Tell me about it.** An uneasy thought. **How much of this before the Other notices?**
**It's not ready yet — I think.** She pulls back a few centimeters while I concentrate on not thinking about drowning. **How long do you think we've been down here?**
**I've lost track,** I admit. **Half an hour?** I lean back against the rough wall of the tunnel that shouldn't exist. **Longer?**
**Damn.** I can feel the clockwork of her thoughts, tasting of rusty iron. It's like there's a weird tube of pressure squeezing us together down here; the tunnel is a flaw in the countermeasure wards, but outside it there's an almost unimaginable amount of power chained down and directed towards the exclusion of occult manifestations — like our own entanglement. Threatening to crush us to a bloody paste between walls of concrete. **Can we leave yet?**
**Your breathlessness — have you ever been claustrophobic before?** Is that what it is? **Great time to find out.** I shudder and my heart tries to flutter away.
**We're in as much danger if we stay down here as if we surface ** she announces. **Come on. Slowly.** Still locked together, we finger-and-toe our way up the narrow chimney in the rock, feeling ahead for rough bumps and the joints between concrete castings. As we rise, the nightmare awareness of my own death begins to fade. All too soon we reach the grating at the top, a cold wall of rusty iron.
I tense up and try not to give in to the scream that's bubbling up inside. **Can you lift it?** I ask.
**On my own? Shit.** I feel her straining. **Help me!** I brace my legs against one wall and my back against the opposite and raise my arms; Ramona leans against me and puts her back into it, too. The roof gives a little. I tense and shove hard, putting all my fear of drowning into it, and the lid squeals and lifts free above us. **Turn!** I start twisting, rotating the rectangular lid so that when we let go it won't settle back into place. There's a roaring in my ears. I can hear my pulse. And suddenly I'm choking underwater with a lungful of air: we've lost skin contact and I'm going to have aching muscles tomorrow — if there is a tomorrow — and I can't get enough oxygen, so I kick out in near panic and the lid slides away and I kick out again, rising nightmarishly slowly towards the silver ceiling high above me, with my lungs on fire. Then I'm on the surface, bobbing like a cork in a barrel and I breathe out explosively and start to inhale just as a wave comes over the top of the reef and the platform and breaks over me.
The next few seconds are crazy and painful and I'm coughing and spluttering and close to panic again. But Ramona's in the water with me and she's a strong swimmer, and the next thing I know I'm on my back, coughing up my guts as she tows me towards the shallows like a half-drowned kitten. Then there's sand under my feet and an arm round my shoulders.
'Can you walk'
I try to talk, realize it's a bad idea, and nod instead. A sidelong glance tells me her glamour's back in place. 'Don't look back. There's a dive boat just over the far side of the reef and they're looking out to sea. I figure we've got maybe two minutes before they check their tracker ward and see you're showing up again. Have you got any smoke screens on that fancy phone of yours?
Think fast. I try to remember what I've loaded on it, remember the block I put on the car, and nod again. I'm not certain it'll work, but if it doesn't we're fresh out of options.
'Okay.' We're about waist-deep now. 'Blanket's over there. Think you can run'
'Blanket — ' I start coughing again.
'Run, monkey-boy!'
She grabs my hand and tugs me forwards. At the same time there's a ghostly sensation in my chest: she starts coughing, but I feel a whole lot better. Moments later I'm the one who's tugging her along through knee-deep water across a silvery beach, sunlight blazing down on my shoulders. I feel horribly exposed, as if there's a target painted on the small of my back. The towel is just ahead, up a gentle rise. Ramona stumbles. I get an arm round her waist and help her up, then we stagger on up the beach.
Towel. Trunks. A little pile of everyday tourist detritus.
'This ours'
She nods, gasping for breath: she's swallowed my water, I realize. I fumble under the towel and find the sealed polythene bag. Fingers shaking, I unseal it and pull out my Treo.
The damn thing seems to take half an hour to boot up, and while I'm waiting for it I see heads bobbing to the surface near the boat on the far side of the reef. They're tiny in the distance but we're running out of time — Ah. Scratchpad. 'Lie down on the towel. Make like you're sunbathing,' I tell her. Squinting at the tiny screen, I
