Quentin staggered over to Vanity.
I heard Colin say, 'Don't look. This is pretty bloody bad.'
Quentin made a noise like a whipped dog, a painful whimpering. He whispered, 'Darling, don't die. Don't die.'
Vanity mumbled something, and made a noise something between a groan and a shriek. I heard gargling. It sounded like blood was obstructing her throat.
My eyes could not focus. I stared at the ceiling. I heard the conversation, but I did not look at Vanity. My imagination was filled with pictures of her soft flesh cut and lacerated, blood and other fluid seeping and spurting from open wounds, white bone fragments sticking from flesh.
Maybe the reality was not so bad as what I imagined. Or maybe it was worse.
Quentin said, 'What is going on? What are you doing to her?'
Victor said in a cold voice, 'Leader, we must wake Vanity back up, so that she can get us out of here before Trismegistus returns. Her body is trying to put her into shock, to release her from pain. Do I have your permission to apply a stimulant?'
'Wh-what? Is it going to hurt her?'
'The pain-signals reaching her brain from her nervous system will increase.'
'If, if we don't-'
'Leader, we cannot possibly withstand another attack from Trismegistus. All of you are wounded, and I lost ninety percent of my body mass. Will you give the order?'
I did not hear Quentin's reply; he must have nodded.
Colin said, 'Steady on. Steady.' I do not know if he was telling Victor to be careful in applying medication to Vanity, or telling Quentin to retain his self-control.
Vanity let out a gasping scream. It sounded horrible.
Quentin: 'Darling, I'm here. Don't worry. It will be over in a moment. We need to-'
Vanity: (Something inaudible.)
Quentin: 'What?'
Colin: 'She said the chaos was in the way. She needs solid reality, something with walls, boundaries, definitions.'
Quentin: 'Victor, can you stabilize the area?'
Victor: 'Yes. But Trismegistus will find us the moment the storm drops.'
Quentin: 'Do it.'
Victor pried his blue orb eye out of his head and threw it upward. I saw it fly up overhead. At the top of its arc, it passed through the trapdoor and shot blue light in a fan toward the starboard side, the side away from where Trismegistus still (I hoped) was struggling with the storm and dodging cannon fire from the dragon-corpse.
Chaotic matter was evidently even easier to command than solid matter. The storm on that side fell quiet with an eerie swiftness.
Vanity mumbled something. A command. I saw the reflection of a green dazzle coming from her position where she lay.
Vanity was clever this time. The floor on which we lay now acted like a platform that shot downward. Deck after deck swooped away from us as we rode the high-speed elevator downward, into ever-vaster holds the Argent Nautilus now somehow held within her tiny hull.
None of the wounded even had to move.
The square of storm-stuff overhead dwindled to a point, and the falling blue eye of Victor had trouble coming down fast enough, meteorlike, to return to its master's hand.
Slam. A door of steel slid shut behind us. Bang. Another. Boom. A third. Apparently Vanity knew how to run her powers in reverse, and create barriers where none had been before.
Quentin remembered me. He said, 'Colin, wish Amelia back to health again. Victor, you concentrate on Vanity.'
Colin pulled himself by his bloodstained hands over to where I was. He put an arm around my shoulders to prop me up. I felt a warm sensation enter my body, clarity of mind. Colin said softly,
'Okay, Amelia. That is just red ink. Let go of your fear and the pain will let go. Snap out of it.'
With my head up, I could see Victor bent over Vanity like a one-eyed ghoul over a corpse. An antiseptic smell and a sense of heat issued from his body, as if he had projected some kind of weird force field to sterilize everything in an envelope around him. He had pried open her chest cavity with several metal tentacles and clamps formed from his suit, and a dozen more tentacles were reaching into the heap of organs, performing a dozen operations with a score of instruments, tiny waldo-hands, molecular engines made of red
