mouthing the original words, and stopped.
“Couldn’t you have picked a less crowded place to meet?”
Mal’s voice at his side. He whirled on her, and almost lost his balance. “You startled me.”
“At least one of us is discrete.” She was dressed sensibly: gray slacks, flats, a loose white high-necked blouse belted at the waist, a leather bag slung over her shoulder. Sunset caught her skin in burnished bronze. “Shall we go?”
A black sliver detached from the sky, plummeted, and stopped above Caleb’s outstretched hand, hovering on long dragonfly wings. The opteran’s proboscis brushed his skin, tasting his soul.
She called another flier to her. Multifaceted eyes glinted sunset red. Caleb guided his own insect to his shoulders. Its legs wrapped beneath his arms, around his stomach, about his thighs. He fell forward, gave himself to gravity and the surge of lifting wings. Mal followed.
He flew up and out, over the gunmetal gray Pax, high enough that neither spray nor leaping sharks nor the springy tendrils of gallowglasses underwater could catch him.
From above, he saw the ocean’s wounds: four stripes of water six feet broad and half a mile long, transparent from the sea’s surface to its floor. No fish moved in those channels, nor any other living thing. The God Wars had been fought over the oceans of Dresediel Lex, as well as the land and air. Even the sea bore scars. Ships sailed around the clear water, which rusted metal, warped wood, and rotted flesh.
The city retreated at their backs. Skyspires fell toward the horizon, spears to skewer the world. Left and right the Pax opened beyond the harbor’s shelter. Miles to the south, hidden from Dresediel Lex by a spur of rocks, the port of Longsands bristled with triple-masted sailing vessels and the superstructure towers of Craft-sped container ships. Few sailors would join in the evening’s revel. Shipmasters from the Shining Empire and Koschei’s kingdom knew better than to let their crews make landfall on Dresediel Lex during an eclipse. True Quechal gangs would roam the Skittersill tonight, in search of victims with the wrong color of skin or hair.
Bay Station swelled like a pustule on the horizon. Walls of Craft surrounded and protected the atoll and its tower. He drifted through them like a ship through sharp coral and jutting rocks. Dark shapes long as boats and sinuous as serpents circled under the water.
Caleb guided his opteran down toward the ocean.
Mal followed, but when he stopped five feet over the water’s surface, she balked, and shouted: “What are you doing?”
“Don’t worry. We’re safe.”
“Do you know what lives in this harbor?”
“Deaths-head coral, sharks, and gallowglasses. Maybe a star kraken, though I doubt one could get past the wards.”
“A gallowglass could grab you from there.”
“Barely.”
“One sting and you’d claw off your skin to stop the pain.”
He reached back to his neck, and brushed the opteran’s proboscis away. His dull sucking depression ceased, the creature’s arms unclenched, and he fell, arms pinwheeling, to the ocean.
He had made this trip many times, but experience did not dull the monkey panic of falling toward a sea full of teeth and poison. A strangled cry escaped his throat. Gray water struck him in the face and body. Pressure and pain illuminated his ribs, his right hip and cheek, shoulder and thigh. He inhaled through the pain, groaned, and lifted himself off the water.
The Pax gave beneath his hands like a firm bed covered in silk. Testing one leg, then the other, he worked his way to a crouch and stood. Ocean stretched behind him to the city, ahead to Bay Station and beyond. A wave nearly pitched him off balance, but he recovered. “Come on down,” he called up to Mal. “The water’s fine.”
“I remember a story,” she replied, “about two brothers who tricked a Tzimet king into killing himself, by pretending to cut off their heads and daring him to do the same.”
“Trust me.”
“That’s what they said in the story.” But she closed her eyes, released her opteran and fell, twisting through the air like a cat. She landed lightly, and rolled with the waves to her feet.
Standing, stable, Mal pressed her toe into the water and watched the ripples when she lifted her foot. Eyes closed, she repeated the experiment.
“Wild,” she said. “I can’t see anything keeping us afloat, with my eyes open or closed.”
“A club back east figured it out,” he replied. “One of those weird sensory deprivation tricks, for clients who happened to be Craftsmen, or Craftswomen.”
“What kind of club would want to blind its clients?”
“It has a particular clientele.” He bit his lip, wondering how to explain without going into detail. “The place calls itself Xiltanda,” which was one of the High Quechal names for hell.
“Ah.” She walked toward him unsteadily, shifting her weight to remain upright. “Why isn’t this in mass production? I’ve never heard of anything that could make Craft invisible to Craftswomen.”
“No sense mass producing a system that’s not cost effective. Soul for soul, this is the most wasteful piece of Craft in RKC. Lord Kopil likes it, though. Who am I to argue?”
“And so you walk on the water.”
“Not quite.” She pitched forward and he caught her outstretched hand. “If you’re not the right sort of person, you fall through into the ocean.”
“Disturbing.”
He didn’t disagree.
She turned west. An island lay two miles out, and from that island rose a matte black tower, like an arrow drawn to pierce the sky. A shadow crossed her face. “Bay Station,” she said, resigned. “I think I know what you plan to show me. I’d rather not see it.”
“I thought the same thing, the first time someone took me here.”
She drew back. A cool wind blew salt spray against his face.
“You need to see this,” he said.
“They’ll show me when it’s time.”
“I want to be the one who shares it with you.”
“Let’s go back to the shore. Watch fireworks. Have a nice evening.”
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s. But first I want to show you what I mean about sacrifice.”
Her eyes met his: black mirrors reflecting the passion of the sunset.
“Okay,” she said.
He bowed to her and walked toward the station. Out here, away from the shore, the sea no longer smelled of dead fish. “Have you spent much time on the water?” Caleb asked after a while.
“Some friends and I kayaked through the Fangs once, after graduation.”
“I didn’t know you could kayak in the Fangs.”
“Some of the bays are still tainted by the Cataclysm, so the kraken and sea serpents and the other big monsters stay away. Wards on the kayaks deal with little ones.” A tall wave rolled beneath their feet. “The ocean between the Fangs is warmer than the Pax, shallower. On calm days you can see all the way down to sunken Quechal cities overgrown with coral.” She sighed. “Why do you ask?”
“The path is sensitive to intent. The more I think about the station, the more it strays. If I don’t distract myself, we could walk all the way to Longsands, or into the center of the Pax.”
“Oh.”
“So,” he said. “Tell me about your trip to the Fangs.”
“We splashed around for two weeks; I was almost eaten. That was the end of the vacation, at least for me.”
“Eaten?”
“I was bored with the stars one night, and the ocean looked placid, inviting, rippled soft as molten glass. I took off my clothes, warded myself, and swam out.”
“Gods.”
“It wasn’t a good idea.”
“Wasn’t a good idea,” he said. “There are things in the Fangs that would eat you in one bite, wards or no
