And it was true. Eat enough blue lotus and the galaxy got strange. Rechs had once gone out there looking for someone and found only the trail of a ghost that had been gone for years. Maybe. Maybe he’d seen the Dark Wanderer there once in several lifetimes of looking for that strange being. But that was long ago when he and Casper…
… and Reina.
They’d gone out there… looking for the Dark Wanderer and finding something equally troubling. But that was a long time ago.
And Rechs didn’t see why he would consider it now except…
His mind was under attack. Old memories were being trawled and knotted into a net in which he could become lost. The thing in the water…
The mermaid… because that’s what it was… had looked like Reina. At least the top of her had. The woman he’d once known and loved. Calling to him.
That’s impossible, he told himself as he felt his mind get tangled up in his own memories. Lost in dormant emotions. Impossible because Reina had disappeared a long time ago. Well before Casper. Which was why…
His mind wasn’t working too well. That was for sure. Seemed an obvious statement but one he had to begin with. Like starting a problem you couldn’t solve all over again. Because you had to. His mind wasn’t working and he needed it to. Not to remember. To survive.
Moktaar, fangs bared and claws reaching, came for him, leaping across the open span, hurling themselves off the edge.
…hang out on the edge. Wait, Rechs.
Rechs fired at point blank. At the last second. The blaster disintegrated the howling attacker with no room to spare. He shook his head to clear it.
Get out of here, his mind roared.
And all he could see was Reina beneath the waters of the dark underground lake. She’d looked at him, in that moment she’d leapt from the water, hanging between the dark sky of the cavern’s ceiling and the murky black abyss of the cistern. She’d looked at him and… smiled.
A knowing smile.
This is psionics, the distant sane part of his mind screamed. These are… His mind struggled to formulate what it knew was real and what was just some… mental illusion. Some slow poison designed to lure him to his death in the lake.
The sudden splitting headache was the key.
He’d had those before. Always in the presence of those otherworldly mind powers that were usually only whispered to be. And always in the worst of places.
It’s a trick, this thing in the water. The Dreamer, the Sleeper, the Watcher. What did they call it? The Watcher in the Water. It’s a trick this thing does to feed. To fight. To survive.
Even now Rechs wanted to walk to the side of the old mag rail he was stumbling along, trying to get farther away from the enraged moktaar still trying to get to him, and just drop over the side and swim down into the dark where Reina was waiting.
He saw himself doing it.
Saw himself fall and slide beneath the water.
And then he went blind.
Something slammed into his mind and blotted out his vision. Far away he could hear the shrieks of the maddened moktaar. Enraged and indignant at all the injustices of the galaxy. But he couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t see where he was. Or where they were. Just felt something blasting its way into his mind and there was nothing the armor could do to stop it.
So why try?
She swam up out of the darkness in his vision. And the darkness was the dark water of the underground lake he’d been running above. She swam up out of that and it was the same body he’d known long ago. Reina. The woman who’d rescued him and Casper from slavery long ago aboard a Savage lighthugger. The Obsidia. The woman he’d loved.
The Dark Wanderer.
Hang out on the edge. Wait.
The water pulled and swirled her hair to become all that was known. Except Reina’s hair had always been black… and now it was red. Red the color of blood. Arterial-bleeding red. Dark and bloody.
She smiled and he saw her vampire’s canines opening to…
He felt himself stumbling toward her embrace in the waters below. Stumbling toward the edge of the track. Helpless to do anything other than let it happen.
Tyrus Rechs knew that was wrong. Knew that would be the end of him if he did. Knew that once he took that last step he’d sink to the bottom of the old lake and find a sea of necrotic white corpses along its bottom in the bare shifting light down there. It would be like hell.
Somehow this thing—whatever it was—had found the old lake and made its lair there in the long years after the foundry’s collapse. Or maybe it had always been there. Who could ever be sure about the unknowable?
It was a feeding ground now. Part of the way things worked in the down below. Covenanted with the moktaar who knew to drive prey to it, and the smuggler Giles who needed to cross over it. Like some deal with a devil in the water.
Helplessly Rechs felt himself bashing into the rail of the track, the thin barrier that maintenance crews would use to travel along. That passengers would walk when techs said the train they were taking home or to work wasn’t going to budge, and they’d have to get on a new train at the next station.
I’m going in. And there’s nothing I can do about it.
Which was a terrifying thought.
He dropped
