Ren Vale was slipping into the dark.
It wasn’t the cold, crushing dark of the Mariana Trench, where water held the weight of mountains. It was the grey, weightless dark of a dead writing hall where every candle had guttered out and every contract had dissolved into pulp. His chest was hollow. There was no air in him. But every nerve ending in his lung tree screamed as if sunk in boiling lye.
Through the thinning grey fog of his mind, he heard metal strike stone.
Clank.
Deep-Diver Ren threw his heavy lead-weighted ballast gloves onto the gold-silver metal flat stone slabs. The diver’s pale, coral-white hands—thick-knuckled, crisscrossed with jagged white scars from deep-sea wire ropes and sea-floor crustacean claws—moved with brutal, clockwork care.
“Move aside, girl,” Deep-Diver growled.
Mira didn’t pull away. Her left hand clung stubbornly to Ren’s sleeve. But she shifted her knees, giving the diver room on the blood-spattered ash. Her quartz arm flickered with rapid, low-intensity amethyst pulses, lighting up the diver’s grim, scarred face.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice shaking. “He’s not taking air. If you shake him, his ribs will break.”
