The silver wire binding the fossil mammoth ivory bit into Ren Vale’s thumb until his bright red blood flowed hot and dark down the fluted groove of the awl.
Beneath the four-foot frozen stillness circle etched into the damp flat stone slab, the four trapped children stopped screaming. Their eyes were wide, numbed by the sight of the massive oak roof-beam suspended six inches above their skulls, held in check only by the crimson glow of Ren’s binding matrix. But the ivory was shuddering under the sheer moving load. A thin, hairline fracture spider-webbed across the silver solder at the base of the metal ring, and Ren’s shoulder blades burned with painful muscular strain.
His brass breathing collar hissed with a rhythmic pulse, pumping cold stone salt water mist across his tongue and down into his burning throat pipe. The dysbaric tax from his pact with Deep-Diver Ren in the Hadal Trench made every breath of surface air feel like inhaling crushed glass and skin-burning lye. Without the aerosolized salt water saturating his wet inner skin, his unpressurized alveoli would have collapsed within two minutes. That left him to drown on dry land.
“Ren!” Mira called out, her voice cutting through the rising thunder of the mob.
