One pace. Two. Close enough that the lip of the rock falls away in front of my toes, and the mist dampens my shins.
My stomach swoops. My breath hitches again.
But I don’t stop.
I look down at the water.
It looks…exactly the same as before. Dark. Deep. That faint reddish sheen of algae tendrils swirling just above the spot where the current wells up from the crack in the rock.
My heart thuds so hard I can hear it in my ears.
I let it.
This place tried to kill me. Now I’m back on my own feet.
“Hi,” I whisper under my breath, feeling faintly ridiculous and not caring. “We’re doing this my way now.”
I reach down and skim my fingers through the surface.
The water is warm to the touch, slick with the bloom, but I pull my hand back. Wet, trembling, but mine.
Something in my chest unlocks.
Okay.
I can do this.
Behind us, Erika clears her throat gently. “We’re on a timeline here, boss lady, or are you communing with the water for a while longer?”
“Multitasking,” I say, voice steadier. I step back from the very edge, giving the rock enough respect to not tempt fate. “We stick to the plan. Quick in, quick out.”
Sarven squeezes my shoulder once, then turns to the rest of the crew.
He starts giving instructions in the mindspace, gesturing to the cleaner side of the pool. Erika adds a few clipped commentsin English about load-bearing and not undermining the wrong part of the ledge.
Over the next few hours, they do exactly what we agreed. We haul rock. A lot of rock.
It’s sweaty, repetitive work rather than delicate engineering. Vorn and Keth pry stone slabs free from the cavern wall with grunts and mindspace curses, Rok and Tharn wrestle them into place near the outflow channel. Sarven moves as if he was born to rearrange mountains, shouldering blocks twice my size, feeling for the places where the rock wants to lock together. But his eyes never stop scanning the high shadows. Every ten minutes, he pauses, listening for something I can’t hear.
I spend most of my time wading knee-deep along the shallow edges, pointing out where the current curves strongest, where the water looks least slick with the contaminant. Erika is a constant presence at my shoulder, muttering to herself, double-checking that we’re not just redirecting the poison somewhere it’ll bite us later.
My muscles burn. My lower back starts a low ache. My hands go from numb to prickling to just…there, wrinkled from the water.
Sometime in the middle of it, when the immediate edge of fear has worn down into a background hum, I tilt my head back and look up.
The shaft of light that cuts down from the high ceiling is as bright as it was that first time, a white-gold column in the mist. Droplets catch it and break it into a thousand tiny flares.
No face.
Just brightness. Mist. The distant suggestion of an opening to the outside world, far, far above, too high to reach.
I stand there, breathing hard, watching.
“You are staring at empty air,” Sarven comments in my head, and I sense his curiosity along with a faint, private worry that I might be slipping back into that fugue state.
“Just checking,” I murmur.
His hand brushes my lower back briefly as he passes with another stone.
