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"Just different."

That was as much warning as any of us got.

The floor went out from under all five of us at once, no cracking sound first, no warning groan of stone giving way, just solid ground turning to open air in the space of a single step. I heard someone shout, my own voice maybe, and then there was nothing but falling, dark and fast and endless enough that my stomach caught somewhere up near my throat and stayed there.

Light bloomed beneath us before I understood what I was looking at, a vast cavern opening wide in every direction, walls catching some faint, sourceless glow that turned the whole space the color of old bruises. I had half a second to register the size of it, big enough to swallow Training Hall Four twice over, before the water hit.

It hit hard. Cold enough to drive the breath clean out of my lungs, deep enough that my feet found no bottom no matter which direction I kicked, and for a few disoriented seconds I couldn't tell which way led up and which led further down into whatever waited beneath the surface.

I broke through into the air, gasping, and started counting heads on pure instinct before I'd even cleared the water from my eyes.

Corian, surfacing hard a few feet off, already turning in place.

Nykos, coughing, treading water near the edge of the light.

Halver, already stroking toward the nearest rock shelf with the powerful motion of a man who swam like he did everything else, with purpose.

Jade wasn't there.

"Jade!"

Nothing broke the surface where I was looking. I spun, scanning the water in every direction, the eerie glow throwing everything the same flat, useless color that made it impossible to tell shadow from depth.

"Jade!"

My own voice cracked on the second call, high and raw in a way I didn't recognize coming out of my own throat. Every joke I'd ever made, every easy laugh I used to fill a room, none of it was anywhere near reach right now. There was just the water, and her name, and a silence underneath both that felt like it was reaching straight down into my chest and pulling something loose.

"Where," Corian said, already moving toward me, his voice pitched low and controlled in a way that meant he was fighting exactly as hard as I was not to sound the way he actually felt.

"I don't know, I don't see her, she should have surfaced by now-"

Nykos went under without another word, no hesitation, no announcement, just gone beneath the water in a single clean dive. I stayed on the surface because someone had to, screaming her name into a cavern that swallowed the sound almost as fast as I produced it, and the seconds that followed were the longest of my entire life.

"Come on," I said, to nobody, to the water, to whatever gods bothered listening to a scared idiot treading water in the dark. "Come on, come on, come on-"

Halver reached the surface again from his own dive, shook his head once, and went back under before I could ask.

Ten seconds. Fifteen. My chest had gone so tight I couldn't tell if the pressure was fear or the cold water finally catching up with me, and I honestly didn't care which. All I could think about was every version of this that ended wrong, and how none of the good ones lasted more than a few more seconds before my mind dragged me straight back to the bad ones. I thought about every person I'd ever lost track of for too long, every door that had ever closed behind someone who didn't come back through it, and hated how fast my own head went there, how little control I had over it once the fear got its hooks in.

Twenty seconds. I was already moving toward the spot where Halver had gone under, some useless instinct screaming at me to do something even though I had no idea what, when Nykos broke the surface with Jade's limp body hauled against his chest, and I don't think I've ever moved through water that fast in my life.

We got her onto the rock shelf between the three of us, Corian taking her legs, Nykos supporting her head, me just trying to keep my hands steady enough to be useful instead of getting in the way. Blood bloomed dark against the pale stone the second we laid her down, too much of it, spreading from somewhere along her side in a way that made my whole body go cold in a way the water hadn't managed.

"She's not breathing right," Nykos said, voice cracking on the last word.

"Move."

I didn't remember deciding to take charge. My hands were already working before the rest of me caught up, tilting her head back, checking her airway, watching her chest for the shallow, wrong rhythm of someone who'd taken in more water than air. She coughed, hard and wet, and some of the ice in my chest cracked loose when her back arched and she brought up half the pool she'd swallowed.

"That's it," I said, my voice doing something rough and unsteady I didn't have time to be embarrassed about. "That's it, come on baby, breathe."

She was breathing. Not well, not steady, but breathing, and I grabbed my knife and cut straight up the front of her shirt without asking permission from anyone, because permission was a luxury for situations that weren't currently painting the stone red.

The damage told its own story the second the fabric came away. Deep bruising already darkened along her ribs on the left side, swelling fast enough that I didn't need training to know at least two were cracked. Below that, along her hip and up toward her lowest rib, a scatter of puncture wounds bled steady and dark, black crystal shards visible at the edges of two of them, buried deeper than anything I wanted to look at too closely.

"Corian, I need light directly on this."

He angled his crystal without a word, and Nykos knelt on her other side, one hand hovering over her shoulder like he wasn't sure touching her was allowed anymore.