Jiang's own call rose through the open service panel.
It was the rough answer he had given his mother's reflection, copied note for note and stripped of the pain that had forced it out of him.
His breast feathers tightened against his skin. Some part of his new body heard an emperor penguin nearby and wanted to answer before thought caught up.
Jiang drove his beak into the altar step instead.
The sting broke the pull.
Aylin crouched beside the stone stairs. Green light crawled over her compass and pointed down, then split toward every wet surface below.
"The cistern is helping it divide," she said. "I can close the whole chamber, but not with you in the water."
Ruth held the service panel with one hand. "Then he stays here, and you find another way."
The copied call sounded again. This time it came from two places beneath them.
Aylin's bruised throat darkened as the Spirit Link pulled tight. She pressed her palm against it and kept her other hand away from Jiang.
"Every reflection gives the trace another grip," she said. "If I spread Natural Essence through that water, the Link will carry it through him too. I may bind them together instead of separating them."
Jiang looked down the stairs.
Cold damp air flowed over his feet. The iron hatch at the bottom stood open above a brick chamber, where a slice of gray water reflected the chapel light. Black veins crossed that reflection and separated whenever the surface trembled.
The water could support his weight. It could also soak Ruth's fresh gauze, drink the heat left in his body, and give Gredudande a voice from every ripple.
He tapped his breast, pointed down, then struck the stair twice with his beak.
Aylin understood. "You go in. I pull when you give the signal."
"That is your interpretation," Ruth said.
Jiang turned to her and nodded once. Then he pointed at Aylin, the cistern, and the open chapel door behind Ruth. Three separate choices. Nobody trapped with anybody else.
Ruth studied him longer than he liked. "Fine. I keep the exit. She keeps the rope. You come back before courage becomes stupidity."
Aylin unwound the green cord from her wrist. It was light rather than fiber, but Jiang felt its pressure through the Spirit Link when she looped it loosely around his chest.
"The cord moves only when you ask," she said.
He pecked once beside the cord. Agreed.
Ruth carried two folded blankets to the stairhead, then set a steel mixing bowl beside them. "For the record, this is the worst baptism our kitchen has hosted."
A laugh tried to leave Jiang as a bark. His injured shoulder objected to both.
He descended sideways. Webbed feet fit poorly on narrow stone steps, so he lowered his belly from edge to edge and used his good flipper against the wall. The bad flipper stayed tucked. By the iron hatch, fresh warmth had spread beneath the shoulder gauze.
The cistern was wider than the chapel font suggested. Old brick curved into a low vault, and a central pool filled most of the floor. A maintenance ledge circled it, slick with mineral film. Water dripped from an overflow pipe near the bell wall.
Gredudande had made a body out of absence. Black patches moved across the pool without thickness, leaping from surface to wall seep to hanging droplet whenever Aylin's compass light touched them.
"Jiang," his mother's voice called from beneath the ledge. "Where are you?"
He entered beak-first.
Cold closed over his breast, but the water gave him back what the chapel floor had taken. His feet drove together. His good flipper swept once, and his rigid body slid past the ledge with less pain than a single land step.
The left flipper dragged. Jiang kept it against his side and steered with his feet, letting his white belly vanish against the light above while his dark back merged with the pool below.
Gredudande's patches lost him for one turn.
The System opened across his sight.
[EVOLUTION THRESHOLD: 50%]
[FROSTWAKE I: Fragile contact ice. Cost: body heat. No remote ice, added force, or healing.]
[DEEP LUNG I: Longer safe submersion and faster breath recovery. Cost: hunger.]
[CHOOSE WHILE CONSCIOUS.]
Deep Lung was the kind choice. It offered more time underwater, an easier return, and a cost he could pay after someone found him food.
Frostwake offered none of that. It would take the resource already failing and spend it faster.
Above the pool, Aylin made a choking sound. A black patch had reached the reflection beneath her hand, and the mark around her throat tightened with it.
Jiang chose Frostwake with open eyes.
The System vanished. No strength followed it. The water remained dark, his shoulder remained open, and his lungs held only the air he had carried down.
He drove toward the nearest black bridge.
Gredudande fled across the surface reflection. Jiang rolled beneath it, kicked upward, and let his breast feathers brush the waterline.
Cold left him in a hard rush.
A skin of clear ice formed where his white breast had touched. It was thinner than window glass and no wider than his body. The next ripple cracked it, but for that instant the black path ended at a white seam.
One patch recoiled from the break. Another kept moving along the wall seep.
Jiang surfaced, pulled air through an aching throat, and heard Aylin call from the hatch.
"I saw the split. Do it once more."
He wanted to tell her once had been enough. His feet were already slower, and shivering shook water from his beak before he could fill his lungs.
The wall patch climbed toward the overflow pipe. If it reached the condensation above the ledge, the whole bridge would reconnect outside his reach.
Jiang dove after it.
His good flipper supplied the turn. Both feet drove him forward, then spread to brake as the brick wall rushed close. He planted his breast against the wet curve and selected Frostwake again.
The water touching him whitened.
Ice traced a crooked line across the brick, trapping a thumb-sized black splinter between two frozen droplets. The skin broke under Jiang's weight and dumped him back into the pool, but the splinter stayed exposed.
"Now!" Aylin shouted above him.
Her green cord snapped tight against his chest without pulling. A second strand passed over his head, narrow enough to miss his feathers, and hooked the black splinter against the brick.
Gredudande screamed in Samira's voice.
Jiang's body reacted before his mind did. He twisted toward the keeper's cry, struck the wall with his bad flipper, and lost the air trapped in his feathers. Pain flashed through his shoulder. Blood loosened from beneath the gauze and curled red into the water.
The black core rushed toward it.
Blood gave the reflection a moving line straight to him. Jiang folded his injured side tight, rolled onto his back, and kicked beneath the red cloud. His white belly caught the chapel light. The dark shape overshot, hunting the stain against the wrong half of his countershading.
Aylin tore the splinter free.
The pressure at Jiang's chest eased, then snapped sideways. Gredudande abandoned the trapped fragment and poured into the overflow pipe as a streak without depth.
Jiang kicked for the surface.
His lungs begged for the Deep Lung choice he had refused. The green cord stayed loose because he had given no signal, and stubbornness nearly kept it that way.
His feet missed their next beat.
Jiang struck the cord twice with his beak.
Aylin pulled. The loop tightened under his breast and lifted him through the surface. He caught the ledge with one foot, scraped his belly onto the brick, and lay there coughing water while his whole body shivered.
"That was the signal?" Ruth called.
Aylin hauled him through the iron hatch. "It is now."
Ruth wrapped him in the first blanket without covering his beak. The wool held no miracle. His feet cramped against each other, the bad flipper hung lower, and a red patch spread through the wet gauze.
Aylin climbed after him with a black sliver trapped inside a loop of green light. It was no larger than Ruth's little fingernail, yet the bruising around Aylin's throat faded at one edge.
"A stabilizing fragment," Aylin said. "Only one."
Below, no black patches remained in the cistern pool.
Water knocked inside the overflow pipe and carried the sound through the wall. Ruth turned toward the nave as the broken bell rope swung from the rafters without touching the floor.
Above them, the chapel bell moved on its own.
Its first note was iron. Its second was a perfect emperor-penguin contact call.