"Which one came home?" the man under the throne asked again.
Aylin kept both hands above the Kingwell water. "You can ask me after we get those cords off your throat."
Beneath the glass, the false Aylin mouthed the same answer without making a sound.
Three cords ran from the prisoner's neck into the dark beneath his chamber. One was black-green and moved with the reflection. One was pale as old salt, drawn tight toward the Crown bars. Almost clear, the third cord trembled whenever the man dragged in a breath.
"Cut none of them blind," Brann said. "One is keeping him alive."
"Which one?" Orra asked.
"Give me a hand small enough to follow them."
Orra tried her hook through the maintenance grate. The shaft entered, but the turn beneath the throne trapped it before the point reached the cords. She pulled it back with black-green water shining along one edge.
Ista buried the wet metal in furnace sand.
Brann put his shoulder under the lower flood wheel. Dagna joined him, holding with a spear already cracked from the court. Together they lifted the prisoner's chamber until one pale cord appeared in the side gap.
The third crown bell dipped toward the rising water.
"Lower him," Orra ordered.
They let the wheel return before the bell could drink. The man struck the chamber floor and lost his next breath.
Aylin flinched toward the grate.
Jiang pressed his breast against her boot. He wanted the man out. More than that, he wanted Aylin to stop offering the water exactly what it needed whenever the face below suffered.
She stayed behind the dry line.
Orra's hunters joined two cedar inspection slats around her hook and bound them into long tongs. Rian guided the jaws through the grate while Dagna braced the dry handles against the wheel platform.
The tongs reached the prisoner's throat. Orra caught the pale cord and lifted.
All three cords rose with it. They crossed beneath his jaw where no one above the glass could see the knot. The clear life cord pinched first, and the man's chest stopped moving.
"Release everything," Aylin said.
Orra opened the tongs. The cords settled, and a bead of air crawled down the clear line into the man's mouth.
Aylin stayed behind the sand. "Can you turn your chin away from them?"
The prisoner tried. One pale wrist restraint shortened as his shoulder moved, dragging the black-green cord tighter. He stopped himself and forced his head back to center.
"The knot is below him," Brann said. "Every tool we send from here reaches the cords before it reaches their crossings."
Rian and Ossin blocked the central glass with two maintenance shutters. The false reflection crossed beneath the first, found no wet seam to the second, and split at the dry gap between them.
Tovin brought down a coil of guide cord with his useful hand. Dagna checked every span for dampness while Ista rubbed dry sand into the braid.
"This will retrieve a body Jiang's size," Tovin said. "It will not retrieve a king."
"It only needs to bring back the one who opens the larger hatch," Brann said.
Everyone looked at Jiang.
He looked at the maintenance grate. Its mouth was wide enough for his breast and no kinder than the pipe beneath the Rome chapel had been.
At least this one contained water. His body understood water. His shoulder, failed flipper, empty stomach, and unreliable foot had filed separate objections.
Aylin crouched. "You do not owe him this."
The man beneath the throne breathed through the clear cord. The black-green one tightened around his throat and stole half the breath back.
Jiang pecked the dry guide line.
"That was not an argument," Aylin said.
He pecked the grate next.
"Unfortunately, that was a complete argument."
Tovin made a sling from the guide cord and the driest fold of Pell's shirt. It circled Jiang's lower breast and hips without crossing the failed flipper or squeezing his air sacs. Dagna tested the knot with both hands. Aylin tested it again.
Ista kept the upper line in a sand trough. "If black reaches my end, I cut it."
"If he is still below?" Aylin asked.
"Then the water does not climb him into all of us."
Jiang disliked the answer. It was still the right one.
Orra opened the grate. Crown water washed over Jiang's feet.
Cold entered through every place Pell's shirt had begun to warm. He tucked the failed flipper into its cradle, drove both feet against the stone, and went headfirst into the Kingwell.
The narrow turn scraped his back. He twisted through it, using the good flipper to control his roll while the guide line followed his belly. Below, the chamber became a dark shape broken by the prisoner's pale face.
Open water gave an emperor penguin room to correct a bad angle. It gave him light above, depth below, and a whole sea in which to turn. The Kingwell offered copper corners and a cord at his belly. His body still knew how to dive; it also knew this was a trap pretending to be water.
Jiang reached the first junction on his ordinary breath.
The three cords passed through separate copper eyes. The black-green one drew water toward the false reflection. The pale one pulled against a bar chain above. The clear cord carried a bead of air toward the prisoner's mouth every time his chest tried to rise.
Jiang marked the life cord with two taps against its copper eye.
His lungs tightened around the remaining air.
The deeper release lay beyond a second bend. He could force the turn, hope his cold body still held an emperor penguin's breath, and risk becoming another weight on the clear cord.
An emperor penguin's lungs were not a promise. Injury and cold had already taken their share before the water began asking.
He backed out before panic chose for him.
The guide line tightened. Tovin hauled with his useful hand while Aylin protected Jiang's damaged cradle at the grate. Jiang came onto the platform coughing water, furious at his lungs for behaving like organs instead of loyal employees.
The false Aylin opened her mouth beneath the shutter.
"He cannot reach it," she said in Aylin's voice.
The living Aylin wrapped Pell's shirt around Jiang. "He reached enough to come back."
That mattered. So did the prisoner's next breath, which ended in a wet choke.
Jiang stared at the grate until the System placed a choice across his vision.
[Deep Lung I]
[One extended breath]
[Cost: Hunger]
[Use / Refuse]
He was already hungry enough to smell the leather grease on Ossin's broken hook. Spending more hunger felt like borrowing from a body with nothing left to collect.
The clear cord gave the prisoner another thin bead of air.
Jiang chose `Use` before fear could bargain.
No warmth returned. His beak still hurt. His shoulder remained open, and the failed flipper remained useless. He drew one slow breath, felt it settle deeper than the last, and entered the grate again.
This time he passed the marked life cord without touching it.
At the second bend, the black-green cord vibrated with voices stored in the Crown water.
Nemi cried for Ista. Orra ordered the Black Door closed. Edric named his daughter dead. None of the voices gained a body in the narrow dark.
Jiang followed the current rather than the sound.
The hostile cord ran outward toward the reflection. The pale bar cord pulled upward, shivering whenever the Crown bars ground lower. The clear life cord moved inward with the prisoner's breath and slackened between each effort.
He wedged the hostile cord against a broken edge of copper. His cracked beak could not bite through it cleanly, so he trapped it beneath one foot and drove backward with the other. The cord stretched, sawing over the metal until black-green fibers opened.
Water struck him in the face.
The false Aylin shattered across the central glass. Her loose hand remained in one wet pane, reaching without an arm.
Jiang let the severed hostile cord go and found the pale one.
Its copper eye was pinned by a flat keeper. He caught the metal between the edges of his beak and leaned back. The bar cord jerked hard enough to slam his belly into the chamber wall.
His stored breath held. His unreliable foot did not. It folded against the clear cord.
The prisoner's next air bead stopped.
Jiang froze before his claws could tighten. He lifted the useless foot, shifted all his weight onto the good one, and let the life cord move beneath him.
The bead traveled on.
Above, someone struck the glass twice. Aylin's signal. Return while return remained possible.
Jiang pulled the keeper free.
The pale cord vanished upward. Crown bars crashed through the palace behind him, closing the easy road out of Flood Hall. The larger Kingwell hatch opened above the prisoner's chamber.
Orra's hunters drove dry cedar poles through it. Dagna and Brann lifted the man clear while Rian held the disconnected black cord away from his throat. Ista packed sand around every wet restraint they cut.
Tovin hauled Jiang toward the maintenance grate.
Hunger arrived before the air ran out.
It cramped his empty belly so hard that he bit the guide sling. For one stupid instant, the leather tasted like food. Then Aylin's hands reached under his breast and brought him onto Pell's shirt.
He had breath left. He had no desire to spend it proving anything.
Aylin wrapped him close while Orra's hunters lowered the freed man beside the dry wheel platform. He coughed crown water until his ribs showed through the ruined royal coat.
The last piece of the false reflection watched from one wet pane.
Orra covered it with a dry shutter.
Aylin knelt beyond the sand line. "You said someone came home. Tell everyone here what a guard could have seen. Do not give me a memory only I would want."
The man looked at Orra, Brann, Dagna, and the hunters before he answered.
"A woman with Aylin's face reached the western gate before River-Open," he said. Each phrase cost him a cough. "She came through a road that should have opened outward."
"Where was I?" Aylin asked.
His eyes returned to her. "Still inside this palace."
The Crown bars settled behind them with a final iron blow.
The man closed his hand over the scar Brann had recognized.
"I ordered the empty funeral," he said.