Hooked steel slid from the season seed and turned toward Jiang.
Blood unfurled between them. Some came from the bare hand. More leaked where the rain-keel had grown into the severed leg, turning the water around the white socket pink.
Jiang's blood joined it from his beak.
Neither body had enough left for a fair fight.
Red light climbed the keel.
Across the keel, the diver saw it first and locked the grafted leg straight. Jiang felt the command pulse a heartbeat later against his breast, clean and hard beneath the Bellmother's uneven contraction.
He flattened before it struck.
Water slammed along the white spine. The diver bent around the fixed socket without losing hold of the knife. Jiang's sound foot slipped from its foothold, and only his belly kept him from being thrown between the amber ribs.
Something opened behind him.
Behind him, the withdrawal flap he had freed was folding shut again.
