'I know you. Sit down.'
I stopped kicking. The panic went past me looking for somebody else.
Ilse was up against the wall.
She had to be. When you cannot see and cannot breathe, your body finds a surface and holds on, and it is the worst possible thing you can do in a tunnel owned by climbers, and she knew that, and her body had done it anyway.
Four of them were coming along the rock toward her, hand over hand over hand, the wall-glow smearing green behind them through all that moving water so that I got them as shapes and never once as animals.
I threw the first chain past her, into the wall above the nearest, and I hauled — and the pull took the thing off the stone and dropped it into open water, and Death Sense told me the exact moment it went from a predator to a bag of loose joints.
Three left on the rock. Two chains left in me.
