Drip.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  Something cold struck my forehead with a slow, steady insistence.

  I surfaced into awareness like a hand breaking through mud. My first breath came sharp and wrong. I jerked, arms filing, and the world answered by pulling at me.

  Water.

  Not deep, but heavy enough to take advantage of panic. I went sideways, cheek dipping under, silt swallowing sound and light. I kicked once, felt nothing solid, and a jolt of fear tried to seize my spine.

  Stop.

  I forced my limbs still. Stopped fighting the current. Stopped trying to stand on something that didn't exist.

  As soon as I went motionless, the pull eased. I floated again, buoyed by a mix of water and wet sediment. My lungs burned. My throat tasted like iron.

  I blinked until the grit scraped my shes raw.

  The cave around me resolved in pieces: a low ceiling, uneven stone ribs, a shallow pool spreading into darkness.

  I exhaled and tried to clear my mind. The drip above was not malicious—just water finding its way, like I had to.

  I was half-buried in silt, my body sunk in it to the hips, arms free only because I had thrashed them loose. Everything ached in a dull, even way, like my bones had been shaken in a jar. My head felt swollen with pressure. My ribs compined when I tried to draw a deeper breath.

  But I was alive.

  I y there for a moment, staring up at the ceiling, letting that fact settle into my chest.

  The shaft. The fall. The cold rush of air and the hard certainty that I was done for.

  A current must have carried me here. An underground aquifer, a flow path, a basin where the silt collected and the water slowed enough to let debris and bodies sink.

  Bodies.

  My stomach tried to flip. I swallowed, coughed, and immediately regretted it.

  The silt might have helped me. If I hit it at speed, it would not behave like stone. It could yield, pull, distribute force. But not enough. Not for that drop. Not with the angle I remembered, the speed, the way the shaft seemed to open forever beneath me.

  Something else had intervened.

  I closed my eyes and ran the fall back in my head, not as a spiral, but as a sequence of facts: air, momentum, impact that should have broken me, and then darkness.

  Metal.

  A pressure around my torso that had not been the water.

  My eyes snapped open.

  "Phymera," I rasped, voice low and hoarse. "Phymera, are you here?"

  Only the drip answered.

  I tried again, louder, then paid for it with another cough.

  "Phymera!"

  Silence stretched just long enough for my mind to begin assembling worst-case answers.

  Then, faintly, from somewhere to my right: a whimper.

  It was too small to be human. Too thin.

  I turned my head carefully. My neck protested, and stars skated across my vision for a heartbeat. I breathed through it and shifted an arm, palm pushing into the silt. It moved reluctantly, sucking at my skin like it wanted to keep me.

  Quicksand.

  I froze, trying to recall everything I knew about it.

  The advice surfaced slowly, dragged up from some half-watched survival program.

  The more you thrash, the more it liquefies. The more it liquefies, the more you sink.

  Slow. I had to go slow.

  I made myself limp and relied on small movements to guide myself toward the sound.

  My hand reached—

  and found something solid.

  Cold metal curved beneath my fingers. A joint bent wrong. Another joint, crushed. A pte twisted at an angle that made my stomach tighten.

  Holy Light bloomed in my palm, small and close, the pale gold glow barely enough to paint the immediate space.

  Phymera y half-submerged in the silt a few feet away, a broken heap of segmented ptes and twisted limbs. One of her arms was trapped deep, the angle wrong. A portion of her torso had caved in as if something enormous had pressed a fist into her.

  For a moment I just stared.

  If she had been flesh, it would have been unbearable. I was thankful for once she was metal. I winced anyway. My throat tightened around a wordless sound.

  She made another thin noise, like a breath that hurt.

  "Hey," I said, softer now, as if volume could break her further. "Phymera, I'm here."

  A pause. Then her voice, faint and warped, coming from somewhere inside the colpsed mass.

  "I'm... sorry."

  Her speech had that familiar ft precision, but it was frayed at the edges, as if the mechanism that shaped her words had been misaligned.

  I crawled closer, keeping my weight spread low. My knees sank. My palms sank. Each motion left a shallow depression that filled with water as soon as I moved on.

  "Don't apologize," I said. "Not for this."

  "I am weak," Phymera whispered. "I am useless. I should be left here to rot."

  I shifted until I was close enough to put my hand on her nearest intact pte. Cold. Wet. Gritty.

  "You are not useless," I said. "You saved my life."

  A tiny sound, skeptical.

  "You did," I repeated. "The silt might have helped, but it alone wouldn't have been enough. I remember being grabbed mid-fall. That was you, wasn't it?"

  Silence.

  Then, very quietly: "I could not help you above. I could only seek to rectify my error as we fell."

  "That's still something," I said. "It's more than something."

  I gnced around, forcing my mind into inventory.

  Water. Current. A low basin. The ceiling dripped. The air was damp enough to stick in my throat. No obvious exit at ground level, only darkness where the pool continued.

  We could float with the current. That was the simplest option. Let the flow carry us to somewhere the cave opened into a passage that had walls firm enough to crawl or climb.

  But Phymera was not going to be able to do that in this shape.

  I leaned closer, trying to see what portions of her still moved. A small twitch in an intact forelimb. A faint shift in her head segment.

  "Phymera," I said. "How much of you can still transform?"

  A pause.

  "Not enough," she said. "It would be better if you left me here."

  "No," I said, ftly. I did not soften it. "Try again. Answer the question."

  Her voice came slower, like it cost her. "A small portion. If I abandon the rest."

  I felt a brief, sharp relief, immediately followed by guilt. Relief that I would not be alone down here. Relief that she could still move at all.

  I shoved the guilt aside and kept my tone practical.

  "Do it," I said. "It would help immensely if you made yourself more portable."

  For a moment nothing happened. Then, with a faint series of clicks and soft grinding, ptes shifted. Metal folded over itself, segments contracting in a way that was almost fluid. The broken mass did not become whole. It became less.

  A smaller shape pulled free of the silt with a wet suction, dragging one twisted limb that then reconfigured, shortening, shedding damaged extensions.

  In a few seconds, a rge gecko sat on the silt beside me, metal body sleek where it could be, jagged where it could not. Its eyes were the same as ever: too aware, too steady.

  It looked up at me.

  "What are you pnning to do next?" Phymera asked. Her mouth movements followed a step out of sync.

  I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.

  "We float," I said. "We let the current take us until we hit something solid. Then we figure out where we are and how to climb out."

  Phymera stared.

  I shifted, testing my legs. The silt held on as if offended by the idea of letting me go. My thighs screamed. My calves cramped. I forced myself not to yank.

  Slow and steady.

  I leaned back into the water and let it lift me. The silt released a fraction. Then more. I worked one leg free, then the other, using buoyancy rather than strength.

  By the time I was floating, my whole body trembled. Not from cold, though the water was cold. From adrenaline burn-off and the pain that had been waiting patiently in the corner of my mind.

  Phymera climbed onto me without being asked, cws finding purchase through wet fabric. She settled snugly on my chest, heavier than she looked.

  We drifted.

  The current was gentle but persistent, drawing us along the edge of the basin and into a narrower channel. The cave ceiling lowered in pces, forcing me to keep my head tilted back to avoid scraping stone. My Holy Light hovered low and close, more to orient than to illuminate fully. Too much light would bounce off wet rock and make it harder to see depth.

  Minutes passed. Maybe more. Time down here did not have good edges.

  At several points, my mind tried to climb back up into panic. I refused to let it happen.

  Ahead, the channel curved. On the inside of the bend, silt had piled into a pale, granur ridge. It looked different than the liquefied trap I had woken in. More compact. Still damp, but it held its shape.

  "There," I said, nodding toward it. "That's our chance."

  Phymera shifted, cws tightening on my colrbone.

  I adjusted my angle with small strokes, using my forearms like paddles, careful not to churn the bottom. The current tried to push me past, but the silt bank created a slower pocket of water. I let the flow do most of the work, guiding rather than fighting.

  When my shoulder bumped the ridge, I froze. Let the silt decide if it would hold me or swallow me.

  It held.

  I exhaled slowly and inched forward until my torso rested on it. The silt crumbled under my weight, but not catastrophically. It behaved like wet sand: unstable, but workable if you did not demand too much of it too fast.

  I rolled carefully onto my side, then onto my stomach, and began to drag myself out of the water.

  Everything hurt. My shoulders ached like the joints had been forced apart. My lower back throbbed. My right ankle felt wrong, not broken, but strained, swelling already inside my boot.

  I made it onto the bank and colpsed ft on my back, arms spyed, chest heaving. The ceiling drifted in and out of focus.

  Phymera sat on my sternum, head tilted.

  "We made it," she said.

  "Yeah," I muttered. "We did."

  The silt was not solid enough to stand. Even shifting my weight made it crumble, threatening to slide me back into the channel. Still, it was better than the water.

  I took a moment to let my pulse slow.

  My forehead was still damp from the drip that had woken me, but down here everything was damp. Even my thoughts felt damp.

  An old reflex surfaced.

  Boy Scouts. Lick your finger and hold it up to find the wind.

  Without thinking, I lifted my hand to my mouth.

  Grit hit my tongue and I made a choking sound, coughing hard enough that my ribs fred with fresh agony. I dropped my arm back into the silt and y there blinking until the coughing stopped.

  "Stupid."

  The air here was too humid for that trick to matter, I realized. It was useless.

  I forced myself to sit up, slowly, and brought my Holy Light higher.

  The pale gold washed across the cave walls, over slick stone and patches of sediment clinging like old pster. The light revealed the texture of the rock: striations, old fractures, pces where water had carved shallow channels over time.

  And then, high up, near the ceiling on the far side: a dark notch in the stone.

  An overflow passage.

  It was situated above the current line, a narrow opening that looked like it had been carved by long-term flow. It was small, but it was real. More importantly, it was in rock, not silt.

  "Up there," I said.

  Phymera followed my gaze. "You intend to climb?"

  "I'd prefer solid ground if possible," I said. "So yes. We climb."

  I crawled toward the wall, moving on elbows and knees, distributing my weight evenly. The silt crumbled beneath my palms, but I made steady progress, inch by inch.

  When my fingers finally found solid rock, the relief was immediate.

  I tested the first handhold. It was wet, slick with mineral film. I rubbed my palm against my trousers to get some friction back and tried again.

  It held.

  I breathed, then began to climb.

  Every movement was negotiated. I kept my Holy Light hovering near my shoulder, close enough to show me surface texture and angles.

  Phymera reoriented herself, crawling up from my chest to my shoulders, then around the back of my neck. Her metal cws found my hair on the way and tugged.

  "Ow," I hissed. "Careful. I don't want to be bald by the time we reach the surface."

  Phymera stilled. "The surface?"

  I nodded and continued working at the wall.

  "How?" she asked, voice lower. "How can you be so optimistic?"

  I paused, forearm braced, boots wedged against a narrow ledge. My breath fogged in front of my face, not from cold, but from exertion in humid air.

  "Optimistic isn't exactly how I would describe it," I said, gritting my teeth.

  "But you speak," Phymera said, "as though this is manageable. You are weak. I am weak. And this is not a situation the weak survive."

  I didn't interrupt her. I let her honesty nd.

  "You were right earlier," I said. "I am weak. And maybe I have been taking for granted the strength of others. Burdening them with my weakness."

  I shifted my weight, found a better hold, and pulled myself up another foot. My muscles shook with the effort.

  "But this is different," I continued. "This is me and you. Our effort. And our abilities combined, however meager. Surely you have no objection to doing everything we can do."

  Phymera did not answer.

  For a moment, she simply rested her head against my colrbone, a gesture of stillness that felt like an apology. Then, as if seeking more security, she wrapped more snugly around my neck.

  Metal pressed into my throat.

  I choked, a sharp, humiliating sound, and my hands slipped a fraction on the wet rock.

  "Phymera," I croaked, tapping at her with frantic fingers. "Ease up. Ease up, please. I need my throat."