Slim arms slide around my chest; her heart is hammering as she hugs me to her, pulling my face between her breasts. She drags me down like a mermaid engulfing a drowning sailor and I stiffen, panicking as I begin to exhale. Then we’re in a bigger space—I can feel it opening up around me—and suddenly I don’t need to breathe anymore. I can feel her/our gills soaking in the cool refreshing water, like air off a spring meadow, and I can feel her borrowed underwater freedom again.

★★Where are we?★★ I ask, shuddering. ★★What the hell was that?★★

★★We’re right under the platform’s central deflection circuit. I figure it throttled our link while we were passing through.★★

My eyes are starting to adjust and I can see a diffuse green twilight. A black ceiling squats above us, rough and pitted as I run my fingertips across it: the tunnel is a square opening in the middle of a room-sized dome under the middle of the flat ceiling. Off to the sides I can just about see other black silhouettes, support pillars of some sort that vanish into the murk below. Beyond them, the turbidity speaks of open seas.

★★I thought it was poured onto the bottom?★★

★★Nope. The reef comes to within meters of the surface, but offshore it falls away rapidly; the bottom hereabouts is nearly sixty meters down. They built it on the edge of an undersea cliff and jacked it off the bottom with those pillars. ★★

★★Right, right.★★ I experiment, pushing off and swimming a little distance away from her until the tightness in my chest begins to return. I can make it to about eight meters out on my own, down here in the penumbra of the coastal defense ward. I turn and drift slowly back towards her. ★★What was it you were wanting to tell me? Before we got interrupted.★★

Her face is a ghostly shade in the twilight. ★★No time. The bad guys are coming.★★

★★Bad guys—★★ I hear a distant churning rumble and look up, out from under the poured concrete ceiling. ★★Let me see. They’ve got spear guns?★★

★★Good guess, monkey-boy. Follow me.★★ She swims out towards one of the pillars and I follow hastily, afraid of being left behind by our bubble of entangled metabolic processes.

The pillar is as thick as my torso, rough-pored concrete covered with lumpy barnacles and shells and a few weird growths that might be baby corals. Beyond it, the open sea: greenness above us—we must be at least ten meters down— and darkness below. Ramona pulls her knees up and rolls head down, then kicks, spearing into the gloomy depths. I swallow, then turn and clumsily follow her. My inner ear is churning but I can almost fool it into thinking I’m climbing alongside the fat, gray pillar. I feel a bit breathless, but not too bad—all things considered. ★★Are you doing okay?★★ I ask.

★★I’m okay.★★ Ramona’s inner voice is tense, like she’s breathing for two of us.

★★Slow down, then.★★ There’s a great beige wall looming behind us in the gloom, bulging closer to the pillar. In the distance I see the streamlined torpedo silhouettes of hunting fishes. ★★Let’s get between the pillar and the cliff face.★★

Distant plopping, bubbling noises from above. ★★Here they come.★★ Ramona peers up towards the surface.

★★C’mon.★★ The cleft between the pillar and the rock face is about a meter wide at this depth. I swim into it then reach out and take her hand. She drifts towards me, still staring up at the distant sky, as I pull her into the shadow of the pillar. ★★How long can we hide down here? If they figure we’re just skinny-dippers, they may not think to come this deep.★★

★★No such luck.★★ She closes her eyes and leans back against me. ★★Have you ever killed anyone, Bob?★★

★★Have I ever ... ?★★ It depends what you mean by anyone. ★★Only paranormal entities. Does that count?★★

★★No. Has to be human.★★ She tenses. ★★I should have asked earlier.★★

★★What do you mean, has to be human?★★

★★That’s an oversight,★★ she says tightly. ★★You were supposed to be blooded.★★

★★What are you—★★

★★The geas. You have to kill one of them.★★ She turns round slowly, her hair swirling around her head like a dark halo. Here we are under twenty meters of seawater and my mouth’s gone as dry as the desert. ★★There are steps you have to carry out in sequence in order to adopt your role in the eigenplot. Jeopardy in a distant city, meet the dark anima, kill one of the other side’s assassins—at least one, more would be better—and then we have to figure out a way around my—damn, here they come. We’ll have to cover this later. Get ready.★★

She shoves something hard into my hand. After a moment’s confusion I realize it’s the handle of a vicious-looking knife with a serrated edge. Then she vanishes into the shadows lining the cliff face. I glance round as a shadow glides overhead: tracking up and over I see a diver in a wet suit, head down, peering into the depths.

I pass through a moment of acute disbelief and resentment. I’ve been in mortal danger before, but I’m not used to being in mortal danger from humans. It feels wrong. Any one of Alan’s mad bastards is probably capable of whacking half a dozen al Qaeda irregulars before breakfast and not working up an existential sweat, but I’m not prepared for this. I can shoot at targets, sure, and I’m death on wheels when it comes to terminating cases of demonic possession with extreme prejudice, but the idea of killing a real human being in cold blood, some eating, breathing, sleeping guy with a job on a rich man’s yacht, makes all the alarm bells in my head go tilt. Trouble is, I also have a deep conviction in my guts that whatever the hell Ramona is on about, she’s right. I’m here for a purpose, and I’ve got to move my feet through the occult dance steps in the right sequence or it’ll all be for nothing. And it doesn’t matter what I want or don’t want if Angleton’s right and Billington is gearing up to drop the hammer on us. When you come down to it, if there’s a war on, the bombs don’t care whether they’re falling on pacifists or patriots. And speaking of bombs . . .

The diver has seen something. Either that or he’s into swimming head down into the depths beside a decaying defense station just for the hell of it. He’s heading parallel to the pillar and he’s got something in his arms. I glance down and see Ramona below me, her skin a silvery flash like moonlight on ice, circling the pillar. My chest tightens. A stab of anger: ★★What the hell are you playing at?★★

★★Hanging my ass out to give you a clear shot.★★ She sounds lighthearted, but I can tell she’s wound up like a watch spring inside. I taste the overspill of her uncertainty: Is he up to it? And my blood runs cold, because under the uncertainty, she harbors the rock-solid conviction that, if I’m not up to it, we’re both going to die.

Outmaneuvered.

The guy above me is turning in tight circles as he descends, keeping an eye open for signs of an ambush as he heads towards Ramona, who is feigning a false sense of security, her back to the outside of the cliff next to the point where the pillar merges with it in a jagged mass of crumpled volcanic rock. I shelter in the cleft between pillar and cliff as he strokes steadily down, hugging the far side of the pillar from Ramona. In his arms he’s clutching something that looks like a shotgun, if shotguns had viciously barbed harpoons jutting from their muzzles. Just great, I think. What was it Harry the Horse tried to beat into my head? Never bring a dagger to a harpoon duel, or something like that.

My luck runs out while he’s still about three meters above me, ten meters above Ramona. He slows his corkscrew, peering into the shadowy cleft, and I see a change in his posture. Shit. Everything happens in nightmarish slow-mo. I’ve got my feet braced against the pillar and I let go like a spring, kicking straight up towards him, knife-first. Something sizzles past my shoulder, drawing a hot line across my chest, then I ram him with my shoulder. He’s already tumbling out of the way of my knife and I try and bring it back round towards him. I can’t breathe—I’m out of range of Ramona’s gills—and in a bleak flash of clarity I realize I’m going to die here. The pressure in my chest eases as he takes a swing at me with a knife I sense rather than see, but I’m inside his reach and I grab his forearm and we go tumbling. He’s strong but I’m desperate and disoriented and I somehow manage to get my other arm around his neck and something snags my knife. I yank on it as hard as I can, as he tenses his knife arm—we’re arm-wrestling at this point—and something gives way. He thrashes spasmodically and lets go, kicks towards the surface, and there’s a silvery stream of bubbles rising above him that’s much too big and bright to be normal.

Ramona’s right below me. ★★Let’s go,★★ she gasps, tugging at my ankle. ★★Deeper!★★

★★But I just—★★

★★I know what you just did! Come on before they do it right back to us! Nobody in their right mind dives alone.★★ She lets go for a moment, kicks out, and moves her grip to my arm. ★★Let’s move it.★★ She rolls us round and pulls me away from the pillar, back up towards the murky gloom beneath the defense platform. I feel her fear and let it pull me along behind her, but my mind’s not home: I’m not feeling queasy, exactly, but I’ve got a lot to think about. ★★We’ve got to get back to the tunnel,★★ she says urgently.

★★The tunnel? Why?★★

★★They’ll have searched it first. And most divers don’t like confined spaces, caves. I figure they’ll concentrate on the open waters outside the reef, now they’ve got the sighting. We just wait them out.★★

★★In the tunnel.★★

What are we doing here? I shake my head. What’s it all for? I keep rerunning the video stream captured in my mind’s eye, the silvery parabola of bubbles rising above the drowning diver—

★★We’re missing something important,★★ Ramona muses darkly.

★★How did they find us?★★

★★Not sure. They’ve opened a channel to let them bring their minions in, but the core defensive wards are still working, you’re cleaner than—★★ She blinks at me. ★★Oh. That’s how.★★

The ceiling is right above our heads now, the dome set into it framing the deeper blackness of the tunnel. ★★What is it?★★

★★I was wrong about them planting a tracker on you. They don’t need to bug you,★★ she says tersely. ★★They can find you anywhere. All they have to do is zero in on the eigenplot. Except here, right where you’re shielded by the defense platform’s wards, even if they have hacked a tunnel right through them to let their associates in ... ★★

★★What is this eigenplot you keep talking about?★★ I ask. I’m dangerously close to whining. I really hate it when everyone else around me seems to know more about what’s going on than I do.

★★The geas Billington’s running. It’s the occult equivalent of a stateful firewall. It keeps out intruders, unless they run through the approach states in a permitted sequence. The sequence is determined by the laws of similarity and contagion, drawing on a particularly powerful source archetype. When you run through them, that’s called ‘walking the eigenplot,’ and you’re doing it real well so far. Only a few people can do it at all—you can but I can’t, for example—and there’s an added catch: You can’t do it if you know what the requirements are beforehand, it doesn’t permit recursive attacks. That’s why you’re just going to have to be brave and ... ★★ she trails off ★★ ... shit. Forget I said that bit. I mean forget it. You’ll just have to see for yourself.★★ She centers herself under the pitch-black rectangle of the tunnel mouth. ★★C’mon.★★

★★But you said—★★

★★If we’re outside the tunnel we’re not shielded. You want to learn how to breathe with a harpoon through you?★★

★★No way.★★ I swim closer to her, until we’re both right under the mouth. ★★I nearly drowned last time we went through here.★★

★★The effect’s attenuated only a couple of meters in. Closer. Hug me. Not like that, like this.★★ She wraps her arms and legs around me. ★★Think you can swim? Straight up, until you don’t feel like you’re drowning?★★

★★Like I’m going to say no?★★ I look into her eyes from so close that we’re almost touching noses. ★★Okay. Just this once. For you.★★

Then I kick off straight up, into the black heart of the drowning zone.

Oh. We’re in the tunnel. Totally black, walls either side of me, five meters of water between my head and the heavy iron grating, nothing but delirium’s arms holding my sanity together. Distracting me. I am distracted. It’s incongruous. There are divers out there hunting the waters for us, and here I’m getting an erection. Ramona’s tongue, tentacular, searches my lips. She’s aroused, I can feel it like an itch at the back of my mind.

★★This is a really bad idea,★★ I overhear her thinking. ★★We’re feeding off each other.★★ I’m drowning. I’m horny. I’m drowning. I’m—feedback. Too far apart and I start to choke, too close together and I start noticing her body, and whichever I’m paying attention to bleeds through into her head. ★★Got to stop.★★

★★Tell me about it.★★ An uneasy thought. ★★How much of this before the Other notices?★★

★★It’s not ready yet—I think.★★ She pulls back a few centimeters while I concentrate on not thinking about drowning. ★★How long do you think we’ve been down here?★★

★★I’ve lost track,★★ I admit. ★★Half an hour?★★ I lean back against the rough wall of the tunnel that shouldn’t exist. ★★Longer?★★

★★Damn.★★ I can feel the clockwork of her thoughts, tasting of rusty iron. It’s like there’s a weird tube of pressure squeezing us together down here; the tunnel is a flaw in the countermeasure wards, but outside it there’s an almost unimaginable amount of power chained down and directed towards the exclusion of occult manifestations—like our own entanglement. Threatening to crush us to a bloody paste between walls of concrete. ★★Can we leave yet?★★

★★Your breathlessness—have you ever been claustrophobic before?★★

Is that what it is? ★★Great time to find out.★★ I shudder and my heart tries to flutter away.

★★We’re in as much danger if we stay down here as if we surface,★★ she announces. ★★Come on. Slowly.★★

Still locked together, we finger-and-toe our way up the narrow chimney in the rock, feeling ahead for rough bumps and the joints between concrete castings. As we rise, the nightmare awareness of my own death begins to fade. All too soon we reach the grating at the top, a cold wall of rusty iron. I tense up and try not to give in to the scream that’s bubbling up inside. ★★Can you lift it?★★ I ask.

★★On my own? Shit.★★ I feel her straining. ★★Help me!★★

I brace my legs against one wall and my back against the opposite and raise my arms; Ramona leans against me and puts her back into it, too. The roof gives a little. I tense and shove hard, putting all my fear of drowning into it, and the lid squeals and lifts free above us.

★★Turn!★★ I start twisting, rotating the rectangular lid so that when we let go it won’t settle back into place. There’s a roaring in my ears. I can hear my pulse. And suddenly I’m choking underwater with a lungful of air: we’ve lost skin contact and I’m going to have aching muscles tomorrow—if there is a tomorrow—and I can’t get enough oxygen, so I kick out in near panic and the lid slides away and I kick out again, rising nightmarishly slowly towards the silver ceiling high above me, with my lungs on fire. Then I’m on the surface, bobbing like a cork in a barrel and I breathe out explosively and start to inhale just as a wave comes over the top of the reef and the platform and breaks over me.

The next few seconds are crazy and painful and I’m coughing and spluttering and close to panic again. But Ramona’s in the water with me and she’s a strong swimmer, and the next thing I know I’m on my back, coughing up my guts as she tows me towards the shallows like a half-drowned kitten. Then there’s sand under my feet and an arm round my shoulders.

“Can you walk?”

I try to talk, realize it’s a bad idea, and nod instead. A sidelong glance tells me her glamour’s back in place.

“Don’t look back. There’s a dive boat just over the far side of the reef and they’re looking out to sea. I figure we’ve got maybe two minutes before they check their tracker ward and see you’re showing up again. Have you got any smoke screens on that fancy phone of yours?”

Think fast. I try to remember what I’ve loaded on it, remember the block I put on the car, and nod again. I’m not certain it’ll work, but if it doesn’t we’re fresh out of options.

“Okay.” We’re about waist-deep now. “Blanket’s over there. Think you can run?”

“Blanket—” I start coughing again.

“Run, monkey-boy!”

She grabs my hand and tugs me forwards. At the same time there’s a ghostly sensation in my chest: she starts coughing, but I feel a whole lot better. Moments later I’m the one who’s tugging her along through knee-deep water across a silvery beach, sunlight blazing down on my shoulders. I feel horribly exposed, as if there’s a target painted on the small of my back. The towel is just ahead, up a gentle rise. Ramona stumbles. I get an arm round her waist and help her up, then we stagger on up the beach.

Towel. Trunks. A little pile of everyday tourist detritus. “This ours?”

She nods, gasping for breath: she’s swallowed my water, I realize. I fumble under the towel and find the sealed polythene bag. Fingers shaking, I unseal it and pull out my Treo. The damn thing seems to take half an hour to boot up, and while I’m waiting for it I see heads bobbing to the surface near the boat on the far side of the reef. They’re tiny in the distance but we’re running out of time—

Ah. Scratchpad. “Lie down on the towel. Make like you’re sunbathing,” I tell her. Squinting at the tiny screen, I shield it with one hand so that I can see the schematic. A circuit design, I need a circuit design. But we’re on a beach, right? Sand is porous. And about fifty centimeters below us there’s a layer of conductive saline. Which means—

I squat on the sand and start drawing lines on the beach around us with my fingertips. I don’t have to go all the way down to the water, I just have to reduce the resistivity of the layer of insulating sand above it in a regular pattern. Divers are crawling back into the boat as I finish the main loop and add the necessary terminals. Phone, phone . . . the bloody thing has gone to sleep on me. I’m about to poke at the screen when I realize there’s sand on my fingertips. Silly me. I wipe them on the towel beside Ramona’s hip and carefully wake the Treo up, stroke it into life, and hit the upload button. Then I sit down next to her and wait to learn if I’ve rendered us invisible.

“You okay?” I ask Ramona.

“Pretty much.” She sits up and stretches. “Your trick worked.”

“Yeah, well. Trouble is, it’s stationary: I can’t take it with us. I figure our best bet would be to head back into town as fast as possible and lose ourselves in the crowd.”

“You really got them stirred up. And their surveillance net is disturbingly good.” She looks at me. “You’re sure it was just Marc you were pushing on?”

“Yes.” I look at her closely. “Marc, and his unfortunate habit of supplying single female tourists to friends with a boat and an unlimited supply of Charlie.” Her expression doesn’t change but her pupils tell me what I want to know. “Virgins aren’t necessary, if this is what I think it is. But they have to be healthy and relatively young. Ring any bells?”

“I didn’t know you were a necromancer, Bob.” She looks at me calculatingly.

“I’m not.” I shrug. “But I do countermeasures. And what I see here is that the island’s defenses aren’t worth jack shit if you’ve got a scuba kit and a boat. Someone’s buying up single women, and they’re sure as hell not shipping them to brothels in Miami. There’s a surveillance net centered on Billington’s boat, and it’s tied in to your friend Marc.” I stare at her eyes. “Are you going to tell me it’s a coincidence?”

She bites her lower lip. “No,” she admits. A pause. “Marc wasn’t a coincidence.”

“What, then?”

“It centers on Billington but it’s not all about Billington.” She looks away from me and stares out to sea, morosely. “He’s got his own . . . plans. To expedite them, he had to hire a bunch of specialists with eccentric tastes and needs. His wife—she’s not harmless. She’s scum.” If looks could kill, the wave crests would be boiling into steam under her stare. “And she’s got retainers. Call it a tactical marriage of convenience. She’s got certain powers and he wants to make use of them. He’s got shitloads of wealth and more ambition than—well, she likes that because it buys her immunity. Eileen . . . her predecessor Erzsebet was probably framed by a rival, a duke who wanted her lands and her castle, but Eileen is the genius who figured out there was a skincare program in the old legend, productized the hell out of it, and sold it as Bathory™ Pale Grace™ ⁹ Cosmetics, with added ErythroComplex-V. It’s basically a mass-produced level one glamour. She sources most of the wholesale supplies from commercial slaughterhouses and leftover blood bank stock, and on paper she’s clean, but you still need a better than homeopathic quantity of the real thing to make it work. And that’s before you start asking how many regulatory committees she had to buy off to bury the details of her research.”

“Why not go after her directly?”

“Because—” Ramona shrugs. “Eileen’s not the main target. She’s not even the appetizer. What she does amounts to at most a few dozen deaths per year. If Ellis gets what my boss thinks he wants, the whole human species gets to deal with the fallout. So he figured I should get close to Eileen—to introduce you to Ellis, as much as anything else—and meanwhile get enough of a grip on the rest of her project to mop them up afterwards.”

“You were going to get information out of Marc after your Other got through chowing down on his soul?”

“You’d be surprised.” She sniffs primly. “Anyway, you should know, mister computational demonologist: How hard would it be to summon up a puppeteer and schedule a late-binding, voice-directed linkage to keep the body dancing?”

I think back to the dead seagulls. To the bad guys and what they did to Marc after his fatal heart attack. “Not very.”

“Okay, just so you know the score.” She reaches out and grasps my wrist. Her fingers are warm and much too human.

“Billington’s plans,” I prompt. “The business with the Explorer.”

“I’m not allowed to tell you everything I know,” she says patiently. “If you know too much, his geas will spit you out like a melon seed and we won’t have any time to prep a replacement.”

“But you need me to get aboard his ship because I’m playing a role in some sort of script. While you stay entangled with me so you get to come along, too.” I swallow. “Punching a hole in his firewall.”

“That’s the idea.”

“Any idea how to do it?”

“Well—” a hint of a smile “—Billington usually visits the casino every evening when he’s in range. So I’d say we ought to get back to the hotel and get ready for a high-rolling evening, and try to finesse an invitation. How does that sound?”

I stand up. “That sounds like a plan,” I say doubtfully. “I expected something a bit more concrete, though.” I glance around. “Where did I put my boxers?”

Ramona drives carefully along the coast road, back towards the west end of the island and the hotels and casinos. I slump down in the passenger seat and check my e-mail as soon as we get adequate cell phone coverage. All that’s waiting for me are two administrative circulars from the office, an almost plaintive request for a Sitrep from Angleton, and an interesting business proposition from the widow of the former president of Nigeria. ¹⁰ Ramona doesn’t seem to be in a talkative mood right now, and I’m not sure I want to risk upsetting her by asking why.

Eventually, as we’re entering Philipsburg, she nods to herself and begins talking. “You’ll want to report in to your support team.” She downshifts a gear and the engine growls. “Keep your station chief off your back, pick up the toys your tech guys have been unpacking, and call home.”

“Yes. So?” I study the roadside. Pedestrians in bright summer holiday gear, locals in casuals, rickshaws, parked cars. Heat and dust.

“Just saying.” We’re crawling along. “Then I figure we need to meet up, late afternoon. To go sort out your invitation to the floating party aboard the Mabuse.”

Late afternoon. A stab of guilt gets to me: it’s about six o’clock back home, and I really ought to call Mo. I’ve got to reassure her that everything’s under control and make sure she doesn’t do something stupid like drop everything and come out here. (Assuming everything is under control, a quiet corner of my conscience reminds me. If you were Mo, and you knew what was going on, what would you do?) “You sound very certain that I’ll get an invite,” I speculate.

“Oh, I don’t think it’ll be too difficult.” Ramona focuses on the road ahead. “You already got Billington’s attention yesterday. After today, he’ll want another look at you.” She looks pensive. “Just in case, I’ve got some ideas. We can go over them later.”

I steel myself. “I get the feeling you’re trying very hard not to tell me something that’s not related to the mission,” I begin. “And you know I know but I don’t know what I’m not supposed to know, and so—” I wind down, trying to keep track of all the double-indirect pointers and Boolean operators before I succumb to a stack crash.

“Not your problem, monkey-boy,” she says with a false smile and a toss of her beautiful blonde hair, now coiling up into tight ringlets as the seawater dries in the breeze over the windscreen. “Don’t worry yourself about me.”

“What—” My skin crawls.

She looks at me, her eyes abruptly distant and hard. “You just have to get aboard the yacht, figure out what’s going on, and expedite a solution,” she tells me. “I’ve got to sit it out back here.”

“But.” I shut my mouth before I can stick any of my feet in it by accident. Then I point my head forwards, watching her out of the corner of my eye. Thin-lipped and grim-faced, knuckles gripping the steering wheel. The mermaid who clutched me to her watery bosom is frightened. Ramona, who plays with her food and never slept with a man who didn’t die within twenty-four hours, is concerned. Driving me back to the hotel and the safe house and a setup where she’ll have to hand me over to people she seems to despise—Ramona, the spy who loves me? No, that dog won’t hunt. It must be something else, but whatever it is, she isn’t talking. So we drive the rest of the way to the hotel in lonely silence, grappling with our respective demons.