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She does not like that something lives beneath Aymar that makes deals. It feels too much like the creatures that have torn her world to pieces.

“Come closer,” the darkness whispers. “Let me see you.”

It takes more energy than Voyne really has to rise to her feet, but she does it. She takes the five careful steps to close the distance between her and the crack in the stone. There is nothing within it, no point of light to suggest an eye peering out at her, no touch of warmth in the cool air to denote breath. There is simply an absence, a descent that she cannot make. The crack is too narrow to do more than slip a finger through, and she does not try even that.

“What did you take from—the girl?” Voyne asks, remembering at the last moment that they have not been using names. That this thing does not know Treila’s name. Voyne guards it jealously by reflex.

“A finger,” the darkness says, “to leave. An ear to come back.”

“And if she wants to leave again?”

“Something more, certainly, since I don’t think she’ll ask to come back a second time. But she is a good negotiator.”

Voyne smiles despite herself. “She is. Could you hear us, while the candle was lit?”

It is an obliging darkness. “No,” it says, and she doesn’t think it’s lying. It sounds too frustrated. “The light belongs to somebody else. Somebody who knows how to assert a claim. When it burns, this place is not mine anymore.”

Phosyne.

They are interrupted by a noise—a howling shriek, distant but echoing down the tunnel that connects this limited space to the world beyond. Voyne turns, posture shifting to something far more defensive than it has been.

The noise does not repeat, but there comes a closer crashing surge, and Voyne glances down to see the water below her rising.

“Rain,” the darkness says. “Falling fast and heavy.”

“Will this cavern flood?”

“No,” it says, and there is a creaking rumble.

Across the cavern, the stone slides, a shifting shadow, and the water slows first to a bare trickle, and then nothing at all.

The glow persists, but is thinner now, lingering in the puddles that are left. Voyne stares at it, processing this show of force, this mastery of the environment. Heart hammering in her throat, she looks up, to the side, to where Treila left her.

The tunnel remains.

It may not always.

Her head swims. She should leave, and yet she is still not wholly herself, still not strong enough to navigate a tunnel she does not know the lay of. She needs Treila, or the darkness, if she is to leave.

“Sit,” the darkness murmurs. “You are tired.”

Trembling, Voyne sinks to her knees, leaning back against the stone. The crack cradles the base of her skull. She is too exhausted to move any farther.

If it takes her, it takes her, but she does not think it will.

“You’re not like the—” She hesitates. She will not call them saints, not anymore, but has no other name for them.Guestsis too euphemistic.Enemiestoo crude, too broad. “Like the invaders above,” she settles on.

The darkness does not respond immediately. She wonders if it is considering how to respond, or if it islooking, somehow, up through the yards of rock above them.

“Tell me about them,” it says. “I have smelled them on the girl, and I can feel them walk above me, but I can’t hear them.”

“They are hungry,” Voyne murmurs.

“I am hungry,” the darkness says.

“They toy with us. They strike bargains.”

“In this we are alike.”