The cold slammed the air out of me all over again. Green water closed over my face, and the dissolving alpha rained down around me in chunks of grey sludge that clouded everything. My suit filled with water at the collar where the tentacle had torn it. I kicked, and my legs barely answered, because I had spent six weeks learning how to fight and exactly zero minutes learning how to swim in gore.
A hand caught the back of my collar and hauled.
Naomi dragged me up through the murk in one hard pull of Wave Motion, and we broke the surface together in a spray of blue-white light. I came up coughing seawater and monster juice, and she wrapped both arms around my chest from behind and held me up while I hacked my lungs out.
