The cargo car hits the salt-flat and the sound of it is enormous, a concussive boom that shakes the whole station platform under our feet.
For one horrible second it just sits there, half under, black water pouring through the open roof hatch.
Then the sealed hull finds its level.
"She floats," Clementine says.
"Barely," Harrow says.
"Barely's enough. Barely's fine. Stop catastrophizing."
"The waterline is eight inches from the rim."
"I know where the waterline is, I built the thing."
I find an iron pole in the maintenance shed and use it to push us clear of the platform while Clementine cranks the marine engine to life. It coughs twice, throws black smoke, and settles into a grinding rhythm. The paddlewheel bites into the sludge.
We move.
Bleak-Water Station gets small behind us. The dead saloon on its stilts. The empty train platform. The watchtower with no one in it.
Nobody waves goodbye. There's nobody left.
* * *
The salt-flat has no landmarks. Nothing. Just flat black sludge and low gray sky and the grinding of the engine, which sounds increasingly like it has opinions about what it's been asked to do.
Harrow sits at the bow with the blood-map and a compass, calling out course corrections. Clementine manages the throttle in twenty-minute cycles to keep the coils from seizing. I stand at the stern with the pole, keeping us clear of what's below.
And there's a lot below.
Every quarter mile the pole finds something geometric. Roof beams. Stone foundations. The right angles of buildings.
"The expedition flooded this," Harrow says from the bow. "They drilled too deep, hit an aquifer, couldn't cap it. Drowned their own settlements."
"Did it at least stop the rot?" Clementine asks.
"Look around."
"Right. Stupid question. Never mind."
The bodies appear an hour in.
First one off the port side. Face down. Canvas work clothes. The black spider-web veining of Witherlord infection up the back of the neck. Then another. Then a third directly ahead.
"Stop the engine," I say.
Clementine cuts the throttle. The barge drifts on its own momentum.
Nine bodies. All face-down. All equally spaced, pointing outward from an invisible center like the hands of a clock.
"They were arranged," Harrow says.
The Ledger doesn't give me a Wanted Poster. It gives me something worse. A deep radiant burn from the water itself, like standing near a furnace with the fire hidden.
Something very large is directly below us.
I push the pole down.
Six feet. Eight. The tip finds something soft that moves when pressed, adjusting to the pressure like a sleeping body adjusts to a hand on its shoulder.
"Center of the hull," I say. "Both of you. Now."
They move without argument.
The water goes completely still. The slapping against the hull stops. Then the surface dimples in twelve places, equidistant around the barge.
"Mercer," Clementine says.
"I see it."
The tendrils rise.
Twelve of them, pale and ribbed with cartilage, each one wide as a man's torso, climbing twenty feet out of the water and hanging there. Bioluminescent. Wrong.
The body surfaces last.
No legs. The torso dissolving into the root mass of tendrils below the surface. A face that isn't a face anymore, gill-slits and one massive bioluminescent eye, the size of a dinner plate. On the chest, a Mining Expedition foreman's coat, still buttoned.
WELLS, G. SITE FOREMAN.
WANTED: Foreman Wells. The Deep-Anchor. | Crime: Involuntary Assimilation. Hydrological Contamination. | REWARD: +96 Hours Stability. 8,000 Blood-Iron.
Four more days. The math hits me before anything else does. I hate that.
The eye moves across the barge. Harrow. Clementine. Then it finds me and it holds.
A sound comes from the gill-slits. Not a roar. Something with the rhythm of words, warped past recognition by decades underwater. But it's trying. It's genuinely trying to speak.
"He's talking," Harrow whispers.
"Don't listen to it," I say.
"Arthur, that man has been down there for thirty years, he's—"
"I know what he was," I say. Quiet. "I know what happened to him. I know who put him there."
The eye watches me.
I throw the iron pole.
It crosses twenty feet in a flat arc and drives eight inches into the center of the eye. Wells screams. The sound travels through the water and the hull and through my boots and my legs and into my chest. All twelve tendrils convulse.
"Engine!"
Clementine's already moving. The marine engine roars.
Tendrils crash down around us. One catches the stern, lifts us sideways, and I grab the railing and Harrow grabs the wall and Clementine guns it and we tear free with the hull scraping across the rubbery surface of the tendril.
"Junction points!" Harrow shouts over the noise. His face is white but his voice is completely steady. "Where the tendrils root into the torso. The central ganglia. That's the brain stem. Kill that and everything downstream collapses."
I look. The flesh at the junctions is thin. I can see the dark pulse of it.
I brace my boots, fan the hammer four times.
Four rounds. Four barium flares so close together they blur into one continuous red star.
The junctions sever. The tendrils fall.
Wells collapses and the water takes him back slowly, without drama. The nine bodies go with him, pulled gently down. The black surface closes over everything like nothing happened.
The engine idles. The barge rocks on the aftermath waves.
Sixteen coins through my sleeve.
BOUNTY CLAIMED: Foreman Wells. | LEDGER BALANCE: 96 Hours, 2 Minutes.
Harrow exhales.
Clementine brings the throttle down.
Nobody says anything for a moment.
"You alright?" she asks, looking at me.
"Ask me again in an hour," I say.
She looks at me a little longer than that answer deserves. Then she looks at the horizon.
"Mercer," Harrow says from the bow. Different tone. Quiet and certain.
I look.
Land on the horizon. Dark. Rising from the water. Wrong in a way that is hard to name, just a wrongness that lives in the gut before it lives in the mind.
"Golgotha," Harrow says.
I load four fresh rounds into the LeMat. Snap the cylinder shut. Watch the dark mass grow.
The Ledger burns.
We're close now.