Hell Freezes Over

The bleak landscape stretching behind had nothing on the thunderclouds looming ahead of Ari, and in another few minutes darkness would merge with darkness in a frenzy of hail and ball lightning. He recalled a vague saying about unstoppable forces and immovable objects. In his experience there was no such thing: everything moved eventually; everything could be shaken, torn off, and ripped to shreds. As for unstoppable forces, they stopped too, eventually, and when they did, they left nothing unmoved. He shook his head wondering who the idiot who had thought that up was, and how it had stuck. Different times, probably, and milder winds. Standing by his side, Adi, as if to prove a silent point, had not moved.

In a few minutes it would not matter; in a few minutes the storm would start, and in a few months the winter.

The waters called him, they called her, and they called all of them. Awake and in their sleep, the Fish were the waters.

The Moles’ efforts had proven fruitful, or so they claimed. The tunnels of the Divine Undertaking were nearing completion, and the caves would offer a luxury undreamed of on the surface. But few dreamed anymore. Neural synapses would fire at night just as they always had, but you cannot dream if you do not have a past, and you cannot dream if you cannot bring the future to life—when tomorrow is another whirlwind, and the future an endless field of ice...such are not dreams, but fantasies in the void, and in the void there is despair.

He stretched his arms and leaped over the cliff, the friction building up static against the electrically charged air of the storm, and his head closed in on the blue-black waters with barely a splash.

We have been tried by Water and tried by Ice.

We have been carved by its shards,

And moulded by its flows

As Neptune’s tribulations pass,

The power of Hades grows.

Knowing that the Time of Neptune would soon pass, revealing Hades in all of his glory, ushering in the return to the Cave—before humanity wandered into the light and was blinded to reason by the sun—was little comfort from the disdainful looks of the Moles sitting across the aisle. Their time was close, and they knew it. One day, soon now, Hell would freeze over, and it would be their turn to rule in Hades’ glory.

The scriptures could not mute the snickering, and even the vision of Hell stretching endlessly outside the church window could not dampen their heckling.

The priest was formal, and the Blank Book of Scriptures, its pages untainted and its message clear, was unequivocal. Millions of years past, a man-shaped demon named Plato, son of the wretched Socrates, Scion of Hell, had led to the fore an Age of Reason, dragging Man from the comfort of the Cave, and into the blinding lights of purgatory.

Upon the surface, man had first experienced the Time of Mars, when wars wrecked the world and billions perished as Hell shaped itself at Man’s pleasure. Then came the Time of Hermes, and for a period Man flourished, striking a balance between his aspirations and Hell. In the Time of Narcissus, Man had forgotten his humble beginnings and the comfort of the Cave, and sought his own reflection in the light, his mirror image in Hell. The Time of Neptune had cleansed the world, and Hades would lead us back to the Cave.

Ari shook himself awake, and for a few seconds, the world blended with the Dream before washing it away. Those early moments, growing longer by the day, threatened to rip his sanity apart. As the dreams grew more vivid with each passing night the fragile balance grew more delicate. One day, he knew, like all the other Fish before him, reality would merge with the Dream, and the Dream would win.

Jonah had grown accustomed to the dull look in his son’s eyes, and the light that grew slowly, alerting him to his return. Just as he had grown accustomed to that same look in his father’s eyes, back when he was too young to understand himself. Long before Ari grew accustomed to, recognised, and finally understood, that same look in his own. All the Fish Dream Fish Dreams.

Stepping into life from the Dream felt like defeat in victory, almost fratricide. There was comfort in the Dream, perhaps the comfort of the Cave. Perhaps. Fish were chosen, after all, chosen to rule under Neptune, and had for five hundred years. Who else would dream of the Cave and know it in their souls?

Ari’s sharp intake of air, and sudden rising bolt upright, brought light back to his eyes. He looked around, weighing up his surroundings, making sense of the world as he had known it before going to sleep. Before he Dreamed.

His voice was firm and his grip solid, much to Jonah’s relief. He should not Dream so young, not with such intensity, but he was one of a generation who sought glory in unfathomable depths, ever darker crevasses, ever more dangerous valleys and canyons and towers. A generation for whom the darkness beneath, the endless echo of whale song, was the melody of the Cave and the enticing murmur of Neptune.

“You’re awake. Good. Your mother left some food for you on the table. We need to make the coast before the storm, and we’ll have to stay longer beneath than usual.”

Ari sensed the tension in Jonah’s voice. “It’s fine, Father,” he reassured him. “Once we’re under we can wait out the storm; we’ll be needed once it has passed.”

Jonah did not respond. Instead he stared out of the window to the cliffs and the thunderclouds creeping over the ocean. He turned and stepped through the doorway. “The storm is a harbinger, Son, and winter is but weeks away...”

The Moles had started work early. Lines of Beasts hauled equipment from Fish coastal outposts to the Colony, coordinated by a few Mole overseers. A storm could lay weeks of work to waste in a matter of minutes and last for days. There was a time when the Fish would have exerted explicitly imaginable violence had the Moles failed in their task and suffered setbacks in the Divine Undertaking.

Ari looked down to the other Fish waiting for his father by the cliff. Only a few had shaken themselves awake but he saw Adi looking over the edge to the ocean, turning her back to it, spreading her arms wide and bending backwards over the edge as if about to dive.

A stone hit him in the shoulder, and a young Mole stood there grinning at him. Times had changed. As the Divine Undertaking progressed, and the Dream took ever-larger numbers of Fish over the edge, the balance of power had shifted, and respect for the Fish dimished. Now they served only a purpose, and that purpose would not last the winter.

His father reached out and patted him on the shoulder. Let it be, his expression told him, let it be...

They had been prouder than this once. The Fish dared the depths of the seas for months at a time going through towns and cities long submerged. They’d exposed themselves to unknown amounts of radiation and chemical pollutants over generations, swimming the rising waters for food, materials for construction, power sources for the water filters and storage units, and eventually, for machinery geared towards the Divine Undertaking. But those days were gone; the Dream would take over unless the Moles could exact their vengeance first.

His shoulder hurt, his pride a flimsy thing fainter than reality, but he let it be.

He reached the cliff and sidled next to Adi. Caught in the rising winds behind her, and the crash of the waves hundreds of feet below, she did not hear him place a hand behind her back before pulling her back from the edge.

Her eyes re-focused slowly, and he realised the Dream was taking over her much faster than him. One day he would not be there on time to tease her and no one would stop her fall.

Her left eye still bore a small scar below it, an acid burn from a poisoned tentacle. It had seemed trivial at the time, but she had barely survived the infection.

Adi laughed. She loved the depths, their darkness, unexpected poisonous glows and the whisper of giant beings—Neptune’s titanic children inside which the legendary Jonah, his father’s namesake, had once slept and brought forth the truth of the Cave.

It took a few more minutes for the rest of the Fish to gather by the cliff. Once they were equipped with their suits, propulsion engines, food and energy packs, and fin-shaped oxygen and waste-recyclers on their backs, they resembled the creature they were named after. Not that they would have known—no one in the colony had seen fish before. Only giants and monsters ruled the seas, only the name remained. Fish dove and swam, Moles dug and burrowed.

Not so long ago, a hundred years at most, there would have been a crowd gathered to see them off. But as the Time of Neptune grew longer, the storms stronger, the winters harsher and more unpredictable, the ice encroaching over more land each year, and with the Dream taking away sanity, authority, and lives, those numbers dwindled.

Jonah stood atop a stone to address the crowd of gathered Fish, and the few on-looking Ants and Bees. “Morning! You’ve all shaken yourselves out; get ready to stay that way! You ain’t blind! You can see it coming just as I do! In all things the mission comes first!

“I have split you into two teams; David will sort you out, and tell you where to go! We have two objectives: fuel for the water filters, and power sources for the Divine Undertaking! The Ants have given me very specific directions as to the kind of power sources they require, so be careful!

“You know the works! Keep your com-units on, communicate findings to each other as necessary!”

Adi raised a hand. “Jonah! This is not a storm, I mean it is, of course it is, but... this feels like winter. A bad one.”

“Don’t be silly, Adi. We’re heading south-southeast. Winter is not for a few months; until then, we have to gather as much fuel as we can. But you’re right, the storm will last more than a few days, bet your life on it, and we may have to travel quite far so save on your food and energy packs.” He paused to stare back at the clouds. “Just to be safe, keep your eyes open for unusually cold currents and signs of early icing on the way back north. We won’t be much use to anybody if we’re trapped under... David?”

Jonah’s second stepped up to the stone dividing the Fish into two groups. Ari was sent to gather fuel, Adi, autonomous power sources.

The Fish lined up along the cliff, and one after another, in intervals of twenty seconds, leaped off, daring the incoming juggernaut to smash them against the crag, and answering the water’s siren call with a kiss on her dark and glowing lips.

Adi had been wrong. It was not winter yet, not quite, and the storm had lasted only fourteen days. Every time they dove the cities and towers had changed. Where the ice had retreated, entire areas were laid to waste, and each year more of the seas stayed trapped under ice.

You could not blame Adi for her caution. Sudden onsets of winter had caught and trapped Fish time and time again, but you could usually read the signs: the permafrost spread its fingers further south, leaving the water-submerged lands frozen out of season, and the currents never lied—blasts of cold water killed as often as they warned, but allowed the Fish to know where to swim and complete their missions safely.

The colony knew of the cold and the snow, but the Fish knew the true meaning of winter. The freezing waters took on a glassy, reflective look moving forward along the city grids, swallowing block after block, turning the waters to solid ice down from the surface and almost to the ground, where water circulation blasted cold currents further ahead; subtle signs of impending glaciation that the Fish learned to recognise as children. Each encroachment sent silent explosions along the currents, forming ice walls several hundreds of feet in height and thousands of miles thick, until the summer came and freed them again, but always shorter summers, and always more ice.

And now, Adi was dead. Ari saw her in the Dream and knew that she had succumbed to her mission. She was in the Dream with him, floating through the depths with the whales and the sharks, spinning through swarms of jellyfish unbitten. He knew she had succumbed to the Dream and merged with it, leaving reality behind for boundless currents and her own freedom.

Mole Councilman Eli Khadivi let himself bask in the tension of the Council, allowing the little give-aways to give, and the tell-tale signs to tell him which way the wind blew.

The Council’s currents were only as complex as its members, and the Castes concerns were all the same, and had been so for a century. The ice would trap them if they didn’t act decisively and in the thin tremor of panic he saw the opening he needed to support his own agenda.

He cleared his voice. “Councilmen, Councilwomen. I declare this 62^nd annual session of the Council of the Divine Undertaking open. As you all know we are nearing completion of the network. As such, the first item on the agenda will be fuel and supplies for the caves.”

The Divine Undertaking was ready to embrace them, the network of connecting caves and tunnels was to become the final resting place of a repentant humanity, and the sum of the knowledge it had preserved once the ice covered the world. But he needed to deal with the Fish, they all needed to deal with the Fish, or none of it would matter.

“Yes, Councilman Samadeh, I assume the Bees would have their word as to our supplies, where do we stand?”

The Bees workload had doubled with the Divine Undertaking. Providing food for the colony was an arduous task with every shorter spring, but the Divine Undertaking was a leviathan that required agricultural Bees and labourer Beasts to produce more stock, and engineering Ants to build more storage units and recycle more fuel than the colony had ever needed.

They had grown unaccustomed to the caves after these few centuries on the mountain walls, fields and open seas. They knew they would have to go back to their troglodytic existence, Hades demanded it, but unlike the Moles, they didn’t all embrace the future with equal glee.

“Thank you, Head of Council Khadivi,” said Samadeh, and looked around the room at the other Caste members assembled for the session. Only the Fish were absent. “As you all know, we have prepared for the coming of Hades with due diligence and hard labour, and within the next few days, with the help of the Ants we will have managed to complete all the major storage units and rehabilitated the old plantation caves. We are prepared for Hell, Head of Council.”

“Yes,” broke in a young Ant councilwoman. “The fuel supplies the Fish managed to salvage were more potent than we expected after all these years.”

“Yes,” agreed a Beast councilman, a diminutive fellow in spite of his Caste’s name. “Yes they did well, several perished but they did well.”

“My fellow friends and colleagues,” Khadivi said, “our efforts will not be in vain, none of ours, the Blank Book of Scriptures says so, and so it will be.” He paused for effect and added, “But I fear that, in spite of their recent success, the Fish may have outlived their usefulness.”

“Yes, again?” came another annoyed sigh from the table. “This is not the first time you bring up the Fish and their quirks, but they have their uses Eli, as you well know. Will you Moles ever let bygones be bygones? After all this time?”

Khadivi continued, “My fellow councilfolk, you should know me better than this, and you know that my only concern has always and only been for the survival of this colony, of what is left of our humanity, all of us.

“But we must consider the fate of these poor degenerates, if we are to prosper in the warm embrace of the Cave. Would these sad creatures, hopelessly addicted to the freedom of the waters, find peace in the bowels of the earth?

“Those ‘dreams’ of which they speak, which we naively believed to be Neptune manifested, those dreams, which inevitably, inexorably lead every Fish over the cliff, are nothing more than madness, insanity brought about by their arrogance and vanity. Did we ever really believe that they heard the whales? The Fish thought themselves Neptune’s chosen and are paying the price of blasphemy.”

It was true that when the rising waters had drowned civilisation and pushed them inexorably higher into the mountains, the Fish brought food from the sea to complement the meagre meals Bees would scrounge from the caves. Until able-bodied males and females started dying, children were born with deformities, and they realised that they could no longer depend on the sea for sustenance.

The Bees became more adept at sustaining food for the community, and the Ants’ steady labour at perfecting remnants of Hermes’ gifts allowed the Fish to go deeper and stay longer underwater. Through their alliance the colony made leaps and survived the brunt of Neptune’s anger, but it was the Moles who had paid, the Moles who had toiled, bled, and died, at the hands of the ruling Fish. It was the Moles who dug the caves, who had built the houses for the colony. The Moles had been shackled into building the Divine Undertaking, and it was the Moles who had overthrown the Fish a hundred years earlier. It was the Moles whom Hades had called.

Centuries as slaves. All the other Castes seemed to have forgotten but he would not, and neither would the Fish.

“Yes!” a female voice jested slyly. “Perhaps if Moles didn’t have so many wives there would be room for a few Fish!”

A few smirks followed, but the councilman saw an overture where the others saw snide.

“Polygamy,” Khadivi snapped, “is the legacy of our slavery, when our women were forced into chained pregnancies. Do you wish to see the same happen to you?”

“Shall we pay the price of their survival? The Moles are not angry anymore, but we have not forgotten the whip of the Fish. Do you trust them not to turn on you? Do you trust the madness they leak? The sea calls them, my friends, relentlessly. If we take the heralds of Neptune with us, they will rage and we will perish.

“They have brought this colony to the brink once before, we cannot allow them to do so again. When Hell freezes over, when Neptune closes his scaly fist upon land and sea, the fate of the Fish must be sealed.”

The Fish quarters lay at the bottom of each settlement along the coast, looking up towards the higher echelons on the mountainside where the Moles and the priesthood resided. Bells rang the hour, and the ending of the Council meeting. Ari thanked his mother for the bread and looked up towards the glinting windows of the Mole district.

His mind was elsewhere. The Dream was stronger since their last mission; laughter mingled with submarine harmonics, and somewhere, Adi giggled at imaginary mermaids. He closed his eyes to get a hold of his senses, wrestling with reality; the table, food and room giving way to dolphins glowing a sickly green around him...

His mother burst into focus suddenly, tears dampening her cheek. “Even awake, now...wide awake, now!” Her hands clung to her apron and rolled into fists. She was biting her lip, shaking.

Jonah rested a hand on her shoulder, and wiped a droplet of blood pearling on her lower lip. “I’ve turned out alright,” he said.

“No, no you haven’t, none of you. You don’t hear yourselves at night, or maybe you do, maybe you’re all together somewhere, but I hear you, loud and clear. The sounds you make...they’re not human, Jonah! They’re not...”

She looked at Ari, spat some blood into her apron, and walked to the window, facing out to the cliff. “One night, the two of you, the two of you were...synchronised. You all were. Every single one of you in every house! The Moles came down with the Priests. No one could wake you. Some Moles even suggested killing you. I left the house. I wandered to the edge.” She was visibly shaking, illuminated by the pale light breaking through the clouds. “There were things down there, Jonah. Not the whales, you’ve shown me those, they spit water. Other things. Strange things. Glowing things. Circling each other until the sun came up. I stayed and watched them spin for hours; made myself sick! I only turned back when they left. When I got home the noises had stopped, you were breathing normally again, both of you, all of you!”

“The scriptures are full of stranger occurrences my soul, they’re just dreams...” He threw his son a look.

Ari smiled at his mother reassuringly. “It’s fine, Mother, truly.” But as he said so the dolphins flickered back into focus. They floated in suspended animation, staring at him silently, and exploded into particles of ice, ripping his mother apart.

When Ari entered the conference room, the tables were laid with maps, marking cities along the usual Fish routes north. The room was full of high-ranking Moles, representatives of the Priesthood and leaders of Fish communities along the coast. The air was heavy with whispers and mistrust; perhaps it was the cigar smoke making eyes squint, but Ari thought otherwise.

His father was leaning over a map, arguing with a Mole councilman, and a silent Priest. “With all due respect, Councilman, we could not have accomplished this mission six months ago. The chances of success were slim then and they are nil now.”

“Is there something the Fish can’t do, Jonah?” the councilman laughed, slamming a companionable hand on Jonah’s back.

“I appreciate the jest, Councilman, and the trust, I do. But most of these cities are caught in the glaciers; everything north of the 49^th parallel, in fact, is solid ice from sea to sky, and has been so for years. Even if we could make it that far, hoping some river ways are still navigable and some landmasses are still uncovered, we would need three months to complete this mission, with relays, a network of them.” He ruffled his hair and pointed to several spots on the map. “Here around Beirut, Heraklion, and possibly Ragusa. We don’t have the human capacity to support an operation of this size. Hauling equipment for transport and relay stations will slow us down significantly. Time is against us, winter will be on us before we can return, and we’d be too busy to keep track of encroachments in the permafrost.”

Jonah paused for thought, cupping his chin and frowning. “We can cover roughly six hundred and fifty kilometres a day in a group, with the extra load, maybe half that, and we would spend half days installing the relay stations. It would be almost twenty days to Central Europe, longer on the way back if the trip is fruitful, which it won’t be, Councilman.”

The councilman’s voice turned to syrup. “How about a...‘hit and run’, I believe was the old term. Well how about a hit and swim to the glaciers, we have several seismic charges which the Divine Undertaking will not require, free as much land and town as you can, salvage what you can, and swim back? Three weeks travel time is within reason this time of year, isn’t it?”

Jonah shook his head. “Impossible sir, the glaciers are too high and too thick. We could wreak significant damage, here...” He scanned the map for a few seconds. “...and here maybe, around Hannover if we can swim that far, but the repercussions sir. Thousands of tons of ice is a lot of pressure, it could cause giant waves, it will bring down water temperature, just enough to allow the glacier to spread faster rather than crumble, it would collapse and solidify farther in a matter of seconds; we’d be trapped under and in, there would be no coming back. A hundred years ago, even fifty, maybe. Today...”

“It is settled then, avoid the deep north, and focus your efforts on these two regions, you-”

Khadivi’s grin told Ari that his father had fallen right into it. “And you will have them! The Council would never ask the Fish to risk their lives on a suicide mission, nor would we make this unusual request if the Divine Undertaking didn’t demand it, and not without significant involvement by the Council.”

Jonah looked at Khadivi as if the man had grown a fin. “Sir? It’s all deep north; it’s not a question of where so much as when.” Jonah did not like losing, and his face froze as he grappled for arguments to throw off the wrench he had wedged for himself. “We are grateful for your help, but your men aren’t trained. There is a reason why Fish pass the tradition down, one generation after another. We would need weeks to train your recruits, and that’s barely enough for them to use their equipment, and handle the storage units, sir.

“With all due respect, we are talking about months underwater!” His fist slammed down on the map, and momentarily quieted the buzz of distrust and suspicion bouncing from wall to wall. “Your men, even very well intended, don’t have a mind for the depths; they would slow us down further, they’re a hindrance, sir, you should know that.”

“Didn’t you say that you would need relay points along a network, Jonah? That you would be too busy to monitor changes in currents, sudden encroachments of permafrost, marine life, and threats of such nature?”

Jonah stood nonplussed. “Well yes sir, except the last bit, sir, we can handle those, but-”

“It is agreed then, that with enough manpower the mission can be accomplished before the winter, yes? Our men will serve at your command as relays, to monitor submarine activity, and maintain open communication with the Council. If, for any reason, we were to believe your mission could end in failure or death, we would pull back, and wait out the winter. If you have any reason to believe they cannot complete such simple tasks after three weeks of your expert training, we’d be the first to call the operation off. After all, what are a few more years to Hades?”

He turned to Ari’s father, but Jonah was staring out the window, his eyes blank and unfocused. Khadivi, looking firmly away from him, smiled and said: “Agreed, Jonah?”

Jonah didn’t respond. Everyone in the room had stopped talking, and stared desperately at him, the Fish leaders intimately aware of what was happening, not daring to intervene. All the Fish Dream Fish Dreams, everyone knew by now, Fish, Mole, Priest, Beast, Ant, and Bee. Everyone understood, but none would speak of it. Jonah’s last inkling of pride meant that he could not ask the councilman to repeat himself; whatever the councilman’s intentions, whichever conditions had been laid out, Jonah had no other choice but to acquiesce if he wanted his honour safe before his life. But even then, the Moles could coerce him into doing exactly what they wanted.

His eyes shifted back to reality and he looked around, catching the other Fish’s eyes, and knew he had lost. “Yes sir. Agreed sir. Of course sir.” Embarrassment and shame tinted his voice. “In the name of the Divine Undertaking all Men must labour, and all Men must sacrifice.”

Ben Golkar knew he would pass out eventually, but he would never get used to sleeping underwater.

As a child, he had always envied them, but he would never get used to any of it. Ever. He was a Bee; and the Fish...well, they were freakish.

Regulating oxygen levels to induce prolonged bouts of rest was unnatural, decidedly unnatural, so was tying yourself to cliff walls and inside shallow caves, and the way the Fish let themselves get carried away into sleep, oblivious to their surroundings, and the way they sometimes hummed.

They were all tied along submarine cliffs in small clusters spread over several hundred meters. Some had chosen to break away a little, for whatever privacy the open ocean could offer, but even in the dark you never felt alone, there were creatures down there that could sense you, even when you couldn’t see them.

He couldn’t be the only non-Fish still awake. “Einat,” he whispered on the colony’s frequency. “Einat, you up?”

Ben sensed something large passing in front of him, the pressure of water displacement against the cliff, a sudden warmth as the dark waters went black

On the other end of the line Einat, on the cusp of sleep, responded. “...Ben? Ben? What do you...”

Einat fell asleep instants before she would have heard a hungry blare gnawing Ben short.

Fish Dream on land, and Fish Dream in water. As the weeks passed, installing markers, trackers, and cables, along the way west before heading north, Ari’s dreams grew deeper.

The waters beneath him swallowed even the darkness. Light did not fade so much as squeeze to death, leading to the real bottom, the old ocean floors that would never freeze. Those depths were the true dark. Somewhere down there was where all Fish went. The currents rising from them, lashing upwards to the surface were suddenly drawn back down like giant tentacles, carrying ripples that spoke of minds.

In the depths, day or night, reality or Dream, who knew? In his sleep, he could feel other Dreamers circling him. Unlike at the surface, where the other Dreamers were shadows and shapes barely glimpsed beneath the surface, underwater he knew their evil, their care, their disdain, their disinterest, their love, their amusement; but above all, even in the deepest Dream, when things he couldn’t see and could not bear to, loomed over and around him in his sleep, he knew that he was safe.

The recruits were not. Nights could go by without an incident, but one day three never woke up, two were never found, and one could not be identified for missing a head, suit, and skin.

Some recruits spoke of darker shadows, moving faster than the currents, of muffled noises around them on nights when their companions disappeared, of deafening sounds and a stink of decomposing flesh.

The Fish feigned incomprehension; they were too far ahead in the mission to cause further panic by voicing speculations. It helped reassure the recruits that Fish died and went missing too, floating away when the Dream took them.

“I don’t know, Son. None of this has ever happened in Fish memory that I know of. Told Khadivi about them. They’re trained and they knew what they were getting into, but they’re not clawing off their own faces in their sleep or drifting off careless, I can tell you that much...”

What his father did not dare voice was the presence of the Dreamers, the sense of looming beings in the night, the sense of safety the Fish all shared, inevitably translated into one, or several, dead recruits.

Never was a Fish found eviscerated and fed on in the morning. Sea creatures could be as vicious as they were playful, attack with blinding speed in the blind waters. Jellyfish, brainless and indiscriminate in the thousands, and things with mouths... But in the Dream there was always safety, safety until morning.

Chunks of flesh and suit were still tied to the rocky surface, nibbled on by tiny eels working their way around the fibre in the suit, stripping them clean of bits of bone and sinew.

“We found three more partially eaten corpses like this.” Ari added, “The other three...gone...”

His father nodded gravely and floated away mumbling “I told them, I told them...”

Once they installed the relay stations, the recruits would be safer, and it would be possible for them to keep guard and alternate working shifts. They would be safer.

“West... West... West...” Their teammate Rebecca’s communications were erratic, confusing and often rhythmical. For days, between flashes of lucidity, she kept muttering the same word over the com-lines. ‘West, west, west...’ he could not shut her out without cutting himself off from the network, so he endured on. They would lose her any day now, and the sooner the better, for them as well as for her.

“Becky, we’re heading north-northwest,” someone would chime in every now and then, keeping Rebecca focused enough so she would not try to head back southeast in the opposite direction she urged them towards.

It was a burden they all shared, and none of them wanted to be alone when the Dream and reality became indistinguishable, but it had been down to him for several days, and he didn’t bother to respond to her anymore, just as long as she kept pace.

Things were easier now that they had left the recruits at the relay stations with supplies. They were swimming over a city called Budapest, or what remained of it. There was nothing left to offer in the city or in the nuclear power plants further north. Bridge foundations remained intact, but everywhere metal frames spiked out of shattered buildings, massive structures open to the waters, with rows of seats surrounding empty stages, flooded plazas covered in rock and algae. From above, you could clearly tell where the river used to flow under bridges and around the central island. All of the city’s wealth in wiring, batteries, glass, plastic—anything that could be used, fixed, or recycled—had been plundered by generation after generation of Fish.

They would head northwest from here towards France and with luck, the ice would have retreated far enough that land would be free up to London and most of the old industrial zones that were open to scavenging.

Without luck England would still be under, Northern France would be iced over already, and if the ice had reached the Western Alps then they would have to double back and pray; it would be the last winter before returning to the Cave.

The recruits had held them back more than they’d expected. They were over a week behind; a few more days and it would be the longest Ari had ever spent underwater, and never this long over Europe. He had been as far as Istanbul, and much further southeast for oil, where most Fish missions went. He could have reached here sooner, but this was a different route, further southwest towards Lebanon, then north to Greece to install another relay station before B-Team headed west towards Spain and A-Team caught currents heading north. We should have sent Rebecca along with them.

Ari hated himself for thinking that way, but couldn't help it. Before the Dream took you, some of the things you said had meaning. Most of them did not. Sometimes they were prophetic, but prophecy is as much a matter of minutes as of centuries; it will happen sooner or later, and you would lose your mind trying to decipher every random thought.

“B-Team, do you copy? B-Team, do you copy? We have reached Munich and found evidence of deep icing at the bottom. What is the situation in Spain? I repeat, what is the situation in Spain?” Jonah vocalised on the com-lines.

With the winter it was not uncommon for communications to go out for a few days between teams. Any change in the ice cap could muddle communications over very long distances.

Jonah switched frequencies to the recruits at the relay stations. “Relay Station 2, do you copy?”

“Relay Station 2, inform the council that ice has encroached to Munich, I repeat, ice has encroached to Munich. By our estimates the glaciers must be no further than 3-400 miles north-northwest. North-northeast might be safer, but not for very long. Water has solidified overhead. Relay Station 2, do you copy?”

“We copy, A-Team. We will inform the Council and communicate their instructions. A-Team, do you copy?”

Ari spun. “West, Ari! West!” Rebecca’s voice exploded through the com-lines propelling him backwards into a tower. For a second an orca appeared where she floated, swallowed by a lantern-eyed beast the size of the buildings beneath him.

“Ari? What fool games are you playing? If there was anything here we wouldn’t be picking ice out of our noses,” Jonah said pointing upwards. “See how thin the crust is? It’s pretty damn sharp too, so don’t tempt it.” His father’s voice was thick with nerves.

Ari shook himself out of the rubble and floated up to his father. “I’m sorry, did you not see that!?” he yelled through the com-unit, pointing at empty waters.

“Becky! She was right there, she...” His voice trailed off when he saw nothing behind him but cerulean flows.

Panic registered beneath his father’s helmet. He activated a sensor meant for locking arms to half-ton transport cubes, and clamped Ari’s shoulders, the sudden pressure nearly breaking bones and sending a flash of searing pain through his skull. “Kid... Becky’s gone. Do you understand me?”

Ari started heaving frantically into his breathing unit. Jonah unclenched a hand, turned it, and caught Ari across the face with a blow, while his other hand kept him from spinning.

Ari turned around, looking upwards and downwards; all five hundred Fish left in A-Team were focused on them—some swam in concentric and overlapping circles around the group but all com-units were silent—intent on the conversation. None appeared to have seen Rebecca, or an orca, or a giant stomach with teeth, or heard a Fish burst into whale song.

“When was the last time you remember her interacting with the team? Anybody but you?” Jonah’s words were slow, and the deafening silence on the com-waves made the ocean feel like a Priest, his tilted head passing judgement.

“About...four days ago, she kept babbling on, same as she had for days, she started drifting east. I caught up with her, and turned her back our way. Been keeping an eye on her ever since.”

“Son, Rebecca was gone in the morning, she drifted off in the night...and she’s been behind you since?”

He didn’t answer. The A-Team kept floating around them effortlessly. He should have been worried, his father was, but Rebecca’s voice in the Dream, while terrified, had sounded helpful.

Jonah shook his head. “It’s fine. Night will be on us in a few hours.” He raised his voice. “We’ll bunk in the buildings and wait for word from the Council. The centre of the city has the most remaining structures; we’ll stay in groups of ten within a one-mile radius. We’ll reconvene in nine hours if we haven’t received word. Understood? Good. Ari, you bunk with me.”

The ice was thicker nine hours later. The glaciers had moved southeast enough that the water gleamed with thin particles of ice pushing south.

“Relay Station 2, do you copy? This is A-Team, do you copy?” Jonah said through the network.

“We copy, A-Team. We have just received word from Relay Station 1. You are to stand-by, A-Team; I repeat, stand-by. An emergency session of the Council was called to discuss matters. We have received word from B-Team that significant progress was made in Spain. Stand-by for further instructions. I repeat, stand-by for further instructions. A-Team, do you copy?”

“We copy, Relay Station 2. It’s getting rough out here. Ten to twelve hours. Tops. We will expect word from you. In exactly twelve hours I will give orders to consolidate at your location until further communications. Relay Station 2, do you copy?”

Exactly eleven hours later, just as Jonah was giving orders to double back, Relay Station 2 broke silence. “A-Team, do you copy? A-Team, this is Relay Station 2. A-Team, do you copy?”

“We copy, Relay Station 2. About to lift camp. I repeat, about to lift camp. Relay Station 2, do you copy?”

Temperatures had plummeted since the last contact with the relay station. Where thin particles of ice lit up the dark only a few hours ago, the water was now thick with them, almost slush. Another few hours, less, and the slush would thicken, coagulate, and harden until the moving glacier solidified, creating explosions on the surface, like a giant’s thump blowing dust in every direction, blasting ice further south into the waters ahead.

“We copy, A-Team. B-Team is heading back east from Spain. You are to reconvene over Sicily and help with transport. I repeat, reconvene with B-Team over Sicily and help with transport. A-Team, do you copy?”

“We copy, Relay Station 2. Requesting explanation for the delay in communications. Do you copy? Requesting explanation for the delay.”

There was a long pause before the relay’s response. “We copy, A-Team. A flash storm heading north-northwest hit the colony overnight—communications were disrupted for ten hours. A-Team, do you copy?”

“We copy, Relay Station 2. Relay Station 2, the glaciers are moving faster than anticipated. Conditions over Munich deteriorating exponentially, I repeat, conditions over Munich deteriorating exponentially. At going rates, we will never be more than a few hours ahead of the ice. I repeat; we will never be more than a few hours ahead of the ice. We may have to evacuate Relay Stations after contact with B-Team. Relay Station 2, do you copy?”

“We copy, A-Team, and thank you for fair warning. On stand-by until you make contact over Sicily. Repeat, on stand-by until contact in Sicily. Over and out.”

Priority communications shut down and no one spoke until Amir cleared his throat on the com-line and spun a few back flips for show. Amir made everything he said sound like he was coughing up spite. “Haven’t heard of a north-northeast storm, flash or otherwise, heading for the colony this season since never. My old man might have said something about that but the Dream took him, and he was drunk most of the time so who knows?”

Laughter rang on the com-line. Amir spun a few more back flips and cleared his throat again. He would die before the Dream took him, and that shouldn’t be long. No living Fish had known his father; at nearly sixty Amir was the oldest Fish alive.

Ari sensed the temperatures drop against his face and barely ducked as a streak of frozen shards, several feet long and sharp as cut diamonds, circumvented a bend in the mountainside along a meddling current, and landed directly in front of him. The two Fish swimming immediately behind were less fortunate, and the waters flashed a momentary red.

The frozen peaks of the Alps towered above the icecap, but beneath, the titanic bodies of the mountains shifted the currents, creating powerful flash maelstroms, yanking Fish into boulders and caves, and smashing them against cliffs.

The ice would move faster in some areas than others, dashing into crevasses and between the stone giants only to reverse its course and rip through the swimmers.

Navigation was difficult, communication worse, and they were getting ever less sleep, never more than a few hours rest when conditions were good, and they seldom were. They doubled down in clear streams and they would wake in pre-glacier slush, but worse, the Dream was free of Dreamers. After weeks of feeling their presence it was discomfiting to sleep without them. On any day, hours could go by without sensing them, but now they were gone entirely.

They rested in cities only twice, and only because the weather conditions made sleeping along cliff walls too dangerous. In both Milan and Naples, buildings came down on the Fish during the night, and the slush infiltrated respirators, oxygen converters, and filters.

By the time they reached Sicily there was no sign of B-Team, but the ice had slowed its rapid progress south, the bulk of the glacier still working its way around the Alps.

“There is no sign of B-Team, I repeat, no sign of B-Team. The ice is gaining ground, but the mountains are in the way. Evacuate Relay Station 2, consolidate at Relay Station 1. I repeat, evacuate and consolidate at Relay Station 1. Relay Station 2, do you copy?”

They would need luck. The Dream was taking them in droves, and several Fish would go missing at a time, falling behind and into the deeper slush. Some would emerge and fall back in again, slower in their movements, weaker in resisting the currents.

Ari held on to sanity for Jonah, and Zohar at home, but fear rode the Dream—not his own fear, although it was there too and blurred his vision almost constantly now. Behind him, he caught a reflection of a whale in the ice wall where there was no ice, and no whale.

Around him and ahead of him was thickening slush, even where the waters were clear. His limbs fell numb as he swam, as if they were not his own. Perhaps the other Fish were all feeling the same thing. If it were not for Jonah’s constant surveillance, he would have fallen behind too.

Relay Station 2 was deserted as expected; the slush had not reached the station from the north, confirming that the northeast was still relatively quiet, yet the recruits had packed all the equipment, including chargers for the propulsion engines, food and energy packs, and oxygen filters.

“A-Team, do you copy?! A-Team?! A-Team, head east now! I repeat! Head-” An explosion sounded on the com-line and communication stopped.

His father’s yelling on the com-line shook Ari out of the Dream long enough for him to assess the situation coldly: B-Team had lost contact, Relay Stations 1 and 2 were deserted, and it took twenty hours altogether, twenty hours, for the Council to communicate instructions...

Relay Station 1 was not only abandoned, it was sabotaged. Perhaps, if they hadn’t needed to let Amir distract them from the obvious, they would have paid closer attention to what he had said about flash storms this season, and started adding up. Not since never? Maybe his old man? No one had ever met Amir’s old man; he had been dead forty years or more, and if Amir could not be sure... It took a few minutes for each member of the team to put the last few days together, but someone had to ask.

“Jonah. When you met with the councilman, what were his reasons for this mission?”

Fish missions seldom headed north. Monitoring missions would travel regularly to measure changes in the glaciers and alert the colony to ice moving south. But Europe was always intermittently under ice now, most missions headed south, over the Gulf, for oil reserves that were immediately available and easier to transport. Those waters teemed with submarine life, some benign, some not. But in these waters, abandoned by the Dreamers, sifting through the equipment left behind at Relay Station 2, running out of oxygen, food, sleep, and power, finding only enough propulsion engines to get a handful safely back to a colony that had already decided on their fate...

Jonah gave a start, hesitated, and paused, but Adam cut in. “It’s alright, Jonah, we know, we saw you argue this mission best you could.”

“It was gonna happen sooner or later, Jonah,” Amir proclaimed. “We all saw it coming, we just never said nothing, none of us. We never cared; none of us did, even now. Moles set us up, Council says nothing, Dream kicks in, decisions are made and we’re out at sea again, swimming head first into Hell, not ’membering what the hell for or how it is we got suckered in again. None of us care anymore; the Dream’ll take us all. Sounds to me like something else got B-Team, and I don’t see them caring either. This is the only way for us to go Jonah. So what they say, huh? What can you remember?”

Jonah threw his head back and floated closer to the group. “The only thing that matters every time, Amir: the spouses and kids will be cared for if anything...”

Amir laughed out loud. “That’s a nice thought! Not that it matters much either...”

“And so is my wife,” Jonah interjected before a fight broke out. His voice had grown firmer. “We made that choice when we married them and we knew what it meant. For Yuri it meant extra ratios of grain, we all know that.” Laughter again relieved the tension, but there was little to be wary about anymore. “Those we meet in the Dream we can worry about then, for those we don’t...Hades’ embrace is warm and comforting...”

Jonah’s words afterwards were few and short. The Council had urged the mission forward, in full knowledge of the risks to the Fish, and there was little doubt left that the Moles and Priests were expecting this outcome. Exploiting the last of the resources in Europe before the ice settled over it, and the last winter before the Cave? Right...

Moles...thieves, murderers, and worse, and enslaved for it. To chain a murderer must have made sense when the world fell apart and the waters rose every day; they had needed every hand then, but their children? In perpetuity? In times like those he wondered what kind of masters they had been, or who’d pointed the finger and separated the Moles from the others...

A-Team turned west. Ari spun on himself and saw Rebecca again, floating ahead of him, translucent, and glittering with ice flecks, then disappearing once more in a silent blast a few feet from the Fish, rippling through the waters in waves that knocked them back, slammed them into the ice crust, and spiralling towards the bottom. They all felt it this time. Ari tumbled back, regained control, and stabilised himself facing the direction of the blast.

In the distance, the waters were getting darker; gaining ground forward, he focused his visor on a noticeably darker shape caught deep in the incoming slush, and reality caught up with the Dream. Another shock wave threw him back, and another, and another. His visor focused again on the shape, tumble after tumble. He zoomed in on it, and a two-headed white whale was revealed. It was struggling to free itself, tail caught in the western glacier, each new blast ripping chunks of flesh as ice cut through skin and nerve to the bone.

Another blast dislodged ice from the surface, raining several tons of ice blocks, dozens of feet thick, on the scrambling Fish.

Ari felt drawn forward, torn out of his body towards the living ice wall and the dying whale, and yet he remained motionless. He braced himself for impact when, suddenly, the glacier was spreading ahead of him. He could not move, air was freezing in his lungs and the cold numbed the pain from his massive wounds. His entire body trapped, his tail useless, he caught sight of his second head, its eyes black and dead.

Through the ice, he saw human shapes bouncing discordantly in the distance, struggling to stay out of the blast radius. He felt his strength leaving him, his massive heart fading with a final thump, and his eyes zoomed forward again, through the ice, and into the desperate shapes. He saw himself floating lifeless a few yards ahead. Just as he collided with his own body, reality took over and he saw his father was floating above him, one of the metal fixings from the relay station jammed into his ribs, blood twirling into a shield around him as he spun, helplessly bounced around by the blasts, dead underwater.

Ice particles flashed by, cutting through skin suits, and riding only a few seconds ahead of the slush, coagulating almost instantly on disoriented Fish.

Ari floated up to his father and ripped the propulsion pack attached to his back, cursing himself, hoping against luck that there was enough energy left to make it to the colony. No matter what happened, he would see his mother, and he would die taking out as many Moles as he could before they did him. The Dream could claim him then, but not now.

He repeated the operation with three more corpses, attached a food and energy pack to his skin suit, and blasted his way out of the thickening muck, and ahead, faster and faster ahead.

The glacier had changed directions. The Fish had wrongly assumed that its progression was a constant south-southeast. They had never considered that it could have been converging from the west as well. The explosion that silenced B-Team made sense to him now.

Spreading cracks in the icing overhead alerted him to the much larger northern glacier resuming its progress south. If he were not careful, he would be caught in a vice and forced south. If he did not gain speed he would be too far south to reach the colony, if he did not run out of propulsion first. He shot himself towards the surface at an angle, trying to break the thinner ice cap to get a sense of the glacier from the surface.

He projected himself forward at full speed, then up at a spin; to ease the impact with the surface and have a rotating view, catching all the angles before plunging back and repeating the operation again. Cutting through the air rather than the water would keep him out of the slush and explosions, and with luck, he would stay ahead just long enough when he dove back down to allow himself another leap through the surface.

His helmet broke through the ice and into the blearing sunlight. The sun shone bright on the ice, and the sky was a perfect blue, but you could not have guessed from beneath. The spin should have blocked the sun out intermittently, but the reflection on the ice made it worse. He activated his shading unit.

The bulk of the glacier was closing in on him from the west and northwest. The ice cap itself stretched for several hundred yards behind him, until the glacier filled it in from the bottom, and there, the world ended. A kilometre. Maybe less. Moving at thirty meters a second.

The surface blew up and settled in sequence. Row after row of frozen eruptions, a cloud of diamonds and glass, stretching north and south further than he could see, settling and rising again in waves.

Where the detonations below were silent killers, the deflagrations outside were shock waves of vertigo. He saw a group of Fish leap through the surface and into the air in the distance, he could not tell who they were, but they were too close to the glacier, much too close. The Fish spun down headfirst into the ice. Ari zoomed out too late. The first Fish’s head burst open in blood against it, missing the thinner ice cap by only a few yards. The glacier exploded southward almost as soon as he hit, shredding the body to reddish powder, and slicing the remainder of the group in a detonation of ice spears.

Ari’s spin brought him downwards, through the ice cap, into the streaking ice, and up again in hundred meter leaps. It was all he could do to stay ahead, trying to beat Neptune’s closing, vengeful fist, leaping and swimming north-northeast towards the colony.

The waters were shallower when he approached the cliff. He could no longer dive as deep nor leap as high. His propulsion pack was running out, and the smaller, more frequent leaps gobbled up all the energy he had left. The glacier moved faster in the hollow waters, blast after blast, threatening almost every leap and every dive, but the familiar cliffs of the colony drew him in.

The smell of smoke caught his nose mid-jump; burning pyres lined the edge of the cliff. He could not tell who they were, but he had little doubt the Moles had kept their word and taken care of the children and spouses.

Thousands of voices flooded the Dream. Not the screams of the bodies on the pyres—he was too far to hear them—but a choir of emotions and feelings, none of them painful, all of them accepting. He sought his mother in the jungle of sentience, and could not find her. He probed for his father, and felt him somewhere, and Adi, and Amir...

Caught in the dead Fish’s Dreams, he tried a leap towards the cliff wall. He would break the surface, he thought, soar over the flames, and find arms somehow, food too, somehow, and then he would wreak havoc, and then and only then, the Dream would take him. He concentrated all the power in his propulsion engines for a final leap forward.

His head broke the ice, but the slush solidified around his feet and pulled him back against his impulse, snapping him in half at the waist. The ice closed in on his body before both halves could fully separate and numbed him to the pain.

He tried to scream and his lungs froze. A low rumble built up underneath him, in useless warning of the eruption to come. The sun faded from his vision along with the smell of smoke and the burning pyres.

The world disappeared, and he saw shapes floating through the depths. Large. Faceless. Floating stomachs with thick tentacles by the hundreds, holding eyes and mouths. Among them he saw dolphins and sharks, glowing in shades of yellow and green. Slowly dying of radiation poisoning, slowly changing into new things. And even smaller, between the dolphins and the sharks, between and around the monsters and the whales, tiny, tiny creatures, shaped just as Fish were when they wore their suits. Small creatures such as he had never seen before, attaching themselves to dolphin, shark, whale and mutant alike, guiding them, drifting gently at their side... He felt himself shrink as the rumble of the glacier grew tenor, then baritone, and saw a giant two-headed white whale in the depths, catching the light glowing off the dolphins, and he swam closer to it, ever shrinking, ever deeper, ever smaller...

...The explosion obliterated his body in a deluge of ice, flesh, and blood, but Ari was already in the depths, in the comfort of the Dream.

There was a Time when birds of flame rose from pits of the same, soaring from cavern to chasm, spreading fire with their wings, nigh invisible in the furnace that was the world. There was a Time when life bled from the earth, burning the ground alive.

Those birds are gone now, and the world has grown old and rigid. Where it was soft and warm, it was now hard and cold. They thought of her as a Mole, but in her heart she was the Phoenix...

The school day had ended early, and the sun was setting over the ocean behind Rina as she walked through the gardens.

Ahead, Bees were covering the fields under electro-photo-thermal protective sheets. When the sun set the sheets would shed light and heat on the plants for the early hours of the night, and then just heat when tended by the Bees working the night shift. Water was channelled through heated capillary tubing from the giant cisterns by the mountain and distributed to the plants through irrigation veins.

The Bees’ work was down to five months a year. Her father joked that they would not be busy Bees much longer. She had asked what that meant. An old saying, he’d said. Bees must have been busy someday, go figure.

After the summer the Ants would blast the plantation, bringing up fresh soil. Bees would sow the soil and install the sheets for several weeks, tending to the plants only when there were signs of growth until even artificial heat could not keep the cold out of the ground and the water.

Meanwhile, Bee women and children would secure the produce from the summer and organise it in rations before submitting reports to the Council for distribution. Male Bees would move further southeast, behind the mountain for grazing until the winter.

Rina tripped over a small flowerpot, sending dirt and seeds flying around her as she fell.

A hand grabbed her by the neck, and yanked her off the ground. “Why, you little...” Rina turned to stare into the face of an angry old Bee. “...stinking...”

A young man rushed in, whispering something in the old man’s ear. Rina could not make out his words clearly, something about Mole girls, rushed talk, and something about Hades. Whatever it was, it mollified the old man, who put her down, and dusted off his hands. He looked down at her strangely, turned, and walked away without a word.

The younger man patted her on the head. “Don’t worry about him, little girl, cold is working his joints, he gets like that sometimes...but, you!” Rina jumped to attention. “What’s your name?”

“Well Rina, I’m Dan, and you need to do two things, one of which is to watch your step—that’s food for the colony you just spilled. Understand?” Rina nodded vigorously. “Good. The second is to get home before nightfall. You Moles are really easy with your girls, but besides your mother, you got Beasts to worry about along the way. Now scram!”

“Hey! Watch where you’re going!” yelled a teenage Bee carrying roots and berries out of a small store. Rina turned and poked her tongue at him. The alleyways were crowded with Moles changing shifts, and Ants, Bees, and Beasts on their way back from the places they disappeared to while she went to school.

She could get home before her second mother, Chaya, and her sister, Hadar, if she was fast enough. They spent the afternoon at Hadar’s husband’s house. She was pregnant with his child, and officially married but his first wife had not passed yet, soon, but not yet. He was still in love with her and uncomfortable having Hadar stay in his house, but they visited.

Hadar was getting fat. Rina had tried to poke her belly but she’d pulled Rina’s head to her stomach to feel the baby’s kick. If it was a boy, only four more and Hadar would be finished with her pregnancy duties.

She slowed her pace and hid behind a large wooden cart full of scrap metal as a squad of Fish stepped out of a house dragging two unconscious teenage Moles by the hair, their faces dripping blood, followed by an Ant, his hands tied behind his back. Their leader, a short woman, landed her boot on one of their heads.

The flow of people along the alleyway hadn’t stopped, but a few paid attention and many more leaned over from small balconies and windows.

“The two Moles were found attempting to smuggle contraband into the tunnels, and this Ant, abetted them!” said the leader. More people were stopping now, there was something about sentencing that people wanted to hear, if only to have an opinion. One of the boys started struggling. A short, male Fish shocked him with a lancer, and he went numb again. “They will be flogged and thrown over the cliff! The Ant will serve three months penance in the cells and one working the mines! If there are any complaints, log them with the Priests!”

The Ant’s knees went weak at the word mine, but he managed a steady step as they dragged the two boys away and he followed them guarded by the rest of the squadron.

They walked past the scrap cart but didn’t see her crouched at boot-level. She dusted herself off as they rounded the bend curving down between the rows of houses towards the Fish quarters, and followed the smell of smoke around the mountain to where the Moles resided, guarded, and dug the Divine Undertaking.

The common room was empty when Rina cracked the door open. She shut it quietly behind her and rushed to her room, staying there reading until noises drifted through the door. She heard Hadar warming up the stove in the small kitchen by the window and talking to Chaya.

Her room was windowless, on the top floor of a three-story house built against and inside the mountain wall. There was just enough room for her bed, a small table for studies, and a string to hang her clothes. Each of her three sisters had rooms of their own, which made her brothers horribly jealous. Boys shared their rooms, and with five brothers, Rina’s few square feet were the envy of most of her male siblings.

She heard her sister shuffle her feet to a chair and breathe deeply. The pregnancy was weighing heavily on her, and now that her third mother was between children, she could relieve her of domestic duties.

“Rina?! Get out here!” Chaya’s summon drew her into the common room. “How was school?” she asked. Her smile slid from Rina to Hadar and back.

“Fine,” Rina said, and smiled back warmly at her second mother. Chaya was a loving woman, and had recovered well from carrying Noah. Her strength was returning, and she could get back behind the stove.

Rina nodded hesitantly, happy that Chaya had turned her attention back to the stove. Lying to Chaya was half of what she considered homework, and she would have recognised Hadar’s grunt for doubt at her sister’s honesty. Rina winked at Hadar, who smiled faintly, and pulled herself up to look out of the kitchen window.

Mole quarters spread east and west below the Divine Undertaking. Beneath them stood the Ant, Beast, and Bee neighbourhoods on a lower ridge below the Mole district, opening on the plantations. Stretching all the way down to the lower plateau before the cliff, the Fish quarters still occupied most of the colony, and ended in a perimeter wall that circled the settlement, manned day and night by armed Fish guards. Beyond the wall, smaller Fish communities dotted the edge of the cliff, overlooking the waters that were the world.

From the kitchen window, she could see down past the narrow streets of the Mole quarters, all the way to the furthest Fish settlements, distinguishable only by faint lights in the pitch darkness and dwarfed by the brilliance of the colony.

Rina’s mother had died two years earlier. After delivering Rina her health deteriorated, she could no longer bear as many children, nor could she offer any contribution to the Divine Undertaking. Community members had tried to convince her father to let her go, but he had stuck with her.

Dror and Ora, Rina’s mother, had had five children. Rina had two younger sisters and two younger brothers from her mother, two older brothers and an older sister, Hadar, from a woman she had never met, whom Dror had married before Ora. With Chaya’s baby boy, Noah, asleep in her father’s room, they totalled at nine.

Rina’s painful memories of her mother, frail and weak, too tired to move some days, were disappearing into Chaya’s warm smile and food.

Chaya was happy to have someone around the house helping her, first while she delivered and recovered, and now more than ever with Noah piercing the neighbourhood with screams, to help her stay sane. Rina looked up. Her second mother was leaning over the window, her face tense and hard.

“Rina,” she said, without turning away from the street. “Go fetch your little sisters; your father and brothers are coming up. Get the table ready.”

Bless the grain from Neptune’s winds

Bless the bread from Hades’ warmth

Bless the seeds sown by our hands

Freeze the world and warm our hearts.

Dror was pale throughout the blessings and even paler throughout dinner, unable to take more than a bite at a time. He left the table early, followed by Chaya, leaving Rina and her siblings to finish the meal alone.

After a few minutes of silence, Rina asked for permission to go to the bathroom. She walked to the small hallway where her father’s room stood across from the bathroom. After pretending to go, she instead tiptoed across the hall and stuck her ear to a small crack in the wooden door.

“...losing it...get worse every day...forget their orders and beat us for not following them, forget why they are beating us halfway through and beat us for it...” Her father coughed heavily, a wet, pulpy sound that made Rina’s dinner lurch in her stomach.

Rina checked the hall, and listened for footsteps from the dinner table; when she was sure they were still all seated, she glued her eye to the crack, trying to see her father.

Only glimpses of him were visible in the thick steam rising from a bowl at the foot of the bed by Chaya’s toes. She dipped a piece of cloth inside it and wiped his brow and face gently.

Dror caught his breath between fits of coughing. “...Eitan...go get...Eitan...”

The cough was getting worse. Rina could not make out the words her father formed, and stumbled forward when her second mother pulled the door open. “Rina!” she started.

“It’s alright,” Dror interjected. “It’s alright...let her in...you get Eitan...I’ll talk to him...later.”

Chaya gave Rina a long look, as if her second mother was for the first time, seeing her not as a child to care for, one in a long list of many, but unique, and foreign.

Rina shoved her way into the room, pushing past Chaya, diverting her eyes from her wearying gaze, and up to her father’s bed.

The shadows that danced on Dror’s face by the dinner’s candlelight revealed deep bruises around her father’s eyes now that she was close. He coughed up blood and doubled over. Rina yelped.

“It’s ok, sweetheart... just Hades...bubbling up... haha... nothing...we haven’t seen in the caves....a hundred times...” He attempted a smile, but his lips twisted in a rictus as he tried to stop himself from hacking up more blood.

A knock rang at the door, and her oldest brother Eitan walked in. She ran into his arms and started crying. Eitan rested a hand on her head and ran it through her hair. Hadar was standing in the doorstep, her eyes heavy and wet.

“It’s gonna be alright, Rina,” Eitan tried to reassure her, but her father chose that moment to go into a bout of damp, raspy breaths.

Hadar walked in to draw her out of her brother’s arms. She would not let go. Eitan forced her to the door with Hadar’s help, and closed it on them. The sliver of light under the door went out, and Rina heard a whisper coming from the room followed by another fit of coughing.

A storm was brewing on the horizon when Rina walked into the common room in the morning. Sirens rang from the perimeter wall, alerting the rest of the colony to the incoming onslaught of wind and water. From beyond the wall, the wind carried the sound of Fish drummers beating at the storm. Rising and falling with the gusts of wind between sirens, sticks thumped a deep bass rhythm on taut goatskin punctuated by rapid fire staccatos.

Dror, Eitan, and the rest of her brothers, were already underground and would not come back until the tempest had abated. In a few minutes, a Priest would come knocking to home-school the girls for the duration of the storm.

Chaya rose from her chair and shut the window when the wind began to knock candles over and blow cutlery off the table.

Rina sat down with a cup of tea at a table still spattered with red dots from when her father had sat less than an hour earlier. She reached over and found most of the stains were dry though some stuck wetly to her finger. She scrubbed them frantically with her pocket tissue, removing some, while leaving little pieces of lint glued over others.

She scrubbed until the Priest knocked and Hadar went to open the door for him, scrubbed until his hand stopped her, and he sat at the table.

Narcissus leaned over the pond, catching his own reflection in the stillness of the water. Water had not always been still. His Will and his Will alone had made it so. What trees would not bend to it would crack. What water did not still to it would spill. The land would bear forth the fruits of his desires, lest it wither and dry and crumble from sand to dust to powder, dissolving before his Will.

Narcissus leaned over the pond, catching his own reflection in the stillness of the water. But the sun rose high above and reflected in the water, blinding him to his image. So he built walls around the pond and a roof over his head so the sun would bother him no more.

Narcissus leaned over the pond, catching his own reflection in the stillness of the water. But the waters were dark and the weather grew cold. So he set about starting a fire to warm himself and mock the sun.

Narcissus leaned over the pond, catching his own reflection in the stillness of the water, in the shade of the roof, and the warmth of the fire. But the smoke burned his eyes, the roof trapped the air, and the water grew warm. From its depths rose a shape, a shape that was a hand, a hand that was a fist. And Neptune drew Narcissus into the pond, into the boiling waters which bubbled and bled, fiercer and louder and higher until they overcame the fire, burst through the roof, put out the sun, and spilled over the world...announcing a new Time.

“Rina! Rina Arfazadeh?!” A short, blond girl walked out of the examination room at the other end of the long hall, behind the Priestess calling out Rina’s name, her head low, but smiling faintly. Rina stood up.

Hadar had left only a few days after the storm. Dror had never come back. Eitan’s face had been sombre and he’d become unusually dark in the following days, but he’d never said what happened to their father. Even now, almost two years later sitting in the Priestess’ anteroom, waiting for her Fertility & Fitness Evaluation, she could still feel the honey-like stickiness of his drying blood on the table tingling under her fingertip. The Priest’s dismissive look at it—raising his eyebrows cynically as if telling her to grow up, it was time for Mole female duties—brought something up in her. Trembling with memory she walked into the medical room.

It was her first time seeing the kind of equipment used for Fitness & Fertility testing. These medical facilities were less clustered, and admitted only girls and women. This room had a bed larger and longer than her own or her father’s—Eitan’s now—and medical equipment she had never seen and did not understand. Everything gleamed with a weapon-like sheen and seemed invasive somehow, angry and intimidating.

A group of Ants was busying around the machines, making last-minute adjustments before leaving Rina alone with the Priestess. She pulled a chair behind a table, and sat in front of a list of names on a sheet.

Rina looked down at the paper and smiled inside. Why else would I be here? “Yes, Priestess,” she answered meekly.

Her inner smile must have broken through, because the Priestess’ face hardened suddenly. She slammed the pencil down and grabbed Rina’s chin, pulling her forward and madly scanning her face. “Are you fresh, girl?”

Rina was fresh. Eitan had refused to keep Chaya after Dror passed, claiming she was not fresh enough. Noah was her only child with Dror, but she had twelve other children from her two previous husbands, and Eitan was right to think she would not be as good a wife or mother as a younger girl. Later, Rina had asked Hadar what not being fresh meant—Hadar was pregnant for the third time now, and both of her children were girls—Hadar had told her and Rina had giggled that it must tickle.

The Priestess let go of her face, and she rocked back into the chair. “We’ll find out soon enough if you let Narcissus tempt you, girl. Makes my job easier if you have,” she said, ticked her name off the list, and nodded over Rina’s shoulder. “Head over to that bunk and take off your skirt.”

Rina looked up to the door from the couch and put down her drink. There was something familiar about the man who entered the comfort house. She felt an invisible hand pat her head, a sense of confusion and of being admonished. Dan!

The man smiled at her; if he recognised her he gave no sign. She remembered falling in the gardens—it seemed long ago but could not have been more than four years— and being picked up and saved from a hideous old man by a handsome young hero. What would her hero turn into inside these walls?

The conversation had started before she had even left the room. The two Beasts inside were fools, or did they think her as deaf and mute as the couch she lounged on?

Furniture has few privileges, listening in on sex-drunk, over-confident patrons was one of them. She would not be the first girl to curry favour with the Fish by reporting to them things said carelessly by patrons from other Castes.

Life is made of little things. People waste it looking for the one big thing instead of building it themselves out of tiny moments. She was one of those things now, a tiny thing, and a short moment.

The Priestess had confirmed Rina’s freshness with a hint of disappointment; it would have made her job easier indeed if she had let Narcissus tempt her, but not by much. The Fertility & Fitness Evaluation had been conclusive. Rina was barren, and for barren women, the choices were simple. Either leave for another Caste, hoping a male would take an infertile woman for wife and you could live the life of a house slave. Or choose the comfort houses, where you would be cared for, fed, and lodged until you were too old to serve the house’s patrons and you would serve as a maid. Un-fresh Mole girls did not get to choose, having chosen Narcissus over Hades.

She had chosen the comfort house as much out of ignorance as out of fear of living her life at the hands of non-Moles and their families—being at the mercy of libidinous husbands, jealous wives, cruel children, and the mockery of other Moles. Her mother had told her about Cast-outs, ‘at least you can eat goats; when a goat dies you can skin it for its hide.’ Rina had added that goats were also too stupid to know better. Her mother had liked that, even as she was bleeding internally, dying from a failed pregnancy.

Shutting the door behind her, she stepped onto the balcony overlooking the common room. Rina doubted she would have chosen otherwise even if she had known. An older woman bumped into her, cursed under her breath and disappeared into a room, letting smoke and the hint of string-music drowned in male and female voices drift out into the hallway. She avoided the common room and headed for the staircase.

Rina went to her room in the basement, where all the girls bedded. When she had first seen her room, almost six years earlier, she had giggled again, remembering what Hadar had told her about her freshness, and pounced on the soft, large bed that was to be hers in a room with five other young Mole girls. The room had been empty when the Priestess handed her off to one of the maids to show her to the girls’ quarters, and start her training.

There were no windows in the basement, but all the rooms on the upper floors had views over the colony and onto the ocean. The better rooms had verandas, and the best rooms, for councilmen, larger balconies. Girls were only allowed to leave once a year for two weeks to visit their fathers, or oldest male relative, and were thus especially fond of the councilmen.

Training lasted for a year, night after night. Try though she did, there are some things you can never learn, but of the few things she did some could not be unlearned. The body has a memory. Some lessons just stay etched into the skin. No matter how many showers you take, how many drinks you have, no matter how hard you scratch, through the dermis to the raw nerve, some itches never stop, and you learn to live with a prickling under your skin. And when the shaking stops and the sobs subside, either the itch becomes energy, or you scratch yourself to death.

“We can’t afford these daily affronts to our authority much longer Amirpour. You and your Caste have assured us that you had dealt with the dissident Moles years ago.”

Amirpour wasn’t used to being addressed by his surname by anybody outside his Caste, but Supreme Councilman Marandi wasn’t one for protocol. “We have, Councilman, which is why nothing happened since we crushed most of their suspected leaders, but you know as well as I how fragile we are. Moles will outnumber the other Castes eventually, but there is no rebellion here I can assure you.”

“Then how do you account for the fifty beheadings the first six months this year, and the other fifty since?”

“Copy-cats, Councilman. No doubt we have a killer, killers, on our hands but there is no coordination to any of this, no rise in contraband, no one with enough authority to pick up where we left them. I can assure you, again, for the seventh time I recall, that this is not a rebellion.”

The Fish had good reason to worry. Beheading and dismemberment leave an indelible mark. They barely left their quarters except to patrol the colony or patronise the brothels and even the latter seldom anymore. But Amirpour had wasted his last two sentences and admonishments on a mad man.

Marandi was an old man. It was amazing in fact that he hadn’t dived over the cliff years ago, but in these circumstances... He was staring straight at him, his eyes completely unfocused but his face holding on to its seriousness. He must be well practiced, even though the fish secret had been out of the net for a hundred years now. They were all mad, every last one of them, and they still believed only the priesthood knew the extent of it.

The Councilman’s eyes gradually regained their focus, and he nodded absently at whatever had been said. “Do you have a lead? We will crack down on the mines like they’ve never seen-”

“That might be hasty, Councilman, we do not know who this is yet, and have you considered that it might not be Moles at all? General discontent has spread among the Castes as you well know.”

Marandi’s face grew hard, and suspicious. “You Priests have always known how to play your hand haven’t you? You imply more than you know and yet you seem confident. What do you hide, Amirpour?”

“Nothing, our fate is tied into yours,” he said in mock alarm. “If anything were to happen to you we would-”

“It does work for you that way doesn’t it? You tried your best to stop us from leaving the caves when the waters receded, then you insisted on the Divine Undertaking, and somehow the Moles still despise us more than they do you. Things always work out for the priesthood.”

Amirpour wondered how much of this conversation Marandi would remember. They weren’t usually this insightful anymore, but it wouldn’t matter, all they needed was some nudging in the right direction. “They will be found, Councilman, they all will, but we can’t be everywhere, I would advise you, and its up to you to take it, to apply mild pressure on the other Castes, nothing excessive, just enough to get names, and follow the trail.”

Marandi looked out his window to the perimeter wall. Guards changed rotations, trading weapons and shields. In almost four hundred years since they had left the caves they had never encountered anyone else. The Fish guarded nothing, their weapons had always been pointed at the colony. “Yes,” he nodded. “Yes, mild pressure, and more when it’s needed...that will be all, Amirpour, my regards to Priestess Gilani, we’ll reconvene next week.”

Even among the Priests, Gilani stood out, a priestess with white-blond hair, red eyes, and almost translucent skin that enabled visions of Hades in the profoundest of unbelievers. Tall as your average Beast, Gilani was a force to be reckoned with among most of the Castes and indeed in the Council.

When Amirpour walked in to her office, he found her staring at her window, also appraising the guards circulating the wall in Marandi’s manner, a glass of something deep red in her hand. “Marandi sends his regards.”

“As he would...” She turned away from the window. “But the situation is to our advantage if we stir things well, the rebellion might just succeed this time.”

Amirpour paused to think, and Gilani smiled. They made a wonderful pair, always at odds in public, or often enough that few suspected their relationship, its efficiency and intimacy.

Amirpour was always the smarter one. “We might. Dror was sloppy, getting rid of him was best, but the elder Moles are corrupt and lazy, they prey on the comfort girls, hoard rations for favours and they will never act. Eitan is...impressive, insane, but impressive, but he is just as reckless as his father, worse even.”

She shook her head. “Dror was sloppy, but the boy is a leader. The younger Moles follow him, and kill for him. The Fish abuse the comfort girls, he will not like that. What was your advice for Marandi?”

Amirpour smirked slyly and winked. “To apply mild pressure on the other Castes. I don’t know if the Dream makes them violent, or if it terrifies them into brutality, or something else, it doesn’t matter. They will overreact, and bloodshed will ensue. That’s all they know to do, that’s exactly what they will do. We will gain more traction with the other Castes, and turn council members our way... If the boy goes the distance that is.”

“Then we will have to advise him somehow, and channel his anger...he is the best chance we have. The Fish have become too dangerous, to the Priests, the Moles, the Divine Undertaking and everybody else.” She turned back towards the window. “They will kill us all eventually—I have no doubt about it.”

Amirpour walked up behind her and rested a hand on her lower back. “I will have a word with the boy. I might have just what he wants...”

Even the balconies had lost their attractiveness with time. Rina stepped to the thin balustrade, and let the ocean breeze hit her in the face. An Ant Councilman snored behind her, impervious to the cold drafts from the open doors. On a lower level, two Beasts appeared from between a row of buildings running furiously.

The order preceded three armed Fish in hot pursuit of the Beasts who split down separate alleyways hoping to lose their pursuers. One of them headed back towards the upper level, the second down.

She lit a thin cigarette and lost track of them between the houses until a large crash came from a lower level and a horn rang. The first fugitive had been caught.

From where she stood, she could see the second Beast making his way cautiously between houses, and the two Fish closing in on him from both sides. She saw him pause at the incoming footsteps, turn and pause again at the other, then brace himself to fight.

Both Fish rounded the corners and unloaded their shock lances, the two bright flashes meeting across the alley in seared flesh.

The Fish’s crackdown was mostly a rumour to the comfort girls, but from what she’d heard the murders had increased the Fish’s brutality which in turn gave way to more murders. The Fish spared no Caste—save the Priests, who appeared to oppose the violence. When they couldn’t arrest, beat, or kill someone they took out their energies on the comfort houses.

The first runaway and his captor had crashed into another patrol. All seven patrolmen congregated around his companion’s corpse. Their voices didn’t carry but she saw one give brief orders, three of them walk off handling the prisoner and carrying the body, while the others pointed at her comfort house, and made their way up the streets.

“Eitan, look, it’s, it’s, it’s...whatever they’ve told you, it’s not true, it’s not true, Eitan, it’s not true!” Mole Elder Nimrod Barghani’s falsetto voice rang over the edge of panic.

“We were friends with your father, Eitan...brothers even! And he knew better than to believe the Priests, Eitan, you know he did!” said Avram Sultani. Standing next to him was Elder Gilad Shahzad, his lips sealed in fright staring at Eitan walking up to them in a fire-suit.

“I know you did,” Eitan said. “I know. He spoke highly of you that last night, when he took the beating and you held your tongues. Especially you Sultani, he loved you my Father, respected you too...”

The three men standing bound inside the deep cave couldn’t feel the blistering heat building up around them, but they could see the lesions forming on their skin nonetheless. The drug cocktail they’d been given would numb them to anything, but knocking them unconscious would defeat the purpose.

“Avram Sultani, he’d say,” Eitan went on. “You can depend on Avram, my brother Avram as you put it.”

Shahzad and Baraghani were silent now, all three of them old, well fed, and until this morning expecting to hear from the Priests that Eitan had been caught, or killed. They had wanted the overzealous boy dead shortly after Dror had passed, but he had taken it upon himself to stir things up.

He turned to a group of Moles in fire-suits, standing next to one of the walls and nodded at them. They drilled a hole in the bottom of the cavern, directly across from the prisoners who started shaking.

He raised a hand and the drilling stopped. “Gag them, and bring the priest.”

“Priest,” Eitan asked the newcomer “are these the men who spread rumours about me to the Beast councilmen?”

He nodded again, and the drilling resumed, releasing a thick stream of lava that washed away flesh and bone. Their eyes bulged above their gags, they writhed against their chains, and muffled screams covered the sound of the wall breaking open to more lava.

“Isn’t this somewhat cruel, Eitan? There are people watching, and people talk,” asked Amirpour.

“They don’t feel a thing,” Eitan replied. “They’re pumped so full of stimulants and anesthetics they’ll live until they’ve melted to the waist. There’s not much you can do after that, but they don’t feel a thing.”

The Priest pinched his nose, closed his eyes, sighed and said, “The killing must stop, Eitan. We can help, tremendously in fact, but you have to stop the killings, the other Castes won’t take this much longer, and we still need to change minds in the Council.”

“Agreed,” Eitan replied, “in the meantime you turn a blind eye to my operations in the tunnels. We’ll have an army, Priest, just as long as you work your way with the council members.”

Rina held herself up against the wall by a hand. She could not see through her left eye, but felt the throbbing in her temples; she passed her tongue timidly over the torn flesh above her lips, stinging herself.

She cleaned blood out of her right eye enough to see herself in the mirror. The lower half of her face was covered in it; the bite to her lower lip had torn most of the skin off.

When the Dream took over, Fish could be unpredictable; some would freeze mid-motion, some would drop unconscious for minutes or hours, but they inevitably came to. They knew they were mad and what they hated the most was having someone witness it. They would go limp, they would go crazy. The closer they were to jumping over the cliff the more brutal they became.

On those nights, she needed medical assistance, and several days rest. She used to look for sympathy, but they never apologised, and there was never a measure of pity—just shock, and sometimes a faint echo of her fear. The Dream was all-consuming, and did not allow for even a sliver of empathy. When drums rolled on those mornings she would not hear them; there were no windows in the basement.

She held herself against the sink, leaving bloody fingerprints on the stone. Her vision blurred. She held her hand to the mirror and leaned on it but her fingers slipped and smeared the glass. Some Fish had their favourites, and knowledge that this would be this Fish’s last visit helped her cross over into limbo, but it would not heal her wounds.

“You’re bound to have goggles lying around somewhere. Throw a blue shirt on me and tell them I’m an Ant.”

The voices were familiar. Her left eye hurt too much to even try and open, bandaged by the feel of it. Vision out of her right eye was not steady enough to make out the speakers’ features, and the lights were dimmed, but she distinguished two voices, one male and one female.

“I like them safe, so did she, and you know exactly what I mean. How do you expect me to handle this?” snapped the female voice.

“It’s not the first time we do this. Tell the Priests she died and you handed her over for recycling, pays to have Ants handy, that kind of thing.”

The word Fish sent a jolt of pain through her face. She let go of a moan, lifting herself up from the mattress a brief moment before falling back into the pillow. The man approached the bed, leaned over her and ran his hand soothingly through her hair. Her first impulse was to recoil, but every movement was painful.

“Don’t worry, little sister, he’s been dealt with, I’m here to take you back.” Eitan came suddenly into focus. His face was harder than she remembered; the scar across his left eye was also new, and still healing.

“Good. She’s awake.” Rina recognised Adina’s sharp tone; or rather, she recognised the no-nonsense undertone in the old maid’s voice. Adina rose from her chair and approached the bed, but did not spare Rina a glance. She turned to Eitan. “The Fish will come back. You take her now. You might have done this before, but it’s the last time you do it with me—understood?”

Eitan nodded at her, and bent down over Rina. “It’s gonna hurt.” He snatched her off the bed and started walking towards the wall at the far end of the room.

Rina was too dizzy to feel pain. She had not visited her family in four years, and had decided she would never go back. Eitan was barely there, Hadar had died soon after delivering her seventh child, her brothers were either married or dead, and she couldn’t be around all the new children, or their revolving mothers.

It was then that she had realised the irony of her circumstances. On the one hand she would never have to suffer the tremendous pressures of childbirth that Chaya had made seem so easy. On the other, she would never know what owning her freedom would mean. If she were going to be passed from man to man until she passed away or was cast away, then it would be the houses for her she’d thought. That was before she had met her first Fish patron.

Adina ran up to them and stuck a syringe in her arm. A surge of energy pulsed through her legs and the dizziness faded along with the numbness in her face. “Careful not to talk, girl. It only feels like you can.”

Eitan pushed a stone on the wall and a trap door appeared in the basement floor, sending a gush of hot air up from the tunnel beneath it. Her brother lowered her to the floor, whistled down the tunnel, and footsteps rushed towards them. Eitan lifted her up, and lowered her into the opening.

A group of three Moles was waiting for them with glowsticks. They turned them on and activated glowstrips along the tunnel walls with them. Iridescent strips lining the walls and ceiling spread light and colour down their segment of the tunnel, too intensely for Rina’s weak eye to handle.

When she opened it again, the Moles were wearing high-intensity light visors, made for prolonged exposure to lava and drill sparks when Moles dug new caves. They wrapped her in a blanket. Eitan started lowering himself into the tunnel.

She heard Adina’s voice through the opening. “Is it worth it boy? Are they any happier down there than in here?”

Eitan paused holding himself up on the edge of the opening. “You can’t compare happiness, Adina. How happy are you? Stay safe.”

Eitan landed next to her, hitting a dial on the wall. The door slipped shut overhead, followed by the slamming and suction of a plastic seal that barred any air in the tunnel from slipping into the basement rooms. In her six years at the comfort house she had never suspected the tunnel even existed.

Eitan grabbed her shoulder. “We have to hurry, the overseers won’t be much longer. Try to keep up. I’ll be right behind you. Dov, cover our back, and kill the light.” The glowstrips faded to black and the three lifted their visors with relief.

“Ethel, Davi, cover the front. If a Fish or anybody you don’t recognise pops their head...” he patted an elongated black metal tube on his left leg, “aim to kill. That’s for you too, Dov. We’ll deal with bodies later. Now go!”

In the faint light of the cave, sulphur drifted from underground pockets caressing Rina’s cheek and tearing up her eyes.

She donned her helmet before placing the drill directly between her legs. A sub-zero draft whistled its way from the mouth of the caves high above and far behind her down the narrow halls, and sent a rare shiver through her neck and shoulders.

The motion of the drill freed stones in small clusters, sprinkling around her feet. The smell of sulphur intensified as a hole started to appear in the rock. A gust of smoke rose through it, revealing the familiar red glow underneath. She raised her helmet long enough to spit through the crack, her saliva turning almost instantaneously to a puff of mist. She thrust her boot heel through the fragile crust, tossed the drill on her back, stretched her arms alongside her body and let herself drop.

Halfway through the fall she activated the cleats inside her boots and landed on the rocky surface, knee down, with a crunch.

She was on a tiny, rocky island inside a smaller sub-cave in the middle of a lava swirl. Left, right, and all around her, boiling lava spun and flowed in a stream leading out of the cave and deeper underground. Her fire-suit and helmet’s sensors absorbed the heat, powering her in-suit equipment.

She shot her arms out at an angle in front of her, lodging hooks into the ceiling, swinging herself from the rocky island onto a larger ridge by the cave wall. The hooks shot back into her suit as she landed and she loosened the drill on her back, and tightened her helmet. The helmet was equipped with a light-deflecting visor, but Rina, and the other comfort girls, had no use for them.

Running through the pitch dark tunnels three years earlier, Rina had wondered how her brother and his friends managed, without using the glowstrips, to stay afoot and find their way in the maze of illegal tunnels that seemed to stretch through every quarter in the colony. Eitan had told her that eventually she would not need light either. She had not believed him then, but he had been right.

After centuries in the caves, Moles were genetically predisposed to working in dark environments. Male Moles laboured at the Divine Undertaking from the age of five from sunrise to sundown. Their eyes weren’t worth much in the sunlight but had excellent night vision. Mole girls had always carried the trait, but until comfort girls were enrolled in the rebellion, their ability was latent. Not anymore. She could see perfectly in sunlight or darkness.

The helmet was a nuisance. Though necessary, it was uncomfortable, and the light-deflecting function got in the way of her eyesight. Not by much, but it was distracting when passing through different types of lighting. She could not remove it or her face would break out in blisters from the heat. The other comfort girls had the same difficulties. Eitan said they would have to deal with it. Smuggling equipment was a crime, and an unsupervised request for modifications would be suspicious. Ants were discreet, but their discretion might end with a Fish inquiry in their affairs—they had things of their own to hide—or again, it might not. One never knew, but Eitan would not risk failure because his soldiers were uncomfortable.

She didn’t see much of him at all come to think of it. He was distant and much darker than she’d remembered as a girl. The sombreness following Dror’s death had grown inside of him. It gave him purpose, but sometimes she wondered who he was.

Rina adjusted the zoom on her visor and scanned the cave. The crust she stood on circled it almost entirely, except for two holes on either end allowing the lava to flow. There was no exit she could see except for the hole she had come down through. Rather than circle the cave, she repeated the operation to the opposite wall, bouncing off the central island just long enough to lunge to the other side.

The moment she landed, her suit and helmet registered large volumes of heat radiating from the cave wall directly ahead of her. She applied her hands to the surface; the effect was immediate, her bodysuit’s power gauge hit full capacity in less than a second. She was at a dead end though. She stuck her helmet to the surface, powering it and activating audio-sensors, scanning for the slow motion grinding of hot stone behind the wall.

Small fissures were appearing on the rock, and a closer look showed thin cracks reaching halfway around the wall from either opening in the cave base, turning the wall into a spider web of connecting cracks in the rock. She only had a few minutes, likely less, before the magma broke through and inundated the cave.

The rumble deepened, and small flakes of stone started crumbling from the wall. High-pressured sulphur blasted stone chips at Rina and into the lava stream, and droplets of magma leaked through, sending ripples through the cracks with a powerful crunch as the wall gave way to the superheated basalt behind.

Rina landed on the small central island, instinctively sending her hooks through the hole and into the ceiling of the grotto above and shot herself upwards in a spin.

The explosion hurled large chunks of rock across the cave, red-hot slag pouring from one cavern to the other and filling it to the brim. Rina pierced through the hole just as the smaller sub cave’s ceiling collapsed under toe, connecting both caves into a pool of fire directly beneath her.

Her options were limited, but her suit and helmet were operating at full power. Her suit could withstand the immense heat and weight of magma for up to fifteen seconds. She should not need that long.

She plunged headfirst into the boiling swirl, supercharging her suit, and propelling herself straight ahead under the surface towards the opening she had drilled to get inside what was then the upper cave. It should remain open above the downpour, but the tremors could bring stones down and leave her trapped outside. She had only a few seconds left before the suit melted, but the magma gave her almost unlimited energy. She shot herself out of the swirl, connected her hooks to the ceiling and threw herself through the hole seconds before it crumbled and closed in on her, catching the hooks’ chains, pulling her sharply back, and slamming her hard into the floor.

The suit and helmet glowed hues of orange, red, and yellow on the outside, radiating huge volumes of heat from the magma away from her. Anybody who approached her unequipped would instantly combust. Inside the suit, the effect was of intense cool. She got to her knees and disconnected what was left of her hooks and drill. She turned back to see her suit had burned her imprint into the rock she had landed on.

Rina raised her visor to catch her breath. The suit was cooling down fast, the timer read three seconds. She would need a better suit, and no matter what Eitan thought, she would get the modifications she wanted. Fifteen seconds was not enough for one, and she would do something about that blasted helmet for two. And someone else would finish the tunnel. They would have to slag the rock to glass, seal the hole shut and double back, but they were close, very, very close...

The caves’ collapse sent a ripple through the illegal tunnels, opening a large sinkhole directly under the Fish quarters and swallowing up houses, crushing scores of Fish, Beasts, and Ants in the middle of the night.

Conveniently, it was Eitan and his crew who were called in by the Priests to investigate the damage and prevent another crater from opening. They were quick to clear out the debris and even quicker to fill the hole. What could be identified as Ant and Beast would be recycled in the morning; the Fish would tend to their own body parts. He would need someone on the Council to brush off the incident and some Moles would pay for this, but they all knew the risks. Close as they were, time was running short.

“Hmm, you could, sure, you could, you wouldn’t be able to move much, but you could. Yes,” said Councilman Tamhidi.

Rina turned away from him. No matter how high they rose in the community, Ants rarely climbed above their station in relation to each other. The old man had built his reputation as a personal equipment mechanic, and that alone had gained him enough respect from the other Castes to join the Council, but that was all he would ever be to other Ants: the best personal equipment mechanic in Ant memory.

His underground lab was connected to the illegal tunnels, as were the three maintenance workshops he ran in the other quarters. Tamhidi was one of the few people Rina knew she could trust not to talk to the Fish. Conspiracies have their benefits, although she was not as confident that he would not talk to Eitan, she knew the challenge intrigued him, and she had placed all her chips on his enthusiasm.

The lab was the most cluttered place Rina had ever seen. The ceiling was lined with hanging propeller engines and other large experimental models too heavy for a person to carry. He cleared a table by brushing off all its contents onto the floor and laid out schematics of mole fire-suits and helmets to ponder over, oblivious to Rina’s curiosity.

She slipped on a screwdriver, kicked it under a table, and picked up one of the books Tamhidi stacked up in a corner and used as an occasional table or seat. She could not read much beyond the title—there were more symbols than she was used to, some of which were missing entirely, others completely illegible.

“You read the old tongue, girl?” Tamhidi chuckled from the other side of the lab. He left the map and approached her, making his way around a table, stepping over a mechanical hand-drill, and crushing a roll of scrolls on the floor.

“There is not much for you to find in here anyway, unless you’re suddenly interested in gravity reversal, but that’s not why you’re here.” He took the book from her hand and put it back on the pile. “Try this. You should understand more.” He walked back to the map. “And if you don’t,” he chuckled again, “why, you made it here once, you’ll make it again.”

“That first word is guerrilla!” he laughed, without turning his attention from the schematics.

Guerrilla warfare. She put the book down. The old man was irritating. She was not going to ask him what it meant, choosing to nod silently instead.

Tamhidi was one of the councilmen who frequented the comfort houses. Rina had not met him before being dragged into the rebellion, but the old man had discontinued his practice after siding with her brother. Ants were usually distracted, and engrossed in thoughts known only to themselves and understandable only by other Ants and apprentices. She had never heard of an Ant harming one of the girls but she would not vouch for the purity of his thoughts right then and there.

What she was doing was dangerous, forbidden, and much worse according to her brother, frivolous. But if Tamhidi thought he had himself a comfort girl on his hands he would find out how precious his hands were and would never take Rina, or any of the former comfort girls, for granted again.

His long blue robs swished as he spun from the table, grinning at her. “Come back in a week, girl! Come back in a week. You might want to hide, your brother being who he his...” He paused as if about to add something, but changed his mind. “Well he’s been kind to you, so I hear, but he wouldn’t like your being here you should know!” and winked as he mentioned Eitan.

He would not talk, but he might ask for something in exchange. He was a councilman after all, no matter how hard he pretended otherwise. His robes were soft and thick, unlike the other Ants’ blue working shirts and slacks meant for ease of motion, thin-threaded and loose for air and comfort. Ant forges could be scalding hot, barely less than the deeper caves. It was obvious that Tamhidi had not wielded a hammer himself for years; whatever strength he had had in his youth was long turned to fat under his bulky robes.

He pressed a button under the table, and the wall slid into a circular opening onto the tunnel. Rina activated a glowstick and ignited the strips along the walls. She sped down the tunnel shutting down the lights at every intersection, less for the Fish than for Mole patrols. Eitan’s sister could get away with a lot, but it would not do for her to set other girls the wrong example.

Running in the dark would have been safer but she had only caught a glance of the map and the maze was complex and booby-trapped, and she had left her helmet behind on purpose.

Tamhidi might talk, but Hades was rising and Mole women would no longer be subjected to comfort houses or pregnancy duties—otherwise what were they fighting for?

She turned a dark corner and slammed head-on into a band of three Moles, two helmetless, heavily armed males and one female with a slit burlap sack hiding her face.

Rina slammed her glowstick on the wall flooding the cavern with light, momentarily distracting both guards. The closest shut his eyes and reached for his glowstick. She spun and caught him in the back of the neck with the flat of her hand, knocking him unconscious before he hit the lights in the tunnel. The second guard was hastily tying his helmet; she tipped her weight on her right leg and slammed her left foot in his face, crushing his visor. He stumbled back and slumped against the wall.

Rina turned to the girl, and ripped the sack from over her head. She did not know her name, but recognised her as one of the former comfort girls. She pinned her to the wall. “Where are they taking you?”

The girl looked her square in the eye and grinned. “Sorry, we’re not all privileged enough to be Eitan’s sister,” she said belittlingly.

The girl spat it on Rina’s suit. “Yeah, can’t expect any better from you either, can we? There’s things you don’t understand. Look at you. You’re not one of us, Rina Arfazadeh. You never really were.”

Rina did not understand what the girl meant, and could not place her. She knew her from one of the teams, but she was not a team leader, so why would she have known? But that was not what she meant. Everybody knew Rina, but she implied that everyone was in on a little secret except for her. And she did not like the scorn in her voice.

The girl kept her eyes locked on Rina’s, but her hands took hold of Rina’s glowstick and the lights went out. Rina’s eyes took only a few seconds to adjust, but not before feet shuffled on the floor and a hand grabbed her by the neck pulling her back, another twisting her arm. A Coil wrapped around and locked her arms, chest, and back.

She leapt in the air, bringing her knee up into the person’s chest, bounced back and landed on her ankle, twisting it. Her efforts only made the Coil tighter, and the muscles in her arm were met with twice the resistance every time she flexed. She could feel her chest cave in slowly as her ribs threatened to crack and crush through her heart.

She heard Dov’s voice as he flipped her over, loosened the Coil, and tied a collar around her neck. “So, causing the death of three djangi was not enough for you? How many more warriors will you take from us? Do you have any idea of the stakes? You’ve had it easy enough. This time...”

He looked at her, his irises flashing through barely noticeable iridescent shades that were not unlike the glowstrips on the walls, his pupils expanding and shrinking frenetically in the dark, filtering the little light in the darkness into an infrared he could make sense of.

“This time you will. This time I think he will want to talk to you himself. You’re gonna have to learn some things if you want this arrangement to continue.” He turned to the girl. “Are you alright?” She nodded, and placed the sack back over her head.

He turned and kicked his partner awake in the chest. “Get up! Drag her to the secret council hall. I’ll deliver this one to Tamhidi and meet you there. Look out for that one; she thinks she’s special.”

The second guard lifted Rina up and placed a board under her body, tied it to hooks on his shoulder pads, locked his helmet around her head, turned the visor blind, and dragged her behind him down the tunnel.

The hall, a simple, brightly lit circular room, was crowded with members of other Castes resting against walls. A large central table lay covered with maps of the tunnels and reports of weapons caches, sinkhole locations, and designs for explosive devices.

Representatives were seated at the table, each Caste occupying a separate side, with four openings, one on each side, into an open space in the centre.

Ants were nearest to the entrance, in shades of blue. Bees were seated further up on the right in hooded yellow windbreaker coats, some holding cattle poles they also used for stick fighting. The poles were light, hard, and telescopic, they could also be split in two and reattached, and were very flexible. Farming leaves a lot of time for fighting so Bees knew how to put their poles to good use. Across from them, Beast representatives wore their characteristic reddish working clothes. Even without them, their intricate facial tattoos marked them apart from the other Castes. Beasts were after a few hundred years much larger than other members of the colony, but they made it a habit to send only their largest representatives—male or female—to any meeting, secret or public, making them appear intimidatingly more powerful than the other Castes, and occupying much more space at the table.

At the head of the table, Eitan was whispering to a Priest dressed in a white robe. No one had paid any attention to Rina as she was dragged in. Each Caste was busy preparing, agreeing on final talking points; each plotting their seat at the table once the Fish were overthrown.

The guard dragged her through the nearest opening past the Ant delegation, and rolled her onto the floor stopping the buzz of greedy murmur around the room.

Their sudden movement had made the Mole delegation visible. Even with lights, especially with lights, Moles’ brown suits and helmets made them almost invisible against cave walls. It was hard to estimate their number until motion made them appear against the background. There must have been a hundred Moles at the meeting, as many as the other Castes put together, but no more than twenty had been visible at the table. The other members reacted with surprise and anger at Moles appearing among them from what they thought was solid wall.

There were only three Priests, two male and one female, but Priests never came in large numbers. At first they had wanted to keep their Caste separate from the rebellion, as advisors, but Eitan insisted on a permanent delegation that could be held accountable if, for reasons of their own, the Priests decided to throw their luck in with the Fish. He could not win the rebellion without the Priests yet there was little sympathy for their presence. Priests were manipulative and deceitful. They had never given the Moles their freedom, instead playing them as pawns in their power struggle with the Fish. But without them the Moles would never sway the entire colony, not even with the help of those present at the meeting and their many cells throughout the settlements.

The slamming of the doors behind the guards was the signal for the clamour to start again. Rina could not make out the individual accusations thrown at her, but she could tell from the few looks she glimpsed curled up on the floor that no one in the room was happy to see her, least of all her brother.

Eitan silenced the room by rising from his chair and stepping into the open space. He flipped Rina over. For a moment the coil tightened and she could feel sharp needles of pain shooting down her arms. The pressure faded as Eitan pressed the coil, removed it, and dropped it to the floor where it recoiled with a whiplash into a small two-inch rubbery circle.

He yanked her up by her braid until her toes touched the floor and then dropped her. Her scalp throbbed under the strain. She jumped up and swung at him, but he caught her blow and sent her tumbling back.

“Three Moles had to die for your carelessness, and you haven’t had enough?”

Rina had been told about the executions. The Fish had insisted on them, backed by a mob of Ants and Beasts.

A towering Beast female sprung from her chair, slamming her hands down on the wood and sending a shockwave that lifted her quarter of the table from the ground. “Three Moles?! Three?! We lost twelve Beasts in that ‘accident’, Mole. Twelve!” Rina did not know her, but had the sense that she had precedence over the Beasts present at the meeting. She leaned over the table glaring down at Rina. “And this one gets to walk? How convenient. No one gets to walk.”

“What Councilwoman Majidi means,” said a Bee, impervious to Majidi’s knuckles grinding on the table, “is that Moles may have suffered a public execution, but Beasts and Ants have their own grievances. Indeed, the Bees-”

“Bees have no business in that neighbourhood at night; likely, he was trading favours for food, yes?” an Ant Rina recognised as Ariel Jafari started. “But we have only a few grievances, three as well as a matter of fact, but they count double, Eitan, for they were children. The adults we recycled, but the children were too young. They will know neither Neptune nor Hades, so how do you expect to compensate us for their souls?”

Eitan spun on him. “Compensate? Compensate? So it is only Moles who should die? Only Moles who should dig, and bleed, and lead the return to the Cave? Your involvement has a cost; you want a seat at the table when we overthrow the Fish? Then pay the price in blood.”

He sat back down at the table and stared at his sister. After a pause, he nodded to the wall on either side of the door. Two Mole guards unfolded themselves from the stone, only their faces visible for a short while against the rock. They donned their helmets. “Strip her to her underwear and throw her into one of the sweathouses. Give her one day’s supply of water, no more.” He turned to Rina, “I tried, but you’re gonna have to learn hard. I’ll speak to you in three days, if you live. Get her out of here before she starts a riot.”

Three days in solitary confinement gives you time to reflect, and despite the pain and thirst, Rina found traces of clarity between blackouts. She was certain of two things: that she and the comfort girls—those who were willing to fight for it—deserved as much respect in the rebellion as the men, and short of Eitan giving it to her, she would take it.

Remembering the comfort girl’s scorn and her words in the hallway stung as she shifted uncomfortably from warm rock to warmer rock. She would make sure that changed.

She woke up inside a healing tank. Two Priests were leaning over it with devices that emitted low-level radiation over her burns activating the healing agent in the thick, translucent ointment that glowed on her skin.

Naked under the Priests’ scrutiny, a memory of the comfort house flashed across her mind and anger bubbled up under the slight tingling of the ointment binding itself to her burns. It hit her in the stomach and spread throughout her body right to the tip of every hair strand like static. The feeling grew warm, turning her muscles to jelly and making her bones ache. The warmth turned to shaking, an uncontrollable thought-shattering quiver.

Every emotion she had swept away night after night and built walls and lies around, shot through every nerve. A flood of images, of shame, satisfied confusion, blinding pleasure and agonising pain, hit her in waves.

In the midst of mindless sensations, one thought seemed to make its way against the gales of primitive instincts, steadying her with every heartbeat.

First it was one thought in the flood of vengefulness and self-loathing, but it started echoing every thought, settling in her spine, answering each trampling of her esteem, each violence endured, each submissive humiliation.

When she opened her eyes, the anger was gone; the memories were there, but they read like someone else’s story. The shame—the itch under her skin, the prickling she could never scratch—was gone. In its place she sensed a strange sense of calm, of being both supercharged and yet at her most peaceful. She had not felt the electric tingle ahead of a storm for almost ten years, that nanosecond when the wind abated and the world froze before unleashing Hell, but she recognised it in herself. No storm could shake her anymore, and no stone could burn her.

“Don’t you feel any regret for the lives lost, girl?” asked Councilwoman Majidi.

Across the dais from Majidi standing in a helmetless fire-suit Rina sensed the question was loaded.

The hulking woman sat on a chair next to Eitan, atop a flight of steps. The room was not completed yet, ending abruptly behind the podium, the walls and ceiling still filled with cracks and holes.

Only the entrance was finished, the stone doors plated with bronze, and the walls smoothed and decorated on the right side with a fresco of Hermes carving a hammer out of a mountain. The lower half of the mountain was hollow, inside a dragon held on a leash by his master blew flames in vain towards the chimney. The tiny puffs of smoke rising from the mountain were barely as large as Hermes’ eyes. They all knew the story of how Hermes kept Azhi-Dahaka at bay while he shaped the world. On the left side, Fereydoon, David, and Kaveh, at the foot of the hill left by Hermes’ labour, were tying Zahak to two pillars under Maccabee’s watchful eye. Whatever the room was, Eitan had big plans for it.

“They died for your recklessness, little sister, there is no glory to this,” Eitan interjected.

She focused on her brother. “No, Eitan, they died for yours. What is this place? A throne room? Has Hades crowned you king? We are slaves, Eitan—where’s the glory in that?”

Eitan did not move, but his body tensed and the deep scar across his eye crimsoned darkly.

Majidi smirked. “Dror’s blood aye?” She looked slyly at Eitan. “Well, girl, we’ll find out soon enough if you’ve learned your lesson. Off to your comfort duties with you-”

Rina launched herself at her. Majidi moved faster than Rina had thought possible, leaving the chair vacant and appearing behind Rina, hands locked onto either side of her head. If she moved, her neck would snap.

“Missing your helmet, girl?” said Majidi with no satisfaction, Eitan’s face held even less.

He rolled a leaf into a cone, sparked a match on the chair and lit it. His face had changed. She remembered the gentle giant who had pushed her out of the room the last night she saw her father. That was how she’d wanted to remember him, before he carried her out of the comfort house. This man was not her brother. He might think he still was, but the man sitting in that chair was not Dror’s son. He was whatever the Fish had made him, and what he had allowed himself to become: something else, something cold.

“We never stop being comfort girls,” Rina said dejectedly. “That’s how you buy your allies.” A giggle built up in her stomach and exploded in laughter. “You’re a fool to count on those men, Eitan.” She could not stop the fit of laughter at the irony and naïve callousness of her brother’s plan. “A fool.”

Majidi raised an eyebrow. Eitan rose from his chair. “Every man has a price, and once it’s paid they’re in your debt. They know it. You know it too, every Mole girl pays that price, and you chose the comfort houses, you chose to be a Mole,” he said coldly.

“No, Eitan, I was trained to be a Mole. Then I was trained to blow up caves and dig tunnels. Then I was thrown in a pit for following orders. The Fish?” she said softly. “I know where I stand with the Fish.”

Eitan did not blink. “And now you know where you stand with me.” He smiled. “Councilman Tamhidi would like you, Rina.” He looked down at her, head tilted sideways, weighing her like she had seen Bees weigh cattle. “Yes. Yes, he certainly would.”

“No.” Rina could handle the old man, but she had been caught once. She would only get one shot at meeting with him again, and he was not ready; she needed four more days.

It did not matter what Eitan might do to her. It was too easy for him, using the comfort girls as the Fish did then trading them off for political favours. She did not know that man, and she owed him nothing.

Majidi stayed silent, but seemed to enjoy the exchange. Women in all the other Castes were free. There were no comfort duties for them, no pregnancy duties, no endless stream of raising and bearing children. Majidi was a councilwoman, and she knew what was at stake for the Moles. All Moles.

Eitan snapped his fingers. Two Mole guards unfolded from the walls and clamped her shoulders. “Three more days in the sweathouse, then take her immediately to Tamhidi. She’ll wake up there—make sure she does.”

Eitan’s jaw trembled. He nodded slowly. Majidi’s eyes appeared to twinkle before they dragged her away.

“Let... go of...me...” Rina’s hand crushed his throat little by little, making Tamhidi’s pleas all the more enjoyable.

She had slipped in and out of consciousness during the four days in the sweathouse, before the heat shut her system down and allowed her to drift into painless sleep.

When she opened her eyes, it was to find the old lecher standing over her naked body. Her first impulse was to struggle with her restraints, but she found that she had none. His mistake, she had thought and thrown her hand up catching the old man in the throat. She could almost see the fat shivering under his plush blue robe, and only released her grip when the colour of his face matched the colour of his clothes. She knew she would have enough time to roll off the table before he could respond to her assault in kind. Tamhidi was still valuable, and killing him would not serve her purposes; he was also valuable to the rebellion.

“Hades, girl,” he managed between wheezy breaths, “there is no need for this!” He grasped the table.

Rina would not hear any of his complaining, and leapt over the table, planning to pin him to the wall and get what she had suffered for. She landed, grinning for an instant before her bare foot slammed into a small pin lying on the floor. Her barely healed body felt like it had been dipped in acid from head to toe. Then a sudden jolt of cold numbed her out of pain. Her vision blurred from the shock, but she found Tamhidi holding her gently, laying her onto the table again, and pulling a syringe out of her arm.

“I told you there was no need for this. Damn you, girl, if I wanted to abuse you, I wouldn’t have woken you up. And you know how much your brother would have enjoyed it.”

He covered her in a cloak. It was dusty and itched, but compared to the bone searing agony of a moment earlier it was the sweet itch of life returning.

Tamhidi laughed. “Speaking of which...hold on, don’t move it will pass...speaking of which, you did show him didn’t you? Four days. Ha! Old Majidi was rolling on the floor telling me about it, and you would know just how much a mess that made. Well, you sure impressed him, and impressed her, and that is more important. Ever wondered how you’re still alive, girl?”

She did. In the sweathouse, just when she lost consciousness for the last time, knowing her water supply was finished, delirious, and with no real understanding of how much time she had left, she had hoped her death would reveal her brother for what he truly was.

“You’re something of a legend now,” he said, his back to her, removing pieces of equipment from the ceiling, “and you owe that to the old Beastess. Ha! Yes you do. ‘I won’t take any less than four!’ A steady stream of girls crept in at night, hydrating you at their own risk.”

He unloaded the items on a nearby table. His voice picked up with the clang of metal on its surface. “Anyhow, you didn’t need to push your luck to prove a point...turns out...” He lost track of his thoughts, engrossed in disassembling the various pieces of equipment on the table. “...Turns out I was already done when he sent you back in.”

He lifted her up, gently again. “Think I couldn’t see it in your eyes, girl? Thought you were one in a long list of many, didn’t you now?”

He walked her to the table. Rina saw what looked like a fire-suit hanging from a wire thread. Something about it was different. She laid a hand on it. It was cold to the touch and seemed to drink in all the heat from her hands. She pulled back. He urged her forward.

“And wait till you try it! Who would have thought liquefying obsidian with lava would create an elastic rubber compound? No one! That’s because they don’t! Ha!” He cackled at his poor joke, “But Coils now, hmm, that was a finder. See? Turns out they are alive after all, and do extremely well under intense pressure. See? They bond with anything and when melted, they don’t die, see!” He got a hold of himself and went on, somewhat calmer. “They transfer their properties to whatever they are melted with and shift shape!”

Rina winced but knew he had not meant rudeness. He was always three steps ahead of most people, and in her condition she could not have kept pace with her younger, more naïve self.

“Alive and well, and it will fit like a...well, a Coil I guess, but without any of the discomfort! Wait till you see the helmet!”

How wrong had she been about the old man? As she would find out, comfort girls had been fooling Eitan and his fanatics all along. Not all of them, many were not lucky enough to have landed on Tamhidi’s favourite list, but those who were gained a lot from him, and at no charge. Tamhidi offered healing services, food, rest, and care for the girls many had thought he abused over the years. Even in the Comfort Houses, he was not the infamous patron many thought him to be, an image he cultivated carefully even as he supported Eitan.

“Your brother...” he started, as if reading her thoughts, “...your brother is an aberration...” He shook his head. “An aberration! Your father, he had his faults, Hades knows, but your brother is another kind of animal. He will sacrifice everyone to get rid of the Fish. Good people seldom want to rule the world. That tells you something about power, girl...”

Rina knew the truth in his words as she recalled her brother’s aura of righteousness, sitting on his makeshift throne, even as he sentenced her to death or rape, or eventually both. A man who could have changed their world, but would not.

Oblivious to his looks she let the cloak drop from her shoulders and slipped into the fire-suit.

The effect was immediate: she was submerged in intense cold as the suit sucked up all her heat and energy. She began to shiver, but almost immediately the suit started feeding her heat back into her, and stuck tightly to her skin just as the old man had said—tight like a Coil, but with no more pressure than needed to maintain contact with her body.

He handed over the helmet. It was entirely black, and apparently seamless; you could not distinguish the visor from the rest of the headpiece. She slipped it on and felt the same cooling effect on her skin and through her scalp as with the body suit.

There was a visor, or maybe the whole thing was a visor; if she had eyes behind her head maybe they would... Instantly an image of Tamhidi standing behind her looking appreciatively at her reactions flooded her vision. She closed her eyes, opened them, and saw straight ahead again. She began to turn towards Tamhidi, reconsidered, and thought about what stood behind her, and again, Tamhidi appeared, a much wider grin on his face.

“Getting the hang of it already! Good, very good, it took me a while myself. I’m not gonna lie to you, I’d been working on this for a while before you asked, and it felt like a shame to hand it over to Eitan and his goons, although I would have had to eventually...” he sighed. “Won’t go into the details of it, too technical I’m afraid, and truth be told I’m not quite sure how it works myself, but why waste time wondering when it does? Wonderful things, Coils, truly wonderful... what else lies beneath the waters, I wonder, if only the Fish...”

Yes, if only the Fish... she thought, if only they were not mad, if only the winters would shorten, if only...

“The Fish will get what’s coming for them,” she said aloud, surprised at her own voice. Fire-helmets hardly carried sound at all, and you could barely hear anything through them either. You had to know your mission better than you knew yourself, hope that your teammates did as well, and rely on the heat sensors to warn you in time of a flood of running rock.

She picked up a small match from the table to her left; all she had to do to see it—think left—and she struck it on the table, and touched the helmet with it. The match went out: its heat went straight to the helmet and into her skin, and through the whole suit. She felt a surge of power through her entire body, as powerful as full immersion in lava with a regular fire-suit. She grabbed the table with her hand and raised it effortlessly over her head, thought back, and saw Tamhidi nodding his head appreciatively.

He shrugged. “For some part, maybe the whole of it, maybe something else entirely, the same circuitry runs through fire-suits and with none of these results. Like I said, girl, the how isn’t always important when it works, and you’re in a hurry.”

Rina removed, or rather peeled off the helmet; concentrating was making her dizzy, and it snapped, wrapping itself back into its original shape the moment it she let go of it.

“Dizzy already?” laughed Tamhidi. “Don’t worry, it will come naturally enough.”

His ability to anticipate her thoughts was unnerving, but in spite of her distant demeanour, her respect for him grew with each passing second.

“Your brother is not expecting you to walk out standing upright, girl, you realise that, yes?”

She nodded resolutely. “Hit me,” she said calmly. She expected an argument; even after years as a comfort girl, she still believed that it was hard for men to strike women, even after Eitan, but to her surprise, Tamhidi nodded gravely in turn.

“I might have to. I might just. Don’t want to blow my cover, anything less than a bruise and your brother won’t buy it.”

Something strange was happening to her. She used to take pride in hearing people mention Eitan as her kin, but she winced when Tamhidi said it, and knew she would every time from this moment onward.

“Good thing you removed the helmet,” he said. He saw the question on her face. “It’s shock absorbent. I hadn’t mentioned?” He smiled faintly.

His uppercut caught her unexpected in the chin, she flew upwards and back, landing hard on the ground, but could only feel pain in her face and jaw. Shock absorbent indeed, she thought, and the old man still packed a punch and a surprising turn of speed under all that fat. She lifted herself up and his fist crashed into her skull and sent her back down.

“That should do it; anymore and someone might wonder how I could still have a go at you afterwards. Hate doing this every time I have to...”

She felt the bruise growing around her eye, and tasted blood in her mouth from his uppercut. She would not be a pretty sight when she was brought to Eitan, but it was worth it.

“I’ll call the guards.” He hit a switch on the wall. “Don’t worry about the suit. With Majidi on your side, I’ll have no difficulty smuggling it. She used to love your brother, you know? Hard to believe from a woman that size, love, but there you have it. Women scorned, ha!”

She limped to the door, and heard the oncoming footsteps through the stone wall.

Tamhidi grabbed her shoulder. “The Fish will get what they have coming, girl, you know that as well as I do. But ask yourself, do you want what’s coming next?”

Rina had let go of herself in the sweathouse, let go of who she thought she was, of who she had been told she was, and for that, she owed Eitan Arfazadeh. Now she had to find out for herself.

It was true she was no longer alone. In the early hours of the morning, before the Fish overseers prodded the Moles into the Divine Undertaking, a stream of former comfort girls would risk their lives to see her. She had few words at first, but her heart did the real talking, or perhaps they were just eager to hear. Hear, and listen.

If you live, girl, think well before you act. You’ll find the suit waiting for you when he lets you out. Wear it. It will help you heal. Do you know what a phoenix is, girl? Bird from the dawn of Mars, perhaps even before we were blinded by the light; maybe its light shone against the cave, who knows and who cares, a bird of flame, girl, a bird of flame. Think on it. The suit will give you two minutes.

Two minutes! She thought back to the comfort girls who opened up to her, and she knew what needed to be done. I’m gonna need a hundred.

The explosion several weeks later caused a small avalanche, killing caste members indiscriminately. She had known that would happen, and as she had told Majidi, they died well. The avalanche sent a signal, and sealed the Divine Undertaking shut. It took the Fish by surprise, and Eitan and the rebels never saw it coming.

The ceiling showered the secret council hall with debris just as the door blew inward and a hundred women shrouded entirely in black, rushed inside.

Majidi smiled and turned to Eitan. “Another one of your tricks?” she said slyly.

Before he could answer, the leading shape leapt across the room, over the table, landed standing upright in front of him, and hit him with a soft blow from the flat of its hand, before turning to face the room, ignoring Eitan while he slammed into the wall on the far end of the cave.

Weapons unloaded electric discharges on the intruders instantaneously. Instead of killing them, they gained speed and strength, appearing and disappearing in front of Mole guards too dumbstruck to fight back. They were everywhere at once, knocking weapons out of their hands, breaking limbs, ripping heads off shoulders, and slicing necks and skulls in half.

The commotion stopped. The dust settled, leaving behind a concussed silence broken by faint groans and the metallic stench of fresh blood.

Eitan rose slowly from a small pile of rubble, the cave wall shattered behind him, his face undecided between rage and surprise. Rage took over, but his step forward, usually unafraid and determined, trembled with a fear he’d thought he’d forgotten.

Eitan froze mid-motion, his jaw trembled and the tremor spread to his whole body. He charged onward. Rina took a step towards him. Eitan stopped.

She turned her back on him and looked towards Majidi. “No Councilwoman, my Brother,” all of her contempt carrying through that single word, “has pulled his last trick.”

Bees could read the winds. Among the myriad things they did, they had the ability to tell which direction they would come from, and more importantly, how long they would last.

This time they were wrong. The winds did blow for three days, and away from the mountain, over the cliffs and onto the oceans, but they did not just blow. Massive gales rocked the colony, carrying the smell of charred houses and burning corpses away from the colony and over the perimeter wall. Fish guards could not tell that the lights gleaming from the more distant Fish outposts along the cliff walls were anything but the night-lights they expected them to be.

It was only when the storm passed and contact was re-established with the colony that they discovered the extent of the slaughter. Five of the ten furthest outposts had been burned to the ground, skeletons of all sizes lay around haphazardly. Eyeless skulls that would never reunite with the Dreamers grinned at them, and the perpetrators hadn’t left a trace.

One of the sentinels raised a horn to his mouth, and no sooner had the first note rung out than hooks landed at their feet from over the cliff walls, and strange, black-clad warriors appeared and disappeared among them, tearing them limb from limb.

“And what exactly did you expect?” the Priestess responded with a disconcerting cool.

Rina knew her as Gilani, and her acolyte as Amirpour, but Priests would always be Priests in her eyes, only real people had names.

In the days that had followed the attacks on the Fish outposts, a civil war had erupted in the colony. Fish soldiers took revenge for their losses the only way they knew how, by killing Moles in droves. Moles had responded by seeking refuge in friendly houses amongst other Castes, drawing them deeper into the century old enmity.

The Fish had not uncovered the secret tunnels, and still did not know how the gruesome attacks had been pulled off, but it was only a matter of time until they did, and then the rebellion would be damned. Surprise was all the rebellion had on their side; lacking that, the Fish with the other loyal Caste members would complete their purge.

Priests outside could not appeal for calm. Their anchor was prophecy, and with their Divine Undertaking shut it never held ground. The Priests inside the caves had received a few relayed messages through the tunnels, but it was clear to Rina that they were biding their time, waiting to see how long the killing on the streets would go on for. Waiting until the inhabitants turned to them in desperation, or better yet, waiting until the Fish found the tunnels and slaughtered the rebellion, handing them the keys to the Divine Undertaking and restoring their power.

They would not give the signal allowing the Bee, Beast, and Ant rebels to rush out of the tunnels and take the fight to the Fish, not with their plans falling apart.

Eitan’s authority was gone, even though he still sat on the throne, and all the Castes involved in the rebellion agreed that Rina was too impulsive. The rebellion was effectively leaderless. Her actions had hastened years of quiet preparation, forcing them into action, leading to the slaughter of their families and friends, and jeopardising their victory. Worse, regardless of how much they despised the Fish, they would not take orders from a woman, much less a former comfort girl turned warrior.

A thought tickled the back of Rina’s brain, bubbled to the forefront, and hit her between the eyes. She looked up at the Priest’s face, calm but betraying a smug self-satisfaction. She caught hold of his neck, lifted him up and turned to her troops. “Kill all the white cloaks,” she ordered.

The other Caste members began to move to protect the Priests out of custom, and even her own soldiers seemed hesitant. Seizing the opportunity, he struggled for air and a word. Rina released the pressure on his throat enough for him to speak.

The last came out muffled as she tightened her grip, but the Moles gathered in the cave took offense, and converged menacingly on the nearest Priest and Priestess.

“Threaten?” Rina’s hand tore through his neck, his body crumpling to the ground, blood dripping down her fingers. His head, slipping from her grasp, hit the ground and rolled to Gilani’s feet.

“A sign!” she yelled, dropping to her knees. No one killed a Priest, or a Priestess—one might as well choke Hades to death. “You need a sign, foolish girl!”

Priestess Gilani’s eyes flickered from Amirpour’s face by her sandals to Rina, “...A sign...a sign of Hades...” she hesitated, staring at the bloody head, its lips reaching for her toes, and gave in. “They, we, do not all believe in this rebellion, but we all believe in Hades. They must believe... somehow, that the Time of Hades has arrived.”

She looked up at the Priestess and nodded, turned to her brother, who still sat, waiting for the show to go on. “You might be rid of me yet, Eitan, make it worth it.”

He stood. “You make it worth it little sister, and there may still be room for you when all is done.”

She glared at him. “If I don’t make it you’re as good as dead, but if I do...” She hesitated as well, unsure of speaking words she could never take back, but it did not matter. Eitan could not, would not, rule if she could help it. “If I do, there won’t be room for the two of us,” she said, and stormed out of the room with her army of sentinels, heading for Councilman Tamhidi’s quarters.

“You have two minutes, after that...you should melt, or explode, the latter is preferable, I suppose.” He paused and repeated himself. “Two minutes, you do realise what that means don’t you?” He read his answer in the flatness of her stare. “And what did I tell you about birds of flame, girl?” He shook his head. “Tsk, tsk, tsk, try metaphors and they fall on deaf ears, I thought you were brighter, girl, but who cares?”

He unrolled an old scroll, showing her the image of what looked like a giant incandescent bird, rising from a pit of flame. “You get the idea, don’t you?”

“100% for the former... The latter, who knows, if you make it out in time, and hit the ground before the suit disintegrates... you could also bury the colony in lava.”

He laughed, a loud and heavy bass that bounced back against the walls. “You’ll live to pester me yet, girl, but you said it yourself, you might only have a few hours left. So far, the Fish have been too busy to dive, but they never let the ocean go too long without them, and when they do...”

She nodded at him. “Thank you, old man,” she said, with more emotion than she knew she held.

“Don’t thank me, succeed girl. Succeed without killing us. Speaking of which, careful with the charges, you don’t want this thing to erupt. Just a nudge.”

She nodded and pulled her mask over her head, and started down the tunnel towards the heart of the Divine Undertaking.

Everything in the colony stopped when the ground under them started shaking hard enough to throw Fish sentinels off the walls.

But all of them, all as one, looked up to the chimney of the volcano, spitting gusts of coal black smoke and bits of flaming stone into the air, and before their eyes. Hades himself rose from its breath and lit the sky.

Somewhere inside the colony, a Priest stood up, headed to the window and rang a bell, echoed soon after by another, and another, and another, until everyone heard, and everyone knew. Hades had arrived.

The bubbling lava pits at the heart of the Divine Undertaking were waiting for her, daring her to dive and challenge the Gods.

The chimney seemed impossibly high, too high for her to reach, even if the explosion stirred the magma into outraged fury. Grimly determined, she looked back at the few sentinels waiting on her expectantly. This was the only chance they had left. Eitan was right, and so was everybody else. She was too impulsive, too brash, incapable of seeing beyond the immediate satisfaction of revenge to see the bigger—the much, much bigger—picture that had unfolded since her father had started planning the rebellion in what seemed another life now. She alone had led her family, her friends, her fellow conspirators, her Mole Caste, to the brink of extermination; it was only fitting that her sacrifice absolved or ended them. Regardless of the outcome, the centuries of slavery would end, a new order would rise, or all would be wiped clean.

She tore her eyes away from the comfort girls, clad in their black suits, impervious to the heat and faced down into the pit, dropping the payload into Azhi-Dahaka’s hungry maw.

The explosion barely registered in the rage of molten lava beneath, but slowly the rumble grew and strengthened in intensity as the embers took on a life of their own and rose to meet her at the edge of the pit. When they were almost at her feet and still building, she felt a glimmer of hope, futile though it was, that she would succeed, and might, just might, live to see the story unfold.

She let the rising semi-liquid guide her into the chimney, it pushed her upward, a tiny thing in the blood of nature.

The rubble shutting the Divine Undertaking blasted outward, taking out the few curious and foolish enough to approach the sealed entrance as Hades blew out of the volcano.

The sound of thousands of underground footsteps made its way from the mountain towards the cliff, and in every neighbourhood, in each Caste’s quarters, armed Moles, Ants, Bees, and Beasts, emerged from houses, and popped out of the ground, relentlessly attacking Fish and anyone deranged enough to get in their way.

Hooks landed on the side of the cliff, followed by black-clad female warriors pouring into the Fish outposts, darting furiously towards the colony’s outer walls, sucking in the heat and energy from Fish laser beams that only propelled them forward, faster and stronger.

The first woman hit the wall with such strength she bored a hole straight through it, sending stone and those walking along the walls into the battle-torn colony. The others followed in a heartbeat, pounding through the structure until it crumbled and collapsed.

The flow abated in the chimney. Caught in the middle, she focused her vision upwards. The lava was thick but she could make out, still impossibly distant, the mouth of the dragon already roaring with fumes and small hyper-accelerated rocks.

Thirty, maybe forty seconds until the coils melted under the pressure or blew up, making her one with the magma. At least the colony will be spared. But the thought, comforting as it was, was not enough. It did not matter that she came out breathing or a writhing ball of flame, unless her body came out for all to see, it would all have been for nothing.

She released one last blast, a little explosive powder wrapped in a pouch made of suit fragments at her side, for one final attempt to reach the exit.

The small detonation was enough for her to accelerate, in seconds her head was peering ahead of the onslaught, her body still caught in the red turmoil, the mouth of the chimney visible intermittently between the gushes of wind that blew smoke away from the mountain.

Twenty seconds, maybe less. She could feel the suit weakening, an odd feeling that disconnected her from her state of hypersensitivity. At least I won’t feel anything.

Suddenly, air hit her face just as she lost the ability to feel. Only her sight remained clear enough to see the sun break through the smoke, impossibly bright, impossibly close.

Above and around her, bright blue skies conflicted with the blackness beneath, shielding her from the events in the colony, and she soared still further upwards. The weakened suit still shrouded her, but glowed strangely from the heat, giving it shades of purple, streaked with random shots of bright blue where it had weakened the most.

Just as she thought that she would hit the sun and burn inside it, gravity asserted itself, sending her down in an arch back towards the volcano, back towards the colony, and the fight that still had to be fought.

She twisted her body into a spear, heading straight down into the black smoke, through it, and broke out over the confusion of a human eruption.

She thought she was falling back into the volcano and the flames, until she saw it was the colony, burning almost everywhere, accelerating towards her.

She could make out the different coloured hues of the Castes’ clothing, fighting Fish, fighting each other, and amidst them, black streaks leaving brushstrokes of carnage behind them.

Brown Mole suits were backed into corners surrounded by Fish black, shooting through them only to be cut down by rebel forces closing in on them. Priests held their heads low, alone or in circles, their robes marred by smoke and soot, surviving as fights danced around them, and succumbing to collapsing structures and warriors too desperate to see them or care for their fate.

Only one target mattered to her, and that one she had to find. She hoped Eitan was dead already, but doubted anything could kill her berserk brother once the smell of death fuelled his madness. She focused harder, using the last of the energy caught in the suit as it slowly started to peel off in little specks of black-purple dust, and found him.

Eitan was in the central plaza, a few yards from where the perimeter wall had stood a few minutes earlier, his blade slashing through Fish and rebels alike.

She aimed herself at him, her body cutting through the air with a shriek. The colony was completely visible now. Eitan’s hands were wrapped around a young Ant girl’s neck, trying to rip her head off from her shoulders barehanded.

The air caught in her lungs; she tried to scream, and maybe she did, the clamour of battle and the air rushing past numbed her to sound, or maybe the suit had given way entirely.

He still had his back to her. He would not survive either way. She might, but not Eitan. Yet she wanted him to see her, and she wanted him to remember her words, remember his deeds, and hopefully, at the last second, remember the brother who’d ruffled her hair.

Eitan pulled up and the girl’s neck muscles gave in, tearing away from bone, leaving him holding her reddish haired head, eyes still blinking.

He spun, raising his trophy, and looked up to see a purple-black dash in the sky. The smoke cleared, revealing the shape of a human arrow headed straight for him.

Rina gave a last thrust, one small boost to hit her target before he regained enough sense to dive out of the way. He let go of the head to fall at his feet, transfixed by her sudden apparition.

Two, maybe three seconds. He still doesn’t know, he still... And then Eitan’s eyes widened, a mixture of hate, fear, and respect, growing on his face just as she hit him. Maybe in that last second something changed; maybe terror overcame him, maybe acceptance, but she doubted it was either. Eitan would die believing in his own godliness, just as he had lived, and that was why he had to die.

Eitan exploded on impact as Rina’s suit-wrapped head smashed into his torso. The last of the hyper-sensibility left in her clothing sent two fading heartbeats pulsing through her body, before she knew that he was dead.

She hit the ground with a sonic bang, sending ripples through the colony and beyond towards the cliff, lifting air and rock and levelling houses and warriors in its wake. Skidding further, she lost consciousness as the last of her suit peeled off, leaving her naked in a shallow crater a few yards from the cliffs and the endless waters beyond.

A breeze blew stronger through the open windows onto the balcony, carrying a smell of seaweed and iodine into the room.

The 2^nd Councilwoman, a young, slender Priestess, wiped the sweat from Rina’s brow with a small cloth as she lay in her bed.

The incoming storm felt good, reminding her of her childhood: the green fields in the shade of the volcano, the sun setting over the seas, her father’s homecomings on windy nights, and getting herself into trouble.

“You should close your eyes and rest, 1^st Councilwoman,” the young Priestess suggested.

Rina laughed and coughed. “Ha! My open eyes are all that are keeping me alive. The moment I close them is the moment I’m gone. What do the day’s reports read?”

The Priestess gathered a small pile of paperwork from a nearby table. “Which ones, 1^st Councilwoman? Of the Divine Undertaking or the expeditions north?”

“The Divine Undertaking is progressing well. Overseers speculate that it will take as much time again as since the rebellion before it is complete.”

“Possibly, possibly less, 1^st Councilwoman, we can always drive the Fish harder.”

“Northern Europe is under ice, it would seem, large swaths of...” the unfamiliar word twisting in her mouth, “...of in-ga-land are now completely out of reach.”

Rina nodded. A gust of wind slipped through the window, cooling her fever. “Perhaps, perhaps it is time to rethink the future of the Colony. Perhaps, and I do not say this lightly.”

“But perhaps it is time to start considering how we can bring the Fish back into the fold, back into our community, and find a role for them when the Divine Undertaking is completed and we return to the comfort of the cave.”

She took a hold of the Priestess’ hand. “Do this for me, 2^nd Councilwoman, do this for all of us, so we don’t condemn them the way they condemned us.”

“Of course, 1^st Councilwoman, we will care for the Fish, as the old saying goes, ‘Come hell or high water.’”

Rina coughed again. “Hell...hell, or high lava...1^st Councilwoman...or high lava.”

The Priestess seemed to think on her metaphor for an instant and nodded. “Yes, Yes...Or high lav-”

A blast of wind cut the Priestess short. She shielded her face. When she turned back to the bed, Rina’s eyes were closed, her smile was gone, and just as she had predicted, so was everything that had been Rina.

She pointed to Rina’s corpse. “It’s 1^st Councilwoman now. See that the body is disposed of.”

She thought it over and shook her head. “No, no, make sure that the proper rituals are observed and that she is recycled; such a great leader should be put to the Colony’s benefit, not thrown to the dragon.”

She walked towards the window as the Beast councilman had the body lifted onto a stretcher and carried out of the room. A freezing slither of wind cut through the growing storm, chilling her throat and chest.

“And Councilman? Make sure the Fish’s working shifts are doubled as of tomorrow, and that expeditions north are maintained until they can no longer swim; kill any protesters.” She looked towards the ocean and the storms that sung of endless ice. “Time is running short. One morning, soon now...”

“Hell will freeze over, Hades will rise, and we will return to the caves...”

Mame Bougouma Diene is a French-Senegalese American humanitarian based in Paris with a fondness for progressive metal, tattoos, and policy analysis. He is published in Omenana, Brittle Paper and Edilivres, and is in no position to win the Nobel Prize so he can write the hell he pleases until it all freezes over.