Dead silence hung in the ship, and the guy who had been unbuttoning his pants buttoned back up and backed away, eyes nervously on Travis.

Travis was standing there, blinking at her, the glittering malice in his gaze replaced with complete, uncontrolled confusion—like a bird of prey that had realized the mouse it had halfway down its gullet was roaring like a lion. “What did you say to me?”

“I said you’re a mental midget with a cock to match,” Crash said. “And from what I’ve heard when your girls giggling about you when they thought I wasn’t paying attention, you probably did me a favor by fucking them instead of me. Pro tip, Travis: Using a pillow doesn’t compensate, and people can smell venereal disease.” It was guesswork, mostly—Crash hadn’t really heard any of his girlfriends giggling about him, but when she dropped the scenario into her mindspace—something she could do whenever she hyper-focused to the point of a razor edge of concentration—that’s what she got. Multiple partners, none satisfied—mostly due to the fact he was a selfish lover and not necessarily the smaller instrument, but Travis didn’t need to know that—STDs from too many partners, and lots and lots of quiet, cruel giggling behind his back by twenty years of jilted lovers and throwaway whores. Crash had seen them coming and going for years, and, had she pulled herself out of her work long enough to think about it, she would have noticed the smug looks they gave her as they left, the complete confidence in their face that she was a moron.

Travis stared at her for much too long before he repeated, “What did you say to me?”

“I said of course I’ve know I’ve been trapped here this entire time, you fucking moron. Why else would you put my face on all the billboards and news cameras? You were afraid of me running off and losing your one chance at controlling Quad.” She made a snort of complete disdain. “Why do you think I kept ‘forgetting’ to record him whenever he started talking about weapons? I knew exactly what I was doing, you complete imbecile.”

Travis’s face was darkening to a purple thunderhead of rage, and the men around him were watching the exchange with slack faces, their eyes flickering back and forth between Travis and Crash nervously. “That first Rifter’s staff in here with us, Matthis?” Travis asked, without taking his eyes off Crash.

“Yes sir!” Matthis said, handing it to him. Khayu’s staff was a big gold-and-black work of art, clearly meant to be as ornamental as it was useful. On one end, it had a bluish crystal surrounded by two golden prongs. The space between the prongs shimmered almost like a heat wave, and Crash got chills looking at it.

Travis took the staff from his assistant and held up the shimmering tip of the staff to look at her over it as he examined the strange heat-waves between the prongs. “Average, huh?”

Crash swallowed hard. She straightened, recognizing the thing that had been used to explode people in the Rifter’s raids on the villages.

“This thing is basically an insta-kill, right?” Travis asked casually to Matthis. “Like boils them from the inside?” His words were lazy, completely enjoying the way she was trying to inch away from him.

“Yes sir,” Matthis said. “We’re still trying to figure out how it works.”

“Mmmm,” Travis said, his eyes locking on Crash. “Well, take a note.” He stepped towards her, hefted the staff while watching her with a little twist to his lip, and, in one horrible moment, like a malignant child about to crush an ant with the tip of a stick, thrust the staff at her.

Crash had just enough time to let out a terrified cry and cringe before an obsidian arm slammed into her field of vision, grabbing the head of the staff by the shimmering crystal and yanking it forward, twisting it out of Travis’s startled hands.

Chaos suddenly erupted as the staff spun, and, like a martial artist spinning a bokkin, the man whipped the staff around and hit the man with the automatic weapon standing beside Travis in the side of the neck.

He boiled from the inside. Like a microwave oven over-nuking an egg. Pieces of him exploded in all directions, and Travis and all the others lunged backwards with startled, horrified cries.

Not before, however, the Rifter easily twisted and slammed the head of his staff into a second man’s gut—the same man who had been unbuttoning his trousers earlier—and the soldier’s blue eyes widened only for a moment before particles of him, too, flung themselves across the cargo bay in a spray of red.

Men everywhere were screaming, now, and bullets were starting to pummel off the blood-soaked metal, and Crash cringed and huddled against the engine block, with no way to protect her vitals.

The Rifter put his bigger body between her and the bullets, and all around him, in little silverish puffs, the bullets seemed to just…vanish in tiny bursts of water vapor. Crash got a look at a determined, focused frown of concentration on his dark face before Khayu followed up his first two attacks by easily taking a third man under the arm holding his automatic rifle. The man’s side immediately caved inward, like a membrane getting sucked away, then he, too, exploded in a rain of blood and gore.

All in the span of maybe five seconds. Too fast. Inhumanly fast. Like watching a horror movie on fast-forward.

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The Rifter would have gone after the other soldiers shooting at him, as well, but the three chains still holding him to the engine block yanked him up short. He casually put his glowing green palm to the chain against his neck as he silently watched the soldiers back away, screaming and shooting at him, to no effect.

As Khayu paused there, brought to the end of his leash by the massive engine block, the soldiers in the room rushed to get out of reach, through the open door deeper into the ship. As the first chain at the Rifter’s neck fell away, someone hit the hatch release button inside the entrance to the cargo bay, and suddenly there was a blast of cold wind slicing at them from under a crack forming in the front wall of the cargo bay.

The Rifter made a determined face and went for the next chain, this one padlocked to his ankle. Behind him, the big cargo bay door slid to halfway open. Bullets were still peppering the air around Crash and Khayu, but they were bursting into little puffs of mist that left her face feeling damp rather than tearing through her body like shrapnel.

Travis was grabbing the comm on his waist and screaming into it something that sounded like, “Dump it! Now, now!”

And, even as the Rifter was squeezing the metal of the second chain between his fingers like a man pinching the dough to make breadsticks, the ship suddenly tilted, the world upended, and in a moment of total horror, Crash saw a great vast blue ocean beneath her before the engine block started grinding down the metal grating, tearing across the floor towards the yawning Abyss, dragging her and the startled Rifter with it.

There was a horrifying moment where the engine caught on the open door lock and Crash hung there in open air, scrabbling to get her feet on the floor, desperately trying to wrench her hands free…

Then the engine was tilting over the edge, dragging her with it.

“Monkey fucker!” Crash shrieked, as they plunged downward, towards the ocean. She used the rope tying her to the engine to pull her closer, then get her feet on it. Maybe if she could make it to the bolt Travis had used to tie the knots…

The blue of the ocean was coming on too fast, rushing towards her like a great blue expanse, some practice mat in the dojo of God.

Except this practice mat was gonna hurt. A lot. And then drown her.

“Get off me, you inanimate chunk of oxidizing iron garbage!” she shrieked, yanking and jerking, riding the engine, trying to kick herself free. “Let. Me. Go!” She kicked it again, just enough to get one of her hands free, but the second was still trapped.

She was just starting to wriggle her other hand free when the engine struck the surface of the water like a kidney stone of God dropping into the latrine of Heaven. Crash’s whole body hit the engine right after it hit the water first, her face once again exploding in a wave of brilliant stars. She was groaning and just starting to shake herself out of that when the kidney stone of God tightened its grip on her rope and yanked her under the ocean.

“Fuck!” she screamed through a mouth of water. She started feeling for the knots, realizing she should’ve spent time learning the knots Travis had many times tried to teach her—but she’d forgotten because she didn’t care. She randomly started tugging on lines. If anything, they grew tighter.

Fuck, fuck, fuck… She tried not to panic, but the engine was sinking so fast she was whipping along behind it like a streamer, and it was all she could do just to keep from breathing in water. Fuck fuck fuck fuck…

The pressure on her skull was starting to hurt. It was getting darker, the sun lifting out of sight far overhead. Too far.

I’m never going to be able to swim back up there, she thought, horrified. Oh my god I’m actually going to die.

She’d had this master plan in her head, this amazing, intricate bluff to make Travis fuck around long enough for the Rifter to stab him in the head. Not once had she considered Travis tying her to the engine.

“Fuck!” she shouted through bubbles. Too late, she realized that was the wrong thing to do. Now, without air, her lungs started to scream. She forced her legs down, tried again to plant them against the engine and push, but she didn’t have the core strength to fight the current and get re-oriented with her legs facing the engine.

Oh god, Crash thought. God god god don’t let me go like this.

God wasn’t listening. She kept sinking, the water kept getting darker.

Poseidon, then, she thought, switching tactics. If you save me, great and ancient God of the Seven Seas, I’ll renounce any allegiance to the weak and lesser gods of the surface-dewllers and, in my humble gratitude, I swear to you I’ll teach an octopus how to establish itself as a sentient life form to all humanity before I die.

There was a sudden flash of green light, then the screeching of ripping metal as something big immediately grabbed her by the arm in the darkness, then the wrist. At first, Crash thought it was a bioluminescent octopus come to devour her for spurning God like a heathen, and she screamed what was left of her air, kicking violently.

Then the water by her wrists glowed green and suddenly she stopped sinking. Blinking, she saw the massive engine continue its descent below her. Realizing she’d been severed from the anchor, Crash immediately started kicking for the surface.

The Rifter grabbed her, bodily, and, to her horror, jerked her back from the surface. Then, like an iron clamp around her body, he tightened his big arm over her arms and chest, cutting off her struggles.

What the fuck is he doing?! Crash thought, no more able to fight his grip than climb from an iron maiden as her lungs started to scream for air. She started kicking him, elbowing him, desperate for air, knowing she only had seconds…

“No, we’re gonna die!” she tried to cry out, struggling against him helplessly, her lungs burning like nuclear fire.

The Rifter put his big hand over her mouth, clearly planning to suffocate her to make her stop thrashing, and Crash opened her mouth to bite it…

…when she realized the water near her mouth—around his hand—was being converted into air. It bubbled around them violently, rising to the surface in a huge blast of air bubbles that rippled against her hair, and Crash, stunned, opened her eyes and twisted to look up at the Rifter in shock.

In the near-darkness of the middle of the ocean, the deeper darkness in the shape of a human being nodded encouragingly at his hand. He was, she realized, not having a problem breathing the water as if it were air.

Desperate, Crash grabbed his hand in both hands like a respirator and sucked in a huge breath of air through his palm.

Poseidon, she thought, looking up into the Rifter’s glowing yellow eyes in gratitude as the sweet, luscious, life-giving mix of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide filled her lungs, you just made yourself a deal.