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spinning. Like a scallop caught in an eddy, the octopus drew his arms in toward his body. As they contracted, so did his voice. The ferocious swirling that had filled the chamber slowed, shrank to a tiny spiral, and vanished. The blue-black of the ominous deep was replaced by normal daylight falling from beyond the mirrorsky overhead. Behind the shaman, Tythe and Sathi slowly began to emerge from the tunnel. Their eyes were wide with astonishment. But then, Chachel mused, a squid’s eyes are always wide, though not always with wonder.
    Letting go of the outcropping, he finned curiously toward the floating demon. Emerging from where he had taken shelter in the entryway, Glint joined his friend. Chachel was pleased to see that the cuttlefish still held the body of the dead shark. Awe was all very well and good, but it did nothing to fill an empty belly.
    Hovering in the water column, the demon blinked; first at Oxothyr, then at Glint, her gaze finally coming to rest on Chachel. Not knowing what else to do, he put his fingers over his mouth in a sign of friendship. Hesitantly, she raised a hand to imitate him. That was when she discovered, or realized, that the bubbling-emitting device was no longer clamped between her lips. Eyes widening, she thrashed frantically for a few seconds. When she finally calmed down, she drifted and gaped at the webbing that now linked her fingers. None of those present had any idea what she might be thinking.
    Turning a slow circle, the transmogrified demon examined her surroundings. Absently, she reached up to scratch an arm, her chest, then her neck. When her newly webbed fingers reached her throat and encountered the first of her gills, they paused. Fingertips felt gently, then more urgently of the distinctive flaps. Two fingertips pushed inward. Understandably, she choked.
    A changed demon perhaps, Chachel thought, but not necessarily a more enlightened one. This supposition was further confirmed when both her hands came up to feel more fully of the gills on either side of her neck, her mouth opened surprisingly wide, and she fainted.…

— III —
    Irina Malakova loved the sea. Simply sitting in it, treading water, or lying on her back on the surface literally washed away all the weighty cares and concerns of everyday life. Her love had only deepened when she had learned how to scuba dive. It became her release, her vacation, and her therapy. Her passion for the hobby sometimes exasperated her friends and family, but she didn’t care. Whenever she could find the time, she would go diving. Whenever she managed to scrape up enough money, she would book a trip to some faraway place with a strange-sounding name where the underwater scenery and its flora and fauna were new and exotic.
    But not this new. Not this exotic. And certainly not this threatening.
    The danger had initially manifested itself when, entranced by a patrolling moray free-swimming out of its customary hole in the reef, she had wandered away from her dive partner to follow the serpentine shape as it hunted along the rim of the steep coral drop-off. Her enchantment had only deepened when she had been lucky enough to see it actually catch and devour a brilliantly colored queen angelfish. Only then had she come back to reality long enough to realize two things: none of the other divers, including her partner, were in sight, and her tank was half-empty.
    As she worked to retrace her route along the reef’s edge, her usual quiet confidence in her diving abilities gradually gave way to increasing concern. Hadn’t she come this way? Or had she first swam outward from that odd-shaped bommie? Despite the presence of deeper water below and the sky overhead, the reef seemed to take turns and twists she didn’t remember. Once, the sky itself seemed to contort crazily, as if she was swimming at an angle instead of parallel to the light. She was starting to get hungry, and dehydrated. Still there was no sign of the other seven divers