"Excuse me!" demanded the dark elf, snapping me once again out of my thoughts and bursting my focus like a pricked water balloon. Her eyes were an arresting red, one marred by a light gray lightning line down forehead and cheek, smoothed by the years. She had an air of doomed grace, her hair tied up above leaf-point ears and secured with sharp brooches, the insubstantial gown clinging to her slender form. "We are trapped. Where are you taking us? Where can my family go?"

  Constitution looked to me for an answer, surprisingly. I found that I had no words. What could I tell her? That I was supposed to be playing a game, two levels of reality up from here?

  I opened my mouth and sputtered. "I don't," I said. "We--there's...." I concluded. I shook my head and shook it off.

  What was she, even? This was the problem bugging me the most. What were any of them? If we attributes were the bits of Arthrem split up into people, or powering him, or controlling him, or whatever we were doing... what was the purpose of Yorc, and Torm and Drave, and the family and this elf, who didn't actually look like Arthrem (she was a drow, sort of, for gods' sake), but also didn't not look like him?

  I let feeling take over. Like a bad dream where you're being confronted for something you're helpless to affect, I stopped searching for the right words, the most logical and confidence-inspiring response. I lifted the lantern.

  The panel told me nothing more than her name. The gold reflected in her red eyes, and she reached out her fingers to touch the ephemeral panel. It broke, dissolving gently into sparks that swirled, for a moment, around her long fingers made longer by fingernails tapered into points.

  "Mrs. Chryn," I said. "These two officers will get your family to safety."

  "Drave's not really an off--"

  It wasn't the time, and my little speech had momentum. "This is looking bad, yes, but you will get out okay. Is anyone hurt? Your daughter? Mr. Chryn?"

  I think we all felt the needle come off the record. Constitution touched her forehead and closed her eyes. Mohawk Dad looked up at me like he'd taken a bite of bad seafood. The half dark elf kid started to laugh uncontrollably, chanting "Mister Chryn! Mister Chryyyyyyn!" at her father.

  Rethline crossed her arms. "Who in the deepest hell is Mr. Chryn?"

  "I mean," I choked again, "your, ah, I assumed, you'd have the last name, um, it would be the same, if you're." That's literally where my mouth ceased to function. It just pulled its own emergency brake, and it was the right move.

  "You think I would take his last name?" She was fuming, in a very dark elf kind of way. "Chryn is my last name. You think I would let a surface-dweller with the lifespan of a--" she turned and gave her husband a smile. "Sorry babe."

  "It's fine," said Mohawk Dad, shushing his kid. "He's completely out of line."

  Constitution was coughing into a fist and finding something else to look at. "Thanks for backing me up," I said. "Listen, lady, it's my first day on the job."

  "Unbelievable," she said, stamping back to her family. Torm and Drave crept closer to the edge to shout to other rescue efforts below.

  "You stepped in that one, hon," said Constitution.

  "How was I supposed to know?" I snapped back, in that high pitch whisper, barely able to contain myself. "I don't even get why they exist. Are they part of...?" I waved at the sky and boat and all the cosmos. "Y'know. Him? What are they? his tendons? Red blood cells?" I glanced at the family, Rethline nearly serpentine in her too-wet dress. "His dreams?"

  Constitution raised an eyebrow.

  "What?" I asked.

  "Everyone and everything that's here," she said, "belongs here. They all have a part to play. You really oughtta know more about this than I do, sweetie."

  "Yeah," I said, "but I don't." I let the air out of my nose with a hard puff. "Where is Strength?"

  Constitution leaned as far as she dared, a boot planted in an unsteady crevice on the edge of the cloven deck. A sulfuric steam still rose from her shoulders and helmet, the dark blue gray stained by a relatively vibrant slathering of beige.

  "No way," I said.

  "You saw him jump," she admonished, with all the weight of a schoolteacher. "That's pretty much how he operates. Straight to the point. Real lean operation, ya know."

  I failed to see how a couple hundred souls splashing in the water was not the point. She seemed to get this, or anticipate it, and she made a tsk at me. Unmistakably, I might add. An actual tsk with the t, the s, and the k. I don't think I'd been tsked at since grade school.

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  "He has his reasons, you understand," she said. Doubt was clear on her face, what little showed through the T-slit opening in the helmet. She shooed away a seagull, blabbing at us from the deck. "Ya know what's in the cargo holds?"

  I shook my head. What could possibly be more valuable than the lives of every person trying to get away? Even if they did fit them all on escape boats, would they be able to paddle to safety through roiling tides, hunted by Pangs from below and in danger of enormous stone caltrops surfacing from the depths? (I still couldn't make myself use the term "sliceberg.")

  It must have shown on my face. "Remember. This is a dungeon. Strength, he... doesn't like to wait around. He's a man of action." She made a spear-shape of her hand, skimmed it across her other palm. "He skips straight to the boss fight."

  I felt myself squinting. I was losing track of my spark deep inside. "You keep saying that. It's like you already know it's a game."

  "Say what, now?"

  "Nothing. How do you know there's a boss fight? What does that mean to you?"

  She pursed her lips. The blood was gone. Either Connie could shrug off injuries that would have been the end of me, even me in this form, or else she had some kind of internal repair system working overtime to get her back into shape. It bordered on the Wolverinesque. It was probably both.

  "Simple math, hon." She rolled her shoulders and pulled her foot upward, stretching thighs bigger around than my abdomen. (Wisdom did not seem especially well fed, and I was crossing my fingers that the job was not an overly ascetic one.) "You go through rooms, you push through to the objective, you solve a puzzle or two. You fight a boss."

  "What, to you," I pried, "is a boss?"

  She cracked knuckles and clanked her palms together. "Let's find out."

  A rush of water gulping into the lower decks across the huge rift became a staticky roar. Its creaking became the intolerable screech of metal straining against pressure changes and gravity. The screams responded in kind, a chorus of terror.

  The front half of the boat had reached a very literal tipping point. The cross-section of decks tilted toward the sky, both rising and sinking. Bodies hurled over the side and splashed into water, unable to afford hesitation. Wood crumbled and ropes and cables whipped outward, scattering the bulb-pattern of circling gulls. The incalculably large hull plunged spearpoint downward, helm-first into the deep, expectorating crates, seating, bags, tarps, books, charts, laundry, corpses, gears, struts, and fragments of unlaunched dinghies, a galaxy of people and things and parts that would, for a few moments, mark the last known position of the front half of the ship on the surface of the sea.

  Torm slapped his hands over the top of his wet head. Drave sank to his knees. The dark elf woman stared holes in us with her red eyes.

  The two sailors were eventually able to coordinate with the chaotic rescue efforts below to lower the family down via a makeshift rope of daisy-chained sheets and garments.

  "We can lower you down too, lords," they offered. I strongly doubted that two men, burly though they were, would be able to support Constitution in full armor. Hell, I don't know if a team of ten could have. She didn't dwell on it, and jumped over the side onto a relative clearing in a deck below, splashing and rocking a dinghy in her wake. She could stand, wading up to her waist, and when the sailors lowered me down, I swam over to her.

  My sandaled feet did not lend themselves to swimming, but I couldn't reach the floor of the submerged deck. She hoisted me up when I got close enough, and I clung to her ironclad biceps, feet dangling in the water.

  "Your lantern work in the water?" she asked.

  "I don't know," I said. "Should it? Did the other guy's?"

  She didn't roll her eyes, not exactly, it was more one of those "Oh, you" type looks. I was feeling very vulnerable in the water, knowing a Pang might attack without warning at any moment. I wondered what a level 5 Pang might look like, and if they developed special attacks that I had not seen yet.

  "You're you," she said. "Focus on that, 'kay?"

  Sure thing. No problem. It's just that the whole focusing part was impossible when you were afraid for your life and surrounded by screams and water.

  "What is this deck?"

  Catwalks emerged from the water, tracing a wide half-deck that began to narrow, just slightly, somewhere beneath the shifting surface. The waves sloshed against breached bulkheads, visible waterfalls flooding the chamber, most of which was underneath us. Occasionally the water troughed violently enough to expose something long and round, a rod like a great tree made of iron, with smaller gears and turning apparatuses surrounding it. It ran the length of the ship, and toward the surface, its termination jutted out of the water, steaming hot, snapped by incomprehensible forces.

  "I'm not a sailor," said Constitution. "But, it looks like the main axle." An axle meant a propellor.

  "This thing is powered?" I said. "Is that... what we're working with here?" I'd wanted to ask something idiotic like "You guys have technology?" but narrowly halted my tongue.

  A gauntlet pointed downward. "Look," she said. When the waves move. The glimpses of the gears on smaller gears on levers were spaced regularly into the cloudy water. Almost like row stations.

  "This is people-powered?"

  She nodded. "How else? It's a big ship."

  I shook my head at the scale of the solution. It did seem like the kind of fudged technology that you might see in the medieval-inspired-but-not-constrained type of fantasy, the thing where designers and writers realized that the setting is more interesting when you removed those constraints but still kept it recognizable, or at least suggested that it played by a certain set of rules. This was, after all, a world where you could walk through empty glowing mirrors and teleport. A big boat with a huge screw down the middle turned by a hundred pairs of strong arms, well, it seemed very Teo to me, even though I knew it wasn't. Not exactly.

  "I guess I just didn't expect it to be so..."

  "Barbaric?" she smiled.

  I conceded the point. "You have a lead on Strength?"

  "I think so," she said. "The most secure cargo hold is down there, toward the back, in this layer, or whatnot, ya know." That seemed to be the go-to phrasing for Connie when she couldn't explain something, her "yadda yadda yadda."

  "You think Strength is under water?"

  "He's been gone a while, so we have to assume he found a place with, ya know, air."

  It wasn't out of the question. But this was not an Occam's Razor-friendly explanation. "We aren't... we're not entertaining the possibility that he's...?" I cleared my throat. "Ya know."

  Her brows angled humorously. "Oh, sweetie. No. C’mon. It's him."