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He finally noticed her from above the pier as he flew overhead. Scylla was tied up to a pole, plunged so deep into the earth under the shallows that went back and forth between high and low tide between the shore and ocean that there was no way that she would be rehydrated by any of the water around her. It was designed to be torture the likes of which Tantalus had endured, smelling the saltwater beneath her that couldn't reach her even as she'd become more and more dehydrated. Furthermore, as a shark, being forced to remain still for long was already bad enough, since sharks need to stay constantly in motion to stay alive as well. She squirmed.

Descending by the pole that she was tied to in slow, careful circles to land near it, it didn't take long for Rakim to notice that Betta hadn't lied. There was someone else there, someone who seemed determined to make it so that the bat would not be able to free her after all. It was the same ninja carp who had appeared on Mano's sub to get her attention before vanishing again.

"You must be Wintermute," Rakim said to her, remembering what Betta had called her.

She looked at his face carefully as he spoke and, rather than talking back, she started signing at him. 'You must be Rakim,' she gestured at him without taking her eyes off him as she did. He nodded knowingly, and signed back at her. 'I am.' She gasped. You had to see a carp gasp. Their faces seemed sort of designed for it, he couldn't help but think. 'Leave now, and I won't kill you where you stand,' she motioned toward him, pushing past her initial surprise.

Scylla was drowsy, but still sort of half-awake, so she noticed that Rakim was there having an exchange with Wintermute. She hadn't known that Rakim knew sign language. 'If you let me free her, I will go,' Rakim signed at her. 'You can even come with us.' Under ordinary circumstances, he might never have gone to the trouble of learning it, especially belonging to a species that privileged sound over sight the way bats did. But when Irshad had started going deaf, he had started learning sign language, hoping to continue to be able to talk to her, no matter what would happen. 'We can protect you,' Rakim added with what he hoped was due emphasis.

She shook her head. 'If I let her go, it'll be me up on that pole,' she signed resignedly.

He sighed. First he had struggled to learn Arabic for Irshad, then he had struggled to learn sign language for her. He'd always be sad that he hadn't gotten the chance to speak it with her. Even trying to do so now was bittersweet for him, because of what it reminded him of. And yet, even having learned it, it was still no use. How many more languages would he have to learn before he would finally be able to communicate what he truly wanted to someone talking to him?

'I understand,' he signed simply.

They both assumed their chosen fighting stance, sustaining each other's gaze while they did. Rakim saw her eyes freeze into a literally icy glare while sai made of ice coalesced from snowflakes swirling around her in her hands. "Oh crap," the bat couldn't help saying out loud as he started swinging an electrified chain that he extended out of his arm like a flail on his side. She read his lips, and looked at him confidently. " Get over here!" he shouted at the carp as she prepared to block the electrified chain that he was sending toward her with her ice sai. Scylla, almost passed out from what she'd been going through, heard him, and chuckled mirthlessly.

She'd always liked his video game references.

***

Mano, Fugue and Klein reached Atlan's underwater lair in Mano's sub, and found a way in. Fugue knew how to use his spikes to pick locks, and made good use of his skill to allow them all to get past locked doors that stood in their way. Soon, they came upon a room in which three separate doors awaited them, forcing them to split up to continue advancing deeper into the Fishist hideout. Klein was forced to choose the only door that didn't lead into a flooded area.

Klein walked into a bare, white, circular room. In its center, two life-sized mannequins laid collapsed in a heap on top of each other, seemingly inextricably entangled. Strings that seemed too long for them dangled weirdly between them and the ceiling over them. When the skunk took one step away from the entrance toward them, the strings that were attached to the mannequins abruptly yanked both of them so that they would have their backs to the wall facing each other on each side of him. They had each had one of their arms ripped out of its socket, left interlocked with the other's arm hanging by strings at the center of the room in front of Klein.

Klein remembered the factory worker who'd lost an arm because of him well. So this was another way in which Atlan used his powers based on the information he gathered about how other people's minds worked, Klein thought. The dolphin would try to learn what had been some of the most formative events in people's lives so that he could use that knowledge as part of psychological warfare, to try to weaken his enemies' defenses against Atlan ahead of time.

As the strings above the mannequins started spinning around the circular room's ceiling, they dragged the mannequins behind them, still with their backs to the wall facing inward toward the skunk. While they span faster and faster and faster, splatters of blood started appearing on the wall around him, staining its pristine, untouched appearance with bright, messy splashes of red all over the place. The blood didn't seem to have been coming out of the mannequins at all but to have been appearing on the walls themselves. It soon got to a point where more of the wall of the room around him was red than white.

It would've been distressing enough even without his past. Somehow the things about it that didn't quite 'work' - the fact that it was mannequins and not bodies, that the blood wasn't coming from where it looked like it would've been supposed to have been coming from - made it feel creepier, not better. It seemed to bring into question whether or not he was even able to process reality the way it was as it is, seeping doubt into his mind about his grip onto it. What was there even for him to hold onto in such an uncertain existence? So he closed his eyes, and thought back on something that Fugue had taught him long ago.

"Rin... pyo... toh... sha... kai... jin... retsu... zai... zen" he interwove his fingers as he said.

When Klein opened his eyes, the mannequins and blood splatters were gone.

Although Fugue may no longer have been Shinto, Klein was certainly glad that Fugue had been when they'd met. Klein got the impression that Atlan didn't look too kindly on his followers entertaining other belief systems. Whatever Fugue's reasons had been, Klein was glad that Fugue had shared with him the tools he'd had to regain control over his own mind, when he'd still been able to.

The floor in the next room was all black and white tiles, looking just like a chessboard. Klein couldn't help but think that, if he'd been able to see himself from an outside perspective, his black and white skunk body would've probably looked pretty cool set against this floor. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, and there were long rectangular tables set against the left and right walls covered in white tablecloths, plates, glasses, pitchers, bowls, cups, pots and utensils.

The most notable part of the room was still the lobster with a monocle and tuxedo in it.

"And, of course, you would come through here," said the lobster to the skunk, "the only path that wasn't flooded." Klein looked him up and down. "How delightfully... predictable of you." Klein had never seen a lobster smirk before. "Of course, everything is predictable if you have enough data," the crustacean added, flicking his long antennae as he did, "that's just common sense." Klein frowned. "You mean, like, Fate?" Descartes chortled. "Yes, exactly like Fate, if that helps you." Klein shook his head. "There's no such thing." Descartes' claws were decidedly untied. "Oh, but there is. That's how I know Eli's prophecy will come true."

Descartes had started out as a Christian because it had initially seemed to square with his deterministic, essentialist view of the universe. He had abandoned it after having become annoyed with the doctrine of free will, whatever that was. "It will lead us to victory just as surely as our dry path led you here, like a conveyor belt." The lobster had become a genetic engineer and an architect, using his abilities to torture Ammut and to build Atlan's lair. He saw himself as making sure to guide everything in the direction in which he believed it was supposed to go. "So there's no free will?" Descartes scoffed at Klein's sophistry. "A retroactive illusion for pawns."

"Don't you mean 'prawns'?"

Klein narrowly cartwheeled away from having his head cut off by a lobster claw. "You want to talk about shellfish, you insipid little punk?" Descartes adopted a stance that the skunk recognized as being from Eskrima. "Let's talk about lobster tanks, to pick a completely random example I've made up off the top of my head," he started, "when you see a lobster in that tank, Klein, what do you do? Do you walk up to it, and tell it there's no such thing as Fate?" He clicked his claws menacingly at his sides. "Of course not. There's only one thing that can happen. Just as what happened to Eli, as what will happen to all of you landlubbers, inevitably."

Klein was glad that Mandrake had not ended up against Descartes. He would have had such a hard time hitting a shellfish. He liked them so. While the skunk usually found Mandrake's attachment to them admirable, Klein was glad, for once, that he, himself, was not burdened with such compunctions. It would have made fighting back against Descartes difficult, and it increasingly seemed to Klein that he wasn't going to be able to talk his way out of this one.

"You're nothing but a pack of cards," Klein said.

As he sank into his low capoeira footwork, Klein suddenly realized that the rows of black and white floor tiles had started moving under him one after the other in turn. Besides the fact that a horizontal movement was always followed by a vertical movement and vice-versa, there seemed to be no other discernible pattern to which one would move next. They'd been set up in a way in which they didn't interfere with the tables on the sides of the room. What they did do was to consistently make Klein nearly walk into most of Descartes' punches while moving the lobster narrowly out of the way of most of the skunk's kicks, as though he knew where they would be.

The crustacean controlled the Cartesian grid beneath them, so the odds would favor him.

"Are you so naïve as to think the path that led you here is still dry, skunk?" Klein shuddered. How had it not occurred to him that they'd been going to flood the path behind him to trap him in a dead end the way they clearly had? Was Atlan's right hand man right about Fate after all? Did Klein only think that he had free will because he didn't know all of the right factors to predict what would happen to him with utmost certainty, proving his existentialism wrong, he asked himself? Naturally, whichever interpretation of reality resulted in Klein being killed by his opponent was going to be considerably less appealing to him, that much was for certain.

Between Descartes' ballroom footwork and Klein's capoeira, both seemed to be dancing.

Klein jumped back onto a table out of the way of a claw swipe then leapt off the table over Descartes to dodge another one, landing behind Descartes. The chandelier over them swung seemingly of its own accord just as the lobster was in the process of accidentally knocking over a glass because he had tried to hit Klein with his claw and failed. Neither of them expected the glass to hover in midair before slowly returning to the table as though it had come to life.

A chill went down Klein's spine.

He may have been up against worse than the lobster after all, the skunk thought to himself. "Bad fish, breaking glasses," a disembodied Cheshire grin admonished Descartes, confirming Klein's most frightening suspicions. "What did a glass ever do to you?" he asked the lobster reproachfully. "Don't you think that's rude, Klein?" Having just swung from the chandelier above Descartes and Klein by his tongue to save the poor object from inadvertent destruction, Boko dissolved his chameleon camouflage to give a toothy grin up at Klein from his predatory crouch...