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'You can't free a fish from water.' (217th Rule of Acquisition)

"I told you that there'd be another Great Flood," Boko chided Klein, "but you didn't believe me, did you?" Descartes looked Boko up and down. He had no idea who this chameleon could be, or how he had found his way so deep into Atlan's lair unnoticed. Klein felt fear coursing through him as he wondered how far back Boko had been following him. He'd been on Mano's sub. Had Boko been in Soma's grove? Had he been in the alley where Fugue had found him? Or had Boko been following Klein since even before then, without Klein ever having had any idea that he was being watched the whole time? There was no way for Klein to find out.

"Who is this interloper?" Descartes asked Klein, indignant that their fight would have been interrupted the way it had been. "How do you do it, Klein?" Boko was ignoring Descartes completely. "What do you mean?" Klein wasn't sure what Boko was talking about. "Well, Klein... I've been doing some thinking recently," Boko started. "You see, when you first left me, I just thought it'd been my fault for having believed that you could be better than you were. I thought I'd been a fool to worship you like an object, when you couldn't help the fact that you were just a mere person. You could never be made to have the clarity of purpose of an object."

Klein could hear that the path that led them there had filled completely with water now.

"But then, after a while, something happened to me that I hadn't seen coming, something that made me question whether I should've paid closer attention to some of the things you'd said to me after all," Boko continued as water started seeping into the room under the door. "It's not important what happened specifically," Boko hastened to add, less than eager to share his defeat at the hands of Diaz with anyone, "but it recontextualized a lot of what I'd done until then. So, I started wondering if you may have been onto something. I left Noah's Vault behind for a while, and I wandered the world in search of some kind of answer..."

If Boko wanted to keep talking until they drowned, let him, Descartes thought to himself.

"After a while of having searched, and of not having found what I was looking for, I started thinking that, since you'd been the first person to make me question some of my most hardened assumptions about life, that maybe I should try to track you back down, to see if you might have known what the next step on my path should be," Boko explained painstakingly. "So how to you do it?" he'd asked Klein. "How do I do what?" Klein still wasn't sure what he meant.

"How do you let yourself get attached to people when you know they're going to die?"

Klein thought about it. He certainly hadn't expected that kind of question from Boko, of all people. Klein still knew enough to be scared of Boko, of course. Boko was still a serial killer who'd indoctrinated Klein into a destructive belief system without Klein having even realized that was what had been happening for a time. Klein would never be foolish enough to trust Boko again. Be that as it may, it seemed like the truth couldn't hurt him, so he may as well have said it.

"When you find people you really care about, people you feel empathy for, Boko, if that ever happens to you... You're going to understand why you're going to be willing to spend as much time with them as you're going to be able to, even if in the back of your mind you know that they're going to disappear someday. When you meet someone like that... life just becomes unbearable without them. So yeah, you still let it happen, and you don't look back. I don't know if I can explain it to you any better than that. I guess it's the kind of thing that you need to experience yourself to really be able to understand it for some reason. That's my answer."

Boko seemed disappointed at first, as if he'd secretly been hoping for an easier answer, but he stopped and thought about it, turning it over in his mind until his expression slowly changed to resigned acceptance. "I suppose that's the best answer I can probably get from anyone about this," Boko told Klein. "Thank you for having taken the time to give me an honest answer, Klein."

Before Descartes could move, Boko had already wrapped his tail around the lobster's body to slam Descartes' body on the ground to his left and right and left before holding the lobster up in the air in front of him. "How do we get out of here?" "I'll never talk!" Descartes had sputtered. Boko slammed him on the ground again to his right and left and right. "There's a switch in the path behind you that brings the water down. But you'll never make it! It's designed to be so far back from here that it's impossible for any air-breather to reach it from here without drowning in the process," Descartes had revealed to them, "so you'll never make it out alive."

Descartes yelped as Boko threw him behind himself with his tail like an old fruit peel. "So what exactly do we do, Klein?" A cold sweat ran down Klein's back. "I don't know. At this point I have no idea whether Fugue or Mano will make it out of where they are or not. So if neither fish can free us from the flooded path... I guess that's it. We're done for." Boko pondered this, a dubious expression on his face. "Should we have another go of it, for old times' sake?"

Before Klein could answer Boko's suggestion, he saw a stingray come out of the path that had led them there, wet but with the water in the path that she'd just come out of decidedly lowering. "It's you!" Klein exclaimed. It was the stingray who'd taught Klein capoeira and candomblé during his trip to Brazil all that time ago! "How did you find us here?" She shook her head, shaking some of the water off from her journey there.

"I was one of the earliest Fishists. It seemed to make sense after what happened to Eli. At first, our movement reminded me of capoeira's early days. My forefathers had also taken guerilla measures to fight against oppression, just as we were. After a while, I saw that Atlan had more in common with the slave owners that my ancestors had fought to liberate themselves from than with those who had freed themselves from slavery themselves. If there's anything I'd learned to do from them, it was to bide my time while waiting for the right opportunity to escape to present itself. When you and your friends attacked this place, I finally saw my chance, and took it."

So she led them out of Atlan's lair, back to Mano's sub, where they joined Fugue, Ammut, and Mano carrying Atlan's limp body onboard before piloting them all back to shore in her Love Craft.

***

Rakim managed to catch Wintermute in just the same kind of hold that he'd caught Betta in that time. Without thinking, Rakim used his wing to redirect his bat screech right at her head. Without missing a beat, the carp, unharmed by his attack, broke out of his hold, and didn't hear him scream when she broke his arm, either. It hurt so much! He felt so stupid. How had he forgotten that, being deaf, she wouldn't be affected by his sonic attacks at all? Yet there he was.

What neither of them had noticed was that, while Rakim had kept Wintermute distracted, an atlas moth had flown in on the scene, up toward Scylla's pole to start untying the shark's bonds behind her back. When she'd finally finished untying her, Rakim heard a splash, and looked behind Wintermute, noticing that Scylla had fallen into the water at last, where her body could be rehydrated in time so that she wouldn't die from dehydration after all. Noticing that Rakim had noticed something behind her, Wintermute had turned around just in time to see the atlas moth land in front of her, and blow a mysterious powder from her hand into the carp's face.

Wintermute was out like a light snoring ashore as the tide moved back and forth over her.

"Thank you for saving my girlfriend," the atlas moth told Rakim while helping him get up in spite of having just had his arm broken, "I really appreciate it." Rakim didn't know that Scylla had met someone yet, but he was happy for her to learn that she had. She'd wanted to for such a long time. Transitioning seemed to have done the shark so much good. It would've been so stupid for her to have died without having gotten the chance to enjoy it, he thought grimly.

"Thank you for saving me from Sub-Zero over here," Rakim stuck his tongue out. "Don't mention it," she said. "After all," she shrugged, "the atlas moth is the most altruistic of all moths." He couldn't tell whether she was kidding or not. "You and my love both seem to be in need of medical attention, though," she went on, "do you know somewhere we could go to get some of it for each of you?" Rakim nodded. "I'm sure Soma can help us both. Follow me."

***

Soma was having a pretty hard time himself.

Mandrake grumbled to himself about how hard Soma had pushed himself before finally admitting that he'd been pushing himself too hard, after how badly Betta had damaged Soma's health. Now that it was time for Soma to start working on healing Milgram from Atlan's hold on her, before he would finish healing Ogun the rest of the way beyond emergency stabilization, Soma realized that he was out of strength, and couldn't keep going. Worst of all, it was nightfall.

Soma had been as diurnal as Rakim had been nocturnal. As a dryad and as a reptile, Soma got much of his energy from the sun's warmth, and it was difficult for him to stay awake at night. He and Rakim usually dated around dawn or dusk, compromising by meeting each other halfway. However, Soma wouldn't be able to keep working at saving their lives if he fell asleep and, like someone with a concussion, if he fell asleep then, there was a risk he wouldn't wake up.

Mandrake related Soma to the environment in general for more than just because Soma was a dryad. Like the environment, people always seemed to assume that Soma's resources were limitless, when in fact Mandrake knew better than most people that his extraordinary powers still had limits just like everyone else's, they were just different. All their time together, Mandrake had been afraid that, someday, Soma would work himself to death, and it seemed on the horizon.

Like Rakim, Mandrake's people had usually frowned on all forms of evocation since ancient times, but, like Rakim, Mandrake was reaching a point where it was a matter of life and death, so desperate times called for desperate measures. Throwing breadcrumbs into a six-pointed star on the ground in front of him, Mandrake recited the incantation that Soma had taught him to summon Soma's master, who Mandrake had known about, but had never met. Six pigeons coalesced into her from the sky while Rakim landed near them with Scylla and her moth girlfriend.

"Oh, you again!" Mnemos told Rakim. "It's been a while, hasn't it?" Rakim told her. "Huh? Oh, I guess," the rat shrugged. She was always surprised by how mortals seemed to experience time differently than she did, but she adapted to it as well as she could when they did. "My poor boy," she said, caressing the drowsy Soma's face as she did, "you guarded my grove so well," she added. "Thank you, Soma." He smiled at her weakly. "Anything for you," he said.

So she sat on the ground by him and, taking out her flute, began to play for him. Plants and snakes had always responded to music well, even when it was a completely natural process. Music helped plants grow, and snakes were fascinated by flute playing in general. Rakim even noticed that the music that Mnemos was playing for her Soma sounded like snake charming music. If her music could turn books into trees, what could it do for someone like Soma?

But what really caught Rakim's attention was the moth.

Standing in the center of a clearing in Soma's grove as the sun finished setting over the horizon, she began to spin. She was dressed like a dervish, Rakim couldn't help noticing, just as his mother had told him that her Sufi master had been when she'd been growing up back home. She span slowly, at least at first, but faster and faster as time went on, until it seemed as though the friction from her spinning motion was beginning to ignite her body.

Before long, the moth had spun herself into a fiery tornado, coalescing into a large sphere of fire over the grove. The half-moth, half-Ifrit hybrid became a second sun at night for Soma's snake-dryad body to draw the same strength from that he drew from the sun itself during the day. Rakim had not fully believed his mother about those stories she'd told him since he'd been a child, but there he was. She hadn't been kidding when she'd told him that all Ifrits weren't evil.

"Well," Mnemos paused her playing to say, "there's something you don't see every day."

***

When Mano's empathy drug had hit Atlan's metabolism, something unexpected had taken place. No one who'd ever tried her empathy drug had ever been a dolphin or a serial killer, and no one had ever taken such a massive dose of it at once. These were three factors that were necessarily going to affect which effect it would have in ways that she couldn't have predicted until having tried.

Atlan had fallen into such a deep sleep that, even though he wasn't getting any closer or further from dying, he was functionally in a coma for what seemed like it was going to be the rest of his life. When Mandrake used his MRI machine to measure Atlan's brain activity, he told Mano that Atlan was now always dreaming with both hemispheres of his brain, without ever being awake. By putting end to end the scans of which images Atlan's dream brain activity amounted to, it was possible to determine what the dreams he was having were. It turned out that Mano's empathy drug had worked after all.

Finally empathizing with the people he'd killed after a lifetime of never having felt empathy for anyone, because he'd been forced to, Atlan had fallen into a dream state in which he lived, from beginning to end, the lives of the people whose deaths he'd been responsible for. Not just their deaths, and the suffering he'd inflicted on them, but their whole, complete, complex lives, from their troubled youths through their growth process to their adult years. Once he'd finished living one person's entire life over, Atlan would start living another of his victim's lives from the start all over again, always reliving his own specific, never-ending version of samsara.

Perversely, Atlan became all that was left that was preserved of the lives that he'd destroyed, a way in which the people he'd wanted to disappear would exist forever through him.

As for Mano, she continued her lucid dreams of Eli, but she began to sleep much fewer hours a day than she'd been doing since Eli's death had first hit her. When she would be about to wake up, she would perform an invocation ritual with Eli in her dream, just as Ogun the chimera had performed with Ogun the loa. She'd summon Eli's spirit into herself to guide her actions throughout the day. When she would fall back asleep, Mano would perform an evocation ritual in her dream, just as Rakim and Mandrake had performed with Mnemos, drawing Eli's spirit back out of her body to stand in front of her so Mano could still talk to Eli while she dreamt.

With Eli's spirit guiding her actions, Mano rose to the challenge that the rise of Fishism had presented to her. She told them that, while she may or may not have been a divine messiah, she would do everything in her power to help continue leading the battle for fish rights, just as Eli had done before her. Mano knew that it wouldn't have been enough to simply dismantle Atlan's cult to let his followers fend for themselves. At best it would've simply made them prey for the next set of easy solutions to come along for someone else's convenience. She considered everything they had to offer, all the needs they had to meet, the problems they had to address.

She turned Atlan's underwater lair into the first refuge and shelter for homeless fish.

Mano made sure to emphasize the roles of everyone who had helped her achieve her goal. Ammut, Fugue, Milgram, Scylla, Klein's stingray teacher, and even Betta once she'd been released after Soma saved Milgram, would be remembered as Fishist saints. Their ability and willingness to break through Atlan's conditioning became an inspiration to fish everywhere that they could also decondition themselves and others from all other social conditioning that had, for the benefit of the powerful, been designed to restrict their ability to exist. Soma, Mandrake, Rakim and Klein would become reminders that even over-grounders could be helpful to fish.

With Eli as her witness, Mano would make sure that Eli's legacy would become something that she would have been proud of, not ashamed of, just as Eli had wished that someone had done for those who had started every other religion that had ended up being corrupted by power in time. Fishists were encouraged to practice Fishism alongside any religion they wanted, or no religion at all. They were encouraged to exercise critical thinking about all belief systems they encountered, without ever reducing those who practiced them to cardboard cutouts. They were encouraged to treat people on a case-by-case basis, based on their behavior.

The vast majority of Fishists thought of Fishism as a philosophy, but only a small minority of them took some of its aspects literally.

Fishism became open even to believers who weren't fish themselves. While fish rights still were and would always be the main focus of Fishism, Fishists became encouraged to extend the same rights they would want to surface dwellers in turn. For over-grounders, the meaning of Fishism could be extended to include any situation in which you wished that you could force other people to empathize with your pain, just so that they could finally understand what you were going through. Fishists were encouraged to vent the pain that they'd experienced rather than to repress it, like water being let out through a dam so that the dam wouldn't burst.

In time, Fishism became known as a religion of peace.

The first commandment of Fishism is still that fish are people.

***

Having finally broken out of jail after all this time, Bridges just wandered into Diaz's hideout unhindered. Having initially mistaken Bridges for Mandrake, when Bridges asked Diaz if Diaz wanted to go out with him to the Bolgia, Diaz simply accepted. Once Diaz realized that Bridges wasn't Mandrake, though, Diaz was already at the Bolgia, had already met Klein, Mano, Rakim and Ogun. Diaz decided to keep going out with Bridges, who had 'stolen' him, after all.

They are still together.