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Behind him, Jinx and Nezik conversed softly in their tongue for only a few seconds. Then they started off again, and easily caught up to Joshua.

It would be less than an hour later that they would begin to feel hints of the young woman's magical aura. Jinx noticed it first. Her head came up and her eyes went wide. For a moment, the despondency was replaced by hope. "There," she murmured. "I feel something. Come on!"

She sped up, leaving Nezik and Joshua in her wake. Nezik sighed and turned to Joshua. "C'mon," said the young merman resignedly, "I'll give you a ride. No way can you keep up now that Jinx is all excited."

Looking ahead, he knew what Jinx had felt. Tianara's aura, still untainted - at least as far as he could tell. Still pure. And that meant that she was not only alive, she was uninfected.

Nezik easily hooked Joshua's arms around his shoulders, piggyback style, and shrugged. "Exactly," he said, his mood beginning to lighten noticeably. "Now come on - I wouldn't put it past Jinx to just go rushing right in."

As soon as Joshua had a good hold, Nezik took off, matching Jinx's speed and then going faster still until they caught up with the Siren. It was difficult, because Jinx had only sped up since she'd left them. And this close, it was evident why - if you knew the aura, anyway.

Like Tianara had felt earlier in Katalina's, there was fear, but it was a good deal stronger. There was pain.

And the strength of the aura was fading.

"She's not dying," muttered Jinx, sensing Nezik's unspoken fear. "But he's trying to infect her. And who knows how much longer before she can't take it anymore. Come on!"

The two merfolk were in enough of a rush anyway, but this new information sent Nezik in particular into a flat-out race towards whatever he was sensing. "Come on, Tia," he muttered, "just a little longer. Hang on."

It was maybe another half-hour before they closed in on the location. Jinx halted, staring down in disbelief. "He took her here?" she whispered. "That...that..." She couldn't seem to find the words to express her fury.

Nezik shrugged Joshua loose. "Have to be able to breathe now," he explained. "C'mon."

That said, the two merfolk sank towards the wreckage of the ship that lay below them. Jinx looked up, impatiently gestured Joshua down, and then they were out of sight, inside the sunken ship.

Somewhere inside there, they were both hoping to find Kistad and Tianara.

Nezik, thankfully, had waited for him. With a silent gesture, he disappeared around the corner with a flick of the long tail. Evidently they were in a hurry. And rightfully so - the twisted darkness of the ship was mildly terrifying, and it had obviously served as a base for some time.

Up ahead, the young merman tensed. He could feel that Jinx was closer - much closer - than either he or Joshua, and feared that the Siren was going to do something stupid without them there to help her. So he sped up, hoping to catch up to her. Then, for a moment or two, utter chaos reigned.

Jinx's shriek of fury echoed through the ship just as Tianara's aura seemed to disappear completely. There was a low growling sound, and the ship seemed to grow completely dark for a few seconds. There were a few flashes, as though of magical power, and then the darkness diminished a little.

Nezik sped forward, half-blind, barely missing several obstacles. Although he tried to pace himself so that Joshua could keep up, he couldn't quite slow down enough.

By the time Joshua had finished speaking his sentence, Nezik was already gone, speeding away as fast as he could go. Dodging various obstacles and occasionally running into things he hadn't had time to spot in the dark, he made his way towards Jinx.

He found them in the hold of the ship, unsurprisingly enough. Jinx looked up at him. She seemed shaky - maybe with rage, maybe with grief - but otherwise all right. And she held Tianara.

The girl, however, was decidedly not all right. Oh, physically she seemed mostly unharmed aside from some bruising, but her eyes were wide and blank and empty, like a doll's, on an entirely expressionless face. They held no spark of life whatsoever, yet she was breathing.

And the blond merman was floating an inch or two above the floor. He was quite evidently dead. Whether Jinx had killed him or not was debatable; there was no blood on her, but the water might have kept it off. And she was too focused on Tianara for anyone to ask her.

Jinx rearranged Tianara so that the girl's head lay against her shoulder, carrying the girl like a child. Once that was done, she looked at Joshua wearily, knowing the answer would hurt all of them. "I got here just when she broke," she said simply. "And went away inside her head somewhere."

Catatonic. It was an ugly word, but it was the only word Jinx could have used if she'd known it. Tianara had taken the relentless magical assault on her emotions and her mind until at last she couldn't anymore, and she had escaped the only way she could.

"He," and here she nodded at Kistad, "was already dead, though. I think he must have killed himself - she couldn't have done it." The binding marks on the girl's wrists already spoke to why, so Jinx didn't bother with that. "Maybe he came back to himself long enough to realize..." She shrugged. "And then the dark took over working on her, so it could have a new shape."

She looked around the darkness of the ship, and shivered once. "Let's go. Get her out of here."

Jinx and Nezik followed, both equally silent. None of them could say anything about it - they both knew that the chances of Tianara coming back were slim. The chances of her coming back the way she'd been were even slimmer. And in the meantime, they had to take her back to her family like this.

Or...

Maybe, if they got her out of the water, somewhere where she knew she was safe...

It was Jinx who said it at last. "Joshua?"

She didn't want to give the girl up while they tried to make her recover. But she thought that maybe if they got her out of the water, into a totally different environment from the one they had taken her from, it might bring her back. Surely her subconscious would recognize that she was no longer in the water, where the threat she had fled had been.

While she waited for him to respond, she tried to form the words in her mind. She could tell he felt guilty, and it wasn't like she could comfort him - she wanted him to feel guilty, as cruel as it seemed. But he might be the only thing that would bring Tianara back, so she didn't want to emotionally destroy him entirely.

A bit of a puzzle.