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The mist swallowed the raft in gulps of sinuous gray damp.

Ryan noticed an unnatural flurry of movement among the rancid weeds that crowded down to the brink of the water, now only fifty paces from the raft.

“Push it away,” he called urgently, taking one of the branches himself and poling off.

“What d’you see?” Krysty panted, throwing all her weight against the steering oar.

“Nothing. Something. I don’t know.”

“I heard something. Like someone laughing. But someone who didn’t have a proper mouth. Does that seem stupid?”

“No. Not down here it doesn’t.”

A hand erupted from the water, gripping Ryan’s wrist with grotesquely long fingers. The skin was creased, hanging at the wrist in folds, and the face that emerged from behind the hand was worse than anything from the depths of a jolt-spawned nightmare. The fearsome jaw protruded eighteen inches beyond the gaping holes of the nostrils, and the clashing teeth! Row upon row of overlapping, sharp fangs.

With his left hand pinioned, and lying on his right side, Ryan couldn’t get at either his blaster or his panga.

Life was a bare handful of heartbeats.