The water was rising so fast that it quickly went from splashing against his thighs to his waist. Suddenly, a large wave of water came crashing into the room, knocking the floating chairs against one an-other. Gella and Axel both lost their footing. They grabbed for the table, but it was starting to float, giving them no stabilitv.
"Watch out!" Gella yelled. "Don't touch Binnot's body. He's still
poisonous!"
Binnot's corpse had disappeared under the rising tide. With all the floating furniture and the brown, clay-colored water, he couldn't be seen. Axel tried to keep near the wall, pushing himself closer to the door. When Binnot's body bobbed in the water nearby, Axel kicked it away with his boots. One of his legs got tangled in the rungs of a floating chair, and Axel's head briefly went under the surface.
He came up, disentangling from the chair, spitting water into the air.
"Swim, Axel!" Gella yelled, already buoyant and near the exit. She held open the door, which kept trying to shut, by jamming her legs in the frame. Axel managed to swim over and grab the edge of the door-way. He turned around one last time to see Binnot's body floating facedown beyond the table. The bowl full of spiceflowers had been overturned, and the beautiful blooms bobbed gently against his corpse.
"Let's go!" Gella yelled.
"Wait!"
Axel dived beneath the surface and swam back toward Binnot.
When he surfaced, Gella was hollering at him, words like are you crazy and are you trying to get yourself killed. But Axel wasn't listening. He was near Binnot's body now, and he carefully pushed his body aside, avoiding the poisoned glove. He felt for the ground near the wall where Bin-not had dropped Gella's lightsabers, grabbing one and then the other.
He broke the surface, gasping for air.
"If you die, Greylark, I am going to kill you."
Axel lifted up the two lightsabers in his hand as he swam forward.
He handed them to Gella.
"Okay fine, I forgive you," she said, smiling brightly and slipping
them into her tunic.
Axel touched his chest, then raised his wet hand out of the water. It was bright red at his fingertips. The wound in his chest stung terribly, and he realized it had opened back up and was bleeding again.
Gella saw the blood on his hand. "That's from you?"
Axel nodded, his other hand pressing against his chest. The water was now about two-thirds of the way high.
"We've got to get out of here. It's okay. Stay close to me."
They began swimming forward, but Axel lagged behind. The wound in his chest made it difficult to use his arms, and one of them still burned painfully from the lightsaber strike. His boots and clothes were waterlogged, making it almost impossible to swim. He could barely catch his breath between splashes of water cresting by. As Gella progressed forward, she had to pause and occasionally tug Axel behind her by the scruff of his jacket, beneath his neck.
Axel nodded weakly, but a new wave of water filled his mouth, and he coughed and sputtered. Something caught his leg and pulled him under. Axel reached down, his hands frantically scrambling to find what had snagged his boot. It was a hand. He would have yelled if he could, but instead he kicked the hand away, trying to surface for air.
When he came up, there was a Path member flailing in the water two meters away. The woman's forehead was a blur of blue paint, and her eyes were panicked.
"This way!" Gella yelled, motioning toward the passageway back to the surface.
"No!" the woman yelled, hatred in her voice. "Never." But even as she spoke, she could barely keep her head above water.
She flailed again, and her face went under. A single hand surfaced, grasping the air, before it went below again for good.
"Dammit!" Gella said, "Axel. Come on. Keep going."
Axel's legs were starting to cramp painfully from the effort of kick-ing. One arm was hardly useful, and his chest screamed with pain every time he pushed at the water. Darkness encroached at the edges of his vision before retreating. He was going to pass out soon. He was still bleeding.
"Gella," he said, between gasps. "I can't do this for much longer."
"Flip onto your back. Relax."
He did as he was told, and Gella tugged him by his jacket. She was able to swim and yank him past the hairpin turn, then rightward up the corridor that led to the surface. But the water was pushing and gushing upward, faster than Gella was able to swim.
Axel's vision was blurry from water splashing over and over against his face, but he could see the end of the tunnel about five meters. away. They passed the dead body of another Path member, facedown in the roiling water, which continued to rise at an alarming rate. Very soon, there would be no air to breathe.
The tunnel was made of compacted soil and clay, carved out who knew how many decades or centuries ago, but it was not fortified with much stone or cement. Which meant the water was eating away at the soft, clay walls like ocean waves against a sandcastle. The walls began to crumble as Gella cried out.
"Help!" she yelled, gurgling and coughing, her face halfway under the turbid water.
Gella would only ask for help if she knew things were bad. Very bad.
Axel's mouth was full of water. If he spoke, he'd inhale water. Which he did, trying to tell her with his last breath that he was sorry, so sorry for all the trouble hed caused. And that he loved her very much, the way that friends did when they realized their existence had shifted in a way that changed them forevermore.
But what came out of his mouth was a gurgling, coughing gulp.
The darkness once again began tunneling his vision. His legs were cramped into uselessness. His limbs were numb from the cold water, and the pain in his chest would not abate. He was dying for real now, and Gella, with him. Her hand pushed against the roof of the tunnel, her fingers gripping mud as even the ceiling began to soften and collapse.
And collapse it did.

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Together, they reached forward. Yaddle felt the ground in all its beauty and consequence. The tiniest grain of clay, dissolved in so much liquid, and the great stones beneath the surface of the ground that moved only with centuries of past glaciers, formed in magma, cooled into stones as everlasting as hope.
She gathered them, pulled them from the water, and felt them as if molded clay in a child's hands -pulling. Pushing. Thrusting tons of dirt and stone up and away. Peeling it from the bodies, now nearly life-less, deep below.
She opened her eyes. Master Yoda was twisting his clawed hands, and the water was emerging from the widening hole in the ground like a piece of carved glass, a bloom opening and spreading outward from what was now a large crevasse.
"Gella!" a voice cried. Jedi Enya Keen had rushed forward from a nearby rescue tent. Despite the cries of warning from others, she ran forward, knee-deep in the muck and glancing only for a second at the walls of water and soil, like enormous giants of glass and flowers of clay, ever growing, and being manipulated by the two Jedi Masters. A thick wavy mass of clay peeled out of the crevasse, and a human hand appeared in the bubbling water, covered in mud.
Enya reached for it, grasping the wrist, pulling with all her might.
Gella, covered in mud and with an open mouth full of dirty water, emerged. Gella's hand was fixed tight to something deep in the ground, and Yaddle exhaled, dropping enormous twin clods of soil to the side, and reaching in deeply with the Force.
The body of Axel Greylark, similarly obscured in mud and limp as wet leaves, emerged from the watery hole. Gella's hand held fast to the back of his jacket.
Yoda let the water fall in an enormous wave several meters away.
Master Yaddle lowered her arms, the torturous structure of extracted mud falling with a boom at a distance. She exhaled.
Enya pulled both Gella and Axel away from the gushing water and mud. Several medics ran over with stretchers, gathering them up and dashing back to the rescue tent. Enya ran alongside them, out of Yad-dle's view. A single voice hollered to them seconds later.
"They're alive!"

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