He's floating again, treading water again. There's an inky black sky far above him with a few white motes that might be stars. They're too faint for him to tell if they're just tricks of the light, reflected glimmers from the surface of the sea that he's in.
Something bumps against his arm. Victor ignores it. He's still looking into the sky, trying to find something that isn't there. Trying not to look down, or around him, at what's floating in the water around him, gradually pulled away by the current. There's a whispering, echoing cacophony of voices in his head, shards of the people they used to belong to. Somewhere from off the horizon, Victor can hear Ben's animal screaming, devolved and mutilated into a beast rather than a person. He feels the current pull at him, feels what's floating past bump into him.
"It doesn't feel, Victor, it's like a god, it doesn't have compassion or regret or any of those flaws, I'm going to fucking kill it..."
That voice, he knows. He glances down a bit, meets Anna's eyes. Her corpse has kept her injuries. There's only one eye, looking up at the stars maybe to whatever distant perspective he's searching for. Victor stares at her, pityingly, understanding now. Mercifully, she stays dead. Her eye stares outwards, unblinking, and she floats away.
Victor watches them all go. Anna. Ben. Donovan. Julia. Willis. He watches them follow the tide. He keeps swimming.
If there's a beast hunting him from beneath the waters, it doesn't bother him.
He woke up coughing, his suit's air contaminated and leaky. Cave dust washed into him. He groped about in darkness, felt rock and debris. He pulled at it, lashed away, clumsy. It worked, eventually.
His path was slow, and meandering, and gradual. He found Anna's canister rifle on the way, still a couple rounds left. Eventually, he found his way into what remained of the vast open space of the temple. The entire floor was caked with debris, a pile so tall that all that remained of the space was a small slice near what used to be the roof that led back out into the canyon. Victor picked his way up the moiraine slowly, tripping and feeling the loose rock skitter away beneath his feet. He limped on.
Near the entrance, something stirred beneath his feet. Victor looked down, tilted his head at what he saw, but if he was surprised he didn't show it. His face could have been carved out of rock.
Beneath him, the Colossus' head stirred. Scraps of torn-apart architecture, once artfully carved and beautiful, flecked away as it twitched. Victor tried to speak, found he had to cough out dust and blood for a few tens of seconds instead.
"I could kill you," he said finally. "Anna would have. She thought it would have meant something."
The beast stared back, and Victor reckoned it probably understood him.
"I could leave you here, and it would probably be like torture. Maybe I would have done that, once. It would have been revenge. For Ben, and maybe all the others you've killed."
He waited for his ghosts to come back to him, for a drug-addled hallucination of Paul to hassle him, for Anna to mock his ability to feel, for anything. Nothing came.
"I'm leaving you here," said Victor, "alive, because I can't spare the bullets. This isn't for Anna. This isn't for me, or for any of the others. This isn't anything. You're just another casualty."
Victor walked away and upwards. As he reached the edge of the debris pile he found the canyon wall was still relatively intact; he began to climb up the wall. With no anchoring system, it was always possible that he could screw it up and fall all the way to the bottom, but he wasn't sure he cared anymore anyway. He climbed slow, and careful, his armored suit taking the weight.
He was halfway up when he heard the Colossus wail. He heard fragments of Ben in the voice. He heard a person, breaking. Victor didn't even break stride. He kept climbing, pulling himself upwards, careful and patient as a machine. But his lips twisted into something grotesque, something that long ago might have once been a smile.
