Pompeii stood amid the corpses of the elders, raised his foot, and stomped down hard.
The deck exploded beneath his foot. The entire steel plate seemed to be torn apart from the middle by an invisible giant hand, its edges curling outward to reveal the dark compartment below.
He bent down and grabbed a corpse with one hand, as easily as if he were carrying two empty sacks. These had once been the Gattuso Family's most esteemed elders, but now they hung limp from his hand, their heads tilted to one side, their faces still frozen in their final expressions—shock, rage, disbelief.
He threw them into the hole, one, two, three. The corpses landed with dull thuds, like sacks of wet sand bursting across concrete.
The last one was Alpha. When Pompeii picked him up, dark red fluid was still seeping from the bloody hole in the chest of the old man who had lived for more than three centuries.
Pompeii let go. Alpha's corpse turned over, landed face down in the hole, and piled up with the others.
Then he jumped into the hole himself. After glancing around the compartment below, he found a valve. It was a circular handwheel valve cast from brass, its surface oxidized to a dark green. The nameplate bore the ship's construction number and the words "Double Hull Interlayer—Zone 11." He gripped the handwheel and twisted it forcefully.
The rusted threads let out a piercing creak. The handwheel turned little by little, and the valve opened inch by inch, revealing the pitch-black space within the interlayer.
A foul wave of air surged out, carrying the sickly sweetness of rot. It collided with the cold air in the ship and condensed into a thin layer of white mist.
He pushed the elders' corpses into the