Tonight we broadcast live from somewhere between Bukit Timah and Thomson, that nebulous belt of black stone that cuts between the Bukit Brown graveyard and the central catchment forest. By day it is a transient place, a non-place, almost, seen only in brief bursts at high speeds; by night it is still as a tomb, a mist-cloaked desert, a frozen stream. Our quest leads us below the newly-built viaduct over what used to be a grassy field, and Jasmine angles her phone to take in the sheer silent mass of the structure, its megalithic weight. Even the crickets do not sing here. At intervals, there is a rush of wheels overhead -- late-night food delivery riders, the odd zhnged-up race car or two -- but otherwise there is nothing but us and our footsteps and the streetlit sky.

Jasmine pauses. Her phone's flashlight freezes on a spot below a concrete arch. "What's this?" she calls, and we crane our heads to try and see. There -- maybe a trick of the light -- but there's something like a serpentine weave that fades briefly into existence, arcing across the viaduct ceiling for a good ten-twenty metres, before disappearing somewhere beyond the edge of the bridge. "Tracks?" mutters Jasmine, but I don't know any more than she does, and Amira looks like this isn't one of the signs she's had to trace down before. We proceed down along the bridge until my torchbeam catches a couple of the trails again, curled around a pillar like a double-helix.

"Like some kind of snake," I mention, half to myself. The sightings we received weren't very conclusive, and if this deity turned out more serpentiform than expected, we'd have a hell of a night ahead of us. I approach the lower of the trails until it is barely within arm's reach, then I brush it gently with one gloved fingertip. The concrete was waved where the trail passed through, with many little curved grooves; it is cold, almost clammy to the touch. Then gently from above us the concrete starts to ripple.

Sezairi wheels around. Jasmine stifles a scream. Above, where our torchbeams scrape the ceiling, two fins pass in the dark, familiarly-curved trails in their wake. I run after them, catching glimpses of ragged brown forms. "Up ahead," I gasp, "towards the bend."

The ground rises beneath me. The viaduct merges with the street. The things in the bridges screech; they know we have them cornered. Jasmine readies the phone while Amira staggers up the embanked soil, tudung flapping in the traffic wind, wrapped offerings in her palms. She's making soothing noises at the shapes rolling against the bank where the concrete meets the soil, mottling the gray surface with their movements. I can see their faces more clearly, now that they are darting around in place. Two forward-facing eyes, a simian skull too flattened to be human. Their bodies are like glued-together sticks, dried stingrays, tragic Animal-Planet shots of finned sharks, of harvested snakeskin.

They rasp at us, jaws snapping the night air. Voices like running water, sibilant and cloying.

"Ash, what are they saying?" Jasmine asks. For once, she sounds worried. Our rituals always worked with the assumption that terrestrial gods were extensions of the land; these ones came from a different place entirely. Amira's hands are outstretched. The swimmers somehow ignore her.

I clear my throat. "Okay, my mum runs an aquarium -- I've seen fish like this before." I look at Amira for approval. She nods. I continue. "Like, when you dump them in a new tank, absolutely new, no deco or anything. They thrash around like this. Except the fish eventually get used to it." The half-human shapes before us continue stirring.

Amira is stone silent. Her mouth is moving, but it's like she's lost the prayers to say. Jasmine turns to me. "When was the highway built?" she asks. "Don't just stand there, look it up."

I fumble with my phone. The gods (are they?) are growing impatient, their chittering growing louder. Stuttering, I read out dates, building plans, projected completion dates. "They finished this part of the bridge in 2019. People didn't like it, said it plowed over cemetery ground. Bulldozing was completed in less than a month. Here, there's Facebook pages, petitions..."

"The point," warns Jasmine. "Where did they come from? The graves?"

"The graves don't match," I tell her, frantically scrolling through heritage blogs. "There wasn't enough traffic, even after the petitions. People don't turn into gods overnight. Construction was delayed for a little while, though."

"Spill it out."

"Not a protest. Some kind of materials dispute. Claims they were using concrete illegally-sourced -- oh shit, the concrete. Jasmine, the concrete."

"That must be it," murmurs Jasmine. "They're drowning. They can't get out."

My hands are shaking now. We prepared, according to our sources, two sachets of dried fish food and a pinch of mealworm paste. Would that be enough? Before us are a thrashing mass of two -- or is it three? four? seven? -- all the colour of dredged riverbed, the anger of a mangrove at high tide. Amira stands transfixed before them. Even her mouth has gone still.

"Mira?" I whisper. "You alright?"

Jasmine pulls on my hand, fingernails digging into my palm. With the other, she grabs Amira by the sleeve. "Girls, we're in trouble. Go, now." Holding each other's hands, we dash into the wine-dark night.