Starfish

"Nnnnaaaaah…"

She knows the feeling. She's had it once or twice before. She dives blindly on a random heading. The pain in her head leaps from intense to unbearable.

"Aaaaaa — "

She twists back in the opposite direction. A bit better. She trips her headlamp, kicking as hard as she can. The world turns from black to solid brown. Zero viz. Mud seething on all sides. Somewhere close by she hears rocks splitting open.

Her headlamp catches the outcropping looming up a split second before she hits it. The shock rocks her skull, runs down her spine like a small earthquake. There's a different flavor of pain up there now, mingling with the searing in her eyes. She gropes blindly around the obstacle, keeps going. Her body feels — warm —

It takes a lot of heat to get through a diveskin, especially a class four. Those things are built for thermal stress.

Eyecaps, on the other hand…

Black. The world is black again, and clear. Clarke's headlamp stabs out across open space, lays a jiggling footprint on the mud a good ten meters away.

The view's still rippling, though.

The pain seems to be fading. She can't be sure. So many nerves have been screaming for so long that even the echoes are torture. She clutches her head, still kicking; the movement twists her around to face the way she came.

Her secret hideaway has exploded into a wall of mud and sulfur compounds, boiling up from the seabed. Clarke checks her thermister; 45 °C, and she's a good ten meters away. Boiled fish skeletons spin in the thermals. Geysers hiss further in, unseen.

The seep must have burst through the crust in an instant; any flesh caught in that eruption would have boiled off the bone before anything as elaborate as a flight reflex could cut in. A shudder shakes Clarke's body. Another one.

Just luck. Just stupid luck I was far enough away. I could be dead now. I could be dead I could be dead I could be dead —

Nerves fire in her thorax; she doubles over. But you can't sob without breathing. You can't cry with your eyes pinned open. The routines are all there, stuttering into action after years of dormancy, but the pieces they work on have all been changed. The whole body wakes up in a straitjacket.

— dead dead dead —

That small, remote part of her kicks in, the part she saves for these occasions. It wonders, off in the distance, at the intensity of her reaction. This was hardly the first time that Lenie Clarke thought she was going to die.

But this was the first time in years that it seemed to matter.

Waterbed

Taking off his diveskin is like gutting himself.

He can't believe how much he's come to depend on it, how hard it is to come out from inside. The eyecaps are even harder. Fischer sits on his pallet, staring at the sealed hatch while Shadow whispers it's okay, you're alone, you're safe. Half an hour goes by before he can bring himself to believe her.

Finally, when he bares his eyes, the cubby lights are so dim he can hardly see. He turns them up until the room is twilit. The eyecaps sit in the palm of his hand, pale and opaque in the semidarkness, like jellied circles of eggshell. It's strange to blink without feeling them under his eyelids. He feels so exposed.

He has to do it, though. It's part of the process. That's what this is all about; opening yourself up.

Lenie's in her cubby, just centimeters away. If it wasn't for this bulkhead Fischer could reach right out and touch her.

This is what you do when you really love someone, Shadow said way back then. So he does it now, to himself. For Shadow.

Thinking about Lenie.

Sometimes he thinks Lenie's the only other real person on the whole rift. The others are robots; glass robot eyes, matte black robot bodies, lurching through programmed routines that do nothing but keep other, bigger machines running. Even their names sound mechanical. Nakata. Caraco.

Not Lenie, though. There's someone inside her 'skin, her eyes may be glassed-in but they're not glass. She's real. Fischer knows he can touch her.

Of course, that's why he keeps getting into trouble. He keeps touching. But Lenie would be different, if only he could break through. She's more like Shadow than all the others ever were. Older, though.

No older than I'd be now, Shadow murmurs, and maybe that's it.

His mouth moves — I'm so sorry, Lenie — and no sound comes out. Shadow doesn't correct him.

This is what you do, she'd said, and then she'd begun to cry. As Fischer cries now. As he always does, when he comes.

* * *

The pain wakes him, sometime later. He's curled up on the pallet, and something's cutting into his cheek: a little piece of broken glass.

A mirror.

He stares at it, confused. A silver glass shard with a dark bloody tip, like a small tooth. There's no mirror in his cubby.