Starfish

"Understand, Lenie? Tear them to pieces, they come back stronger."

"How do you know all this?" she asks in a metallic whisper. "Where do you come from?"

He lays an icy black hand on her arm. "Right here. This is where I was born."

She doesn't think it absurd. In fact, she barely hears him. Her mind is somewhere else entirely, terrified by a sudden realization.

Acton is touching her, and she doesn't mind.

* * *

Of course, the sex is electric. It always is. The familiar has reasserted itself, here in the cramped space of Clarke's cubby. They can't both lie on the pallet at the same time but they manage somehow, Acton on his knees, then Clarke, squirming around each other in a metal nest lined with ducts and vents and bundles of optical cabling. They navigate each others' seams and scars, tonguing puckers of metal and pale flesh, unseen and all-seeing behind their corneal armor.

For Clarke it's a new twist, this icy ecstasy of a lover without eyes. For the first time she feels no need to avert her face, no threat to fragile intimacy; at first, when Acton moved to take out his caps, she stopped him with a touch and a whisper and he seemed to understand.

They cannot lie together afterwards so they sit side-by-side, leaning into each other, staring at the hatch two meters in front of them. The lights are turned too low for dryback vision; Clarke and Acton see a room suffused in pale fluorescence.

Acton reaches out and fingers a shard of glass sticking from an empty frame on one wall. "There used to be a mirror here," he remarks.

Clarke nibbles his shoulder. "There were mirrors everywhere. I — took them down."

"Why? A few mirrors would open the place up a bit. Make it larger."

She points. Several torn wires, fine as threads, hang from a hole in the frame. "They had cameras behind them. I didn't like that."

Acton grunts. "I don't blame you."

They sit without speaking for a bit.

"You said something outside," she says. "You said you were born down here."

Acton hesitates, then nods. "Ten days ago."

"What did you mean?"

"You should know," he says. "You witnessed my birth."

She thinks back. "That was when the gulper got you…"

"Close." Acton grins his cold eyeless grin, puts an arm around her. "Actually, the gulper sort of catalyzed it, if I remember. Think of it as a midwife."

An image pops into her mind: Acton in Medical, vivisecting himself.

"Fine-tuning," she says.

"Uh huh." He gives her a squeeze. "And I've got you to thank for it. You gave me the idea."

"Me?"

"You were my mother, Len. And my father was this spastic little shrimp that ended up way over its head. He died before I was born, actually: I killed him. You weren't very happy about that."

Clarke shakes her head. "You're not making sense."

"You telling me you haven't noticed the change? You telling me I'm the same person I was when I came down?"

"I don't know," she says. "Maybe I've just gotten to know you better."

"Maybe. Maybe I have too. I don't know, Len, I just seem more…awake now, I guess. I see things differently. You must have noticed."

"Yeah, but only when you're —»

Outside.

"You did something to your inhibitors," she whispers.

"Reduced the dosage a bit."

She grasps his arm. "Karl, those chemicals keep you from spazzing out every time you go outside. You fuck with this stuff, you're risking a seizure as soon as the 'lock floods."

"I have been fucking with it, Lenie. You see any change in me that isn't an improvement?"

She doesn't answer.

"It's all about action potential," he tells her. "Your nerves have to build up a certain charge before they can fire —»

"And at this depth they'd fire all the time, Karl, please —»

"Shh." He lays a gentle finger on her lips but she brushes it away, suddenly angry.

"I'm serious, Karl. Without those drugs your nerves short-circuit, you burn out, I know —»

"You only know what they tell you," he snaps. "Why don't you try working things out yourself for once?"

She falls silent, stung by his disapproval. A space opens between them on the pallet.

"I'm not a fool, Lenie," Acton says, more quietly. "I just reduced the settings a bit. Five percent. Now, when I go outside it takes a bit less of a stimulus for my nerves to fire, that's all. It…it wakes you up, Len; I'm more aware of things, I'm more alive somehow."

She watches him, unspeaking.

"Of course they say it's dangerous," he says. "They're scared shitless of you already. You think they're going to give you even more of an edge?"

"They're not scared of us, Karl."

"They should be." His arm goes back around her. "Wanna try it?"

It's as though she's suddenly outside, still naked. "No."

"There's nothing to worry about, Len. I've already done the guinea pig work on myself. Open up to me and I could make the adjustments myself, it'd take ten minutes."

"I'm not up for it, Karl. Not yet, anyway. Maybe one of the others is."

He shakes his head. "They don't trust me."

"You can't blame them."