"It is not happy!" Nakata shouts.
"Hey; come on, groundhogs!" Caraco's voice buzzes faintly. "Fly!"
Discontent. Something not expected.
Who is that? Clark wonders.
"Come on!" Caraco calls again.
What the hell. Can't hang on much longer anyway. Clarke lets go, pushes off; the top of the muckraker races on beneath. Heavy water drags the momentum from her. She kicks for altitude, feels sudden expectation from behind — and in the next second something slams against her back, pushing her forward again. Implants lurch against her ribcage.
"Jesus Christ!" Brander buzzes in her ear. "Get a grip, Lenie!"
He's caught her on his way past. Clarke reaches out and grabs the line that he and Caraco are attached to. It's only as thick as her finger, and too slippery to hang on to. She looks back and sees that the other two have looped it around their chests and under their arms, leaving their hands more or less free. She tries the same trick, drag arching her back, while Caraco calls out to Nakata.
Nakata is not eager to let go. They can feel that, even though they can't see her. Brander angles back and forth, tacking his body like a rudder; the three of them swing in a grand, barely controlled arc, knotted into the middle of their tether. "Come on, Alice! Join the human kite! We'll catch you!"
And Nakata's coming, she's coming, but she's doing it her own way. She's climbed sideways against the current, hand over hand, until she found the place where the line joins the deck. Now she's letting drag push her back along the filament to them.
Clarke has finally secured herself in a loop. Speed digs the line into her flesh; it's already starting to hurt. She doesn't feel much like a human kite. Bait on a hook is more like it. She twists around to Brander, points at the line: "What is this, anyway?"
"VLF antennae. Unspooled when we scared it. Probably crying for help."
"It won't get any, will it?"
"Not on this side of the ocean. It's probably just making a last call so its owners'll know what happened. Sort of a suicide note."
Caraco, entangled a bit further back, twists around at that. "Suicide? You don't suppose these things self-destruct?"
Sudden concern settles over the human kite. Alice Nakata tumbles into them.
"Maybe we ought to let it go," Clarke says.
Nakata nods emphatically. "It is not happy." Her disquiet radiates through the others like a warning light.
It takes a few moments to disentangle themselves from the antennae. It whips past and away, trailing a small float like a traffic cone. Clarke tumbles, lets the water brake her. Machine roars recede into grumbles, into mere tremors.
The rifters hang in empty midwater, silence on all sides.
Caraco points a sonar pistol straight down, fires. "Jeez. We're almost thirty meters off the bottom."
"We lose the squids?" Brander says. "That thing was really moving."
Caraco raises her pistol, takes a few more readings. "Got 'em. They're not all that far off, actually, I — hey."
"What?"
"There's five of them. Closing fast."
"Ken?"
"Uh huh."
"Well. He's saving us a swim, anyway," Brander says.
"Did anyone—"
They turn. Alice Nakata starts again: "Did anyone else feel it?"
"Feel what?" Brander begins, but Clarke is nodding.
"Judy?" Nakata says.
Caraco radiates reluctance. "I — there was something, maybe. Didn't get a good fix on it. I assumed it was one of you guys."
"What," Brander says. "The muckraker? I thought—"
A black cipher rises in their midst. His squid cruises straight up from underneath like a slow missile. It hovers overhead when he releases it. A couple of meters below, four other squids bob restlessly at station-keeping, noses up.
"You lost these," Lubin buzzes.
"Thanks," Brander replies.
Clarke concentrates, tries to tune Lubin in. She's only going through the motions, of course. He's dark to them. He's always been dark, fine-tuning didn't change him a bit. Nobody knows why.
"So what's going on?" he asks. "Your note said something about a muckraker."
"It got away from us," Caraco says.
"It was not happy," Nakata repeats.
"Yeah?"
"Alice got some sort of feeling off of it," Caraco says. "Lenie and me too, sort of."
"Muckrakers are unmanned," Lubin remarks.
"Not a man," Nakata says. "Not a person. But—" She trails off.
"I felt it," Clarke says. "It was alive."
Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, alone again. Really alone. She can remember a time, not so long ago, when she reveled in this kind of isolation. Who would have thought that she'd miss feelings?
Even if they are someone else's.
And yet it's true. Every time Beebe takes her in, some vital part of her falls away like a half-remembered dream. The airlock clears, her body reinflates, and her awareness turns flat and muddy. The others just vanish. It's strange; she can see them, hear them the way she always could. But if they don't move and she closes her eyes, she's got no way of knowing they're here.
Now her only company is herself. Just one set of signals to process in here. Nothing jamming her.
Shit.
Blind, or naked. That was the choice. It nearly killed her. My own damn fault, of course. I was just asking for it.
She was, too. She could have just left everything the way it was, quietly deleted Acton's file before anyone else found out about it. But there'd been this debt. Something owed to the ghost of the Thing Outside, the thing that didn't snarl or blame or lash out, the thing that, finally, took the Thing Inside away where it couldn't hurt her any more. Part of Lenie Clarke still hates Acton for that, on some sick level where conditioned reflex runs the show; but even down there, she thinks maybe he did it for her. Like it or not, she owed him.
So she paid up. She called the others inside and played the file. She told them what he'd said, that last time, and she didn't ask them to turn their backs on his offering even though she desperately hoped they would. If she had asked, perhaps, they might have listened. But one by one, they split themselves open and made the changes. Mike Brander, out of curiosity. Judy Caraco, out of skepticism. Alice Nakata, afraid of being left behind. Ken Lubin, unsuccessfully, for reasons he kept to himself.
She clenches her eyelids, remembers rules changing overnight. Careful appearances suddenly meant nothing; blank eyes and ninja masks were just cosmetic affectations, useless as armor. How are you feeling, Lenie Clarke? Horny, bored, upset? So easy to tell, though your eyes are hidden behind those corneal opacities. You could be terrified. You could be pissing in your 'skin and everyone would know.
Why did you tell them? Why did you tell them? Why did you tell them?
Outside, she watched the others change. They moved around her without speaking, one connecting smoothly with another to lend a hand or a piece of equipment. When she needed something from one of them, it was there before she could speak. When they needed something from her they had to ask aloud, and the choreography would falter. She felt like the token cripple in a dance troupe. She wondered how much of her they could see, and was afraid to ask.