She rolls onto her stomach, pushes herself up onto all fours. The water rises past her elbows as she watches. She stays low, crawls across the corridor to Rowan's huddled form. A hundred lethal vectors of incidence and reflection crisscross overhead. Rowan's slumped against the inner wall, immersed in icewater to her chest. Her head hangs forward, her hair covering her face. Clarke lifts her chin; there's a dark streak across one cheek, black and featureless in the impoverished light. It flows: shrapnel hit.
Rowan's face is opaque. Her naked eyes are wide but unseeing: the few stray photons from down the tunnel don't come close to the threshold for unassisted sight. There's nothing in Rowan's face but sound and pain and freezing cold.
"Pat!" Clarke can hardly hear her own voice over the roar.
The water rises past Rowan's lips. Clarke grabs the other woman under the arms, heaves her into a semi-erect lean against the bulkhead. A ricochet shatters a few centimeters to the left. Clarke puts herself between Rowan and the worst of the backshatter.
"Pat!" She doesn't know what she expects the corpse to say in response. Patricia Rowan is already dead; all that's left is for Lenie Clarke to stand and watch while she goes through the motions. But Rowan is saying something; Clarke can't hear a thing over the ambient roar, but she can see Rowan's lips move, she can almost make out—
A sudden stabbing pain, a kick in the back. Clarke keeps her balance this time; the water, pooled over halfway to the ceiling now, is catching the worst of the ricochets.
Rowan's mouth is still in motion. She's not speaking, Clarke sees: She's mouthing syllables, slow careful exaggerations meant to be seen and not heard:
Alyx…Take care of Alyx…
The water's caught up to her chin again.
Clarke's hands find Rowan's, guide them up. With Rowan's hands on her face, Clarke nods.
In her personal, endless darkness, Patricia Rowan nods back.
Ken could help you now. He could keep it from hurting maybe, he could kill you instantly. I can't. I don't know how…
I'm sorry.
The water's too deep to stand in, now—Rowan's feebly treading water although her limbs must be frozen almost to paralysis. It's a pointless effort, a brainstem effort; last duties discharged, last options exhausted, still the body grabs for those last few seconds, brief suffering still somehow better than endless nonexistence.
She may escape drowning, though, even if she can't escape death. The rising water compresses the atmosphere around them, squeezes it so hard that oxygen itself turns toxic. The convulsions, Clarke's heard, are not necessarily painful…
It's a fate that will strike Clarke as quickly as Rowan, if she waits too long. It seems wrong to save herself while Rowan gasps for breath. But Clarke has her own brainstem, and it won't let sick, irrational guilt stand in the way of its own preservation. She watches as her hands move of their own accord, sealing her face flap, starting up the machinery in her flesh. She abandons Rowan to face her fate alone. Her body floods like the corridor, but to opposite effect. The ocean slides through her chest, sustaining life instead of stealing it. She becomes the mermaid again, while her friend dies before her eyes.
But Rowan's not giving up, not yet, not yet. The body isn't resigned no matter what the mind may have accepted. There's just a small pocket of air up near the ceiling but the corpse's stiff, clumsy legs are still kicking, hands still clawing against the pipes and why doesn't she just fucking give up?
Ambient pressure kicks past some critical threshold. Unleashed neurotransmitters sing through the wiring in her head. Suddenly, Lenie Clarke is in Patricia Rowan's mind. Lenie Clarke is learning how it feels to die.
Goddamn you Pat, why can't you just give up? How can you do this to me?
She sinks to the bottom of the compartment. She stares resolutely at the deck, her eyelids pinned open, while the swirling turbulence fades by degrees and the roar of inrushing water dies back and all that's left is that soft, erratic scratching, that pathetic feeble clawing of frozen flesh against biosteel…
Eventually the sound of struggling stops. The vicarious anguish, the sadness and regret go on a little longer. Lenie Clarke waits until the last little bit of Patricia Rowan dies in her head. She lets the silence stretch before tripping her vocoder.
"Grace. Can you hear me?"
Her mechanical voice is passionless and dead level.
"Course you can. I'm going to fucking kill you, Grace."
Her fins float off to one side, still loosely tethered to her diveskin. Clarke retrieves them, pulls them over her feet.
"There's a docking hatch right in front of me, Grace. I'm going to open it, and I'm going to come out there and I'm going to gut you like a fish. If I were you I'd start swimming."
Maybe she already has. At any rate, there's no answer.
Clarke kicks down the corridor, gaze fixed immovably on the docking hatch. Its sparkling mosaic of readouts, unquenchable even by the Atlantic itself, lights her way.
"Got your head start, Grace? Won't do you any good."
Something soft bumps into her from behind. Clarke flinches, wills herself not to look.
"Ready or not, here I come."
She undogs the hatch.
Tag
There's nobody out there.
They've left evidence behind—a couple of point-welders still squatting against the hull on tripod legs, the limpet transceiver stuck to the alloy a few meters away—but of Nolan and any other perpetrators, there's no sign. Clarke smiles grimly to herself.
Let them run.
But she can't find anyone else, either. None of Lubin's sentries at their assigned posts. Nobody monitoring the surveillance limpets festooning Atlantis in the wake of the Corpses' exercise in channel-switching. She flies over the very medlab on which, she's been assured, any number of rifter troops are fine-tuning the would-be hostage-takers lurking within. Nothing. Gantries and habslabs and shadows. Blinking lights in some places, recent darkness in others where the beacons or the portholes have been smashed or blacked out. Epochal darkness everywhere else.
No other rifters, anywhere.
Maybe the corpses had some weapon, something even Ken didn't suspect. Maybe they touched a button and everyone just vanished…
But no. She can feel the corpses inside, their fear and apprehension and blind pants-pissing desperation radiating a good ten meters into the water. Not the kind of feelings you'd expect in the wake of overwhelming victory. If the corpses even know what's going on, it's not making them feel any better.
She kicks off into the abyss, heading for Lubin's nerve hab. Now, finally, she can tune in faint stirrings from the water ahead. But no: it's just more of the same. More fear, more uncertainty. How can she still be reading Atlantis from this range? How can these sensations be getting stronger as the corpses recede behind her?
It's not much of a mystery. Pretending otherwise barely brings enough comfort to justify the effort.
Faint LFAM chatter rises in the water around her. Not much, considering; by now she can feel dozens of rifters, all subdued, all afraid. Hardly any of them speak aloud. A constellation of dim stars pulses faintly ahead. Someone crosses Clarke's path, ten or fifteen meters ahead, invisible but for a brief eclipse of running lights. His mind quails, washing over hers.
So many of them have collected around the hab. They mill about like stunned fish or merely hang motionless in the water, waiting. Maybe this is all there is, maybe these are all the rifters left in the world. Apprehension hangs about them like a cloud.
Perhaps Grace Nolan is here. Clarke feels cold, cleansing anger at the prospect. A dozen rifters turn at her thoughts and stare with dead white eyes.
"What's going on?" Clarke buzzes. "Where is she?"
"Fuck off, Len. We've got bigger problems right now." She doesn't recognize the speaker.
Clarke swims toward the hab; most of the rifters part for her. Half a dozen block her way. Gomez. Cramer. Others in back, too black and distant to recognize in the brainstem ambience.