Clarke dwells on the inanity of the question for a moment. But surprisingly, she feels intact. “Yeah.”
And if not, she knows, it’s her own damn fault. She just lay there. She just waited to die. She was asking for it.
She’s always asking for it.
Back in the airlock, the water recedes around them. And within them; Clarke’s stolen breath, released at last, races back along visceral channels, reinflating lung and gut and spirit.
Ballard splits the face seal on her ’skin and her words tumble into the wetroom. “Jesus. Jesus! I don’t believe it! My God, did you see that thing! They get so huge around here!” She passes her hands across her face; her corneal caps come off, milky hemispheres dropping from enormous hazel eyes. “And to think they’re usually just a few centimeters long…”
She starts to strip down, unzipping her ’skin along the forearms, talking the whole time. “And yet it was almost fragile, you know? Hit it hard enough and it just came apart! Jesus!” Ballard always removes her uniform indoors. Clarke suspects she’d rip the recycler out of her own thorax if she could, throw it in a corner with the ’skin and the eyecaps until the next time it was needed.
Maybe she’s got her other lung in her cabin, Clarke muses. Maybe she keeps it in a jar, and she stuffs it back into her chest at night… She feels a bit dopey; probably just an aftereffect of the neuroinhibitors her implants put out whenever she’s outside. Small price to pay to keep my brain from shorting out—I really shouldn’t mind…
Ballard peels her ’skin down to the waist. Just under her left breast, the electrolyser intake pokes out through her ribcage.
Clarke stares vaguely at that perforated disk in Ballard’s flesh. The ocean goes into us there, she thinks. The old knowledge seems newly significant, somehow. We suck it into us and steal its oxygen and spit it out again.
Prickly numbness leaks through her shoulder into her chest and neck. Clarke shakes her head, once, to clear it.
She sags suddenly, against the hatchway.
Am I in shock? Am I fainting?
“I mean—” Ballard stops, looks at Clarke with an expression of sudden concern. “Jesus, Lenie. You look terrible. You shouldn’t have told me you were okay if—”
The tingling reaches the base of Clarke’s skull. “I’m—okay,” she says. “Nothing broke. I’m just bruised.”
“Garbage. Take off your ’skin.”
Clarke straightens, with effort. The numbness recedes a bit. “It’s nothing I can’t take care of myself.”
Don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me.
Ballard steps forward without a word and unseals the ’skin around Clarke’s forearm. She peels back the material and exposes an ugly purple bruise. She looks at Clarke with one raised eyebrow.
“Just a bruise,” Clarke says. “I’ll take care of it, really. Thanks anyway.” She pulls her hand away from Ballard’s ministrations.
Ballard looks at her for a moment. She smiles ever so slightly.
“Lenie,” she says, “there’s no need to feel embarrassed.”
“About what?”
“You know. Me having to rescue you. You going to pieces when that thing attacked. It was perfectly understandable. Most people have a rough time adjusting. I’m just one of the lucky ones.”
Right. You’ve always been one of the lucky ones, haven’t you? I know your kind, Ballard, you’ve never failed at anything…
“You don’t have to feel ashamed about it,” Ballard reassures her.
“I don’t,” Clarke says, honestly. She doesn’t feel much of anything any more. Just the tingling. And the tension. And a vague sort of wonder that she’s even alive.
The bulkhead is sweating.
The deep sea lays icy hands on the metal and, inside, Clarke watches the humid atmosphere bead and run down the wall. She sits rigid on her bunk under dim fluorescent light, every wall of the cubby within easy reach. The ceiling is too low. The room is too narrow. She feels the ocean compressing the station around her.
And all I can do is wait…
The anabolic salve on her injuries is warm and soothing. Clarke probes the purple flesh of her arm with practiced fingers. The diagnostic tools in the Med cubby have vindicated her. She’s lucky, this time; bones intact, epidermis unbroken. She seals up her ’skin, hiding the damage.
She shifts on the pallet, turns to face the inside wall. Her reflection stares back at her through eyes like frosted glass. She watches the image, admires its perfect mimicry of each movement. Flesh and phantom move together, bodies masked, faces neutral.
That’s me, she thinks. That’s what I look like now. She tries to read what lies behind that glacial facade. Am I bored, horny, upset? How to tell, with her eyes hidden behind those corneal opacities? She sees no trace of the tension she always feels. I could be terrified. I could be pissing in my ’skin and no one would know.
She leans forward. The reflection comes to meet her. They stare at each other, white to white, ice to ice. For a moment, they almost forget Beebe’s ongoing war against pressure. For a moment, they don’t mind the claustrophobic solitude that grips them.
How many times, Clarke wonders, have I wanted eyes as dead as these?
Beebe’s metal viscera crowd the corridor beyond her cubby. Clarke can barely stand erect. A few steps bring her into the lounge.
Ballard, back in shirtsleeves, is at one of the library terminals. “Rickets,” she says.
“What?”
“Fish down here don’t get enough trace elements. They’re rotten with deficiency diseases. Doesn’t matter how fierce they are. They bite too hard, they break their teeth on us.”
Clarke stabs buttons on the food processor; the machine grumbles at her touch. “I thought there was all sorts of food at the rift. That’s why things got so big.”
“There’s a lot of food. Just not very good quality.”
A vaguely edible lozenge of sludge oozes from the processor onto Clarke’s plate. She eyes it for a moment. I can relate.
“You’re going to eat in your gear?” Ballard asks, as Clarke sits down at the lounge table.
Clarke blinks at her. “Yeah. Why?”
“Oh, nothing. It would just be nice to talk to someone with pupils in their eyes, you know?”
“Sorry. I can take them off if you—”
“No, it’s no big thing. I can live with it.” Ballard turns off the library and sits down across from Clarke. “So, how do you like the place so far?”
Clarke shrugs and keeps eating.
“I’m glad we’re only down here for a year,” Ballard says. “This place could get to you after a while.”
“It could be worse.”
“Oh, I’m not complaining. I was looking for a challenge, after all. What about you?”
“Me?”
“What brings you down here? What are you looking for?”
Clarke doesn’t answer for a moment. “I don’t know, really,” she says at last. “Privacy, I guess.”
Ballard looks up. Clarke stares back, her face neutral.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it, then,” Ballard says pleasantly.
Clarke watches her disappear down the corridor. She hears the sound of a cubby hatch hissing shut.
Give it up, Ballard, she thinks. I’m not the sort of person you really want to know.
Almost start of the morning shift. The food processor disgorges Clarke’s breakfast with its usual reluctance. Ballard, in Communications, is just getting off the phone. A moment later she appears in the hatchway.