Clarke knew it was all just alligator tales. Nobody over thirteen believed such bullshit, and the people here—for all their numbers—didn't seem motivated enough to hold a garage sale, much less storm the battlements. What was the word Amitav had used?
Docile.
In a way it was a shame, though. She'd never actually been to the fences. It might have been interesting to check them out.
Being dead had all sorts of little drawbacks.
"Surely you have a home to go to. Surely you do not wish to stay here," Amitav prodded.
"No," she said to both questions.
He waited. She waited with him.
Finally, he stood and glanced down at the dead botfly. "I do not know what made this one crash. Usually they work quite well. I believe you've already seen one or two pass by, yes? Your eyes may be empty, but they are not blind."
Clarke held his gaze and said nothing.
He nudged the little wreck with his toe. "These are not blind either," he said, and walked away.
It was a hole in darkness: a window to another world. It was set at the height of a child's eyes, and it looked into a kitchen she'd not seen in twenty years.
Onto a person she hadn't seen in almost that long.
Her father knelt in front of her, folded down from adult height to regard her eye-to-eye. He had a serious look on his face. He grasped her wrist with one hand; something dangled in the other.
She waited for the familiar sickness to rise in her throat, but it didn't come. The vision was a child's; the viewer was an adult, hardened, adapted, accustomed by now to trials that reduced child-abuse from nightmare down to trite cliché.
She tried to look around; her field of view refused to change. She could not see her mother.
Par for the course.
Her father's mouth moved; no words came out. The image was utterly silent, a plague of light with no soundtrack.
This is a dream. A boring dream. Time to wake up.
She opened her eyes. The dream didn't stop.
There was a different world behind it, though, a high-contrast jigsaw of photoamplified light and shadow. Someone stood before her on the sand, but the face was eclipsed by this vision from her childhood. It floated in front of her, an impossible picture-in-picture. The present glimmered faintly through from behind.
She closed her eyes. The present vanished. The past didn't.
Go away. I'm done with you. Go away.
Her father still held her wrist—at least, he held the wrist of the fragile creature whose eyes she was using—but she felt nothing. And now those eyes focused autonomously on the dangling thing in her father's other hand. Suddenly frightened, she snapped her own eyes back open before she could see what it was; but once again the image followed her into the real world.
Here, before the destitute numberless hordes of the Strip, her father was holding out a gift for Lenie Clarke. Her first wristwatch.
Please go away…
"No," said a voice, very close by. "I am not."
Amitav's voice. Lenie Clarke, transfixed, made a small animal noise.
Her father was explaining the functions of her new toy. She couldn't hear what he was saying, but it didn't matter; she could see him voiceact'ing the little gadget, stepping through its Net Access functions (they'd called it the Net back then, she remembered), pointing out the tiny antennae that linked to the eyephones…
She shook her head. The image didn't waver. Her father was pulling her forward, extending her arm, carefully looping the watch around her wrist.
She knew it wasn't really a gift. It was a down payment. It was a token offered in exchange, some half-assed gesture that was supposed to make up for the things he'd done to her all those years ago, the things he was going to do right now, the things—
Her father leaned forward and kissed some spot just above the eyes that Lenie Clarke couldn't shut. He patted the head that Lenie Clarke couldn't feel. And then, smiling—
He left her alone.
He moved back down the hall, out of the kitchen, leaving her to play.
The vision dissipated. The Strip rushed in to fill the hole.
Amitav glowered down at her. "You are mistaken," he said. "I am not your father."
She scrambled to her feet. The ground was muddy and saturated, close to the waterline. Halogen light stretched in broken strips from the station up the beach. Bundled motionless bodies lay scattered on the upper reaches of that slope. None were nearby.
It was a dream. Another— hallucination. Nothing real.
"I am wondering what you are doing here," Amitav said quietly.
Amitav's real. Focus. Deal with him.
"You are not the only—person to have washed up afterward, of course," the refugee remarked. "They wash up even now. But you are much less dead than the others."
You should've seen me before.
"And it is odd that you would come to us like this. All of this was swept clean many days ago. An earthquake on the bottom of the ocean, yes? Far out to sea. And here you are, built for the deep ocean, and now you come ashore and eat as if you have not eaten for days." His smile was a predatory thing. "And you do not wish your people to know that you are here. You will tell me why."
Clarke leaned forward. "Really. Or you'll do what, exactly?"
"I will walk to the fence and tell them."
"Start walking," Clarke said.
Amitav stared at her, his anger almost palpable.
"Go on," she prodded. "See if you can find a door, or a spare watch. Maybe they've left little suggestion boxes for you to pass notes into, hmm?"
"You are quite wrong if you think I could not attract the attention of your people."
"I don't think you really want to. You've got your own secrets."
"I am a refugee. We cannot afford secrets."
"Really. Why are you so skinny, Amitav?"
His eyes widened.
"Tapeworm? Eating disorder?" She stepped forward. "Cycler food not agree with you?"
"I hate you," he hissed.
"You don't even know me."
"I know you," he spat. "I know your people. I know—"
"You don't know shit. If you did—if you really had such a hard-on for my people as you call them—you'd be bending over backwards to help me."
He stared at her, a flicker of uncertainty on his face.
She kept her voice low. "Suppose you're right, Amitav. Suppose I've come all the way up from the deep sea. The Axial Volcano, even, if you know where that is."
She waited. "Go on," he said.
"Let's also say, hypothetically, that the quake was no accident. Someone set off a nuke and all those shockwaves just sort of daisy-chained their way back to the coast."
"And why would anyone do such a thing?"
"Theirs to know. Ours to find out."
Amitav was silent.
"With me so far? Bomb goes off in the deep sea. I come from the deep sea. What does that make me, Amitav? Am I the bad guy here? Did I trip the switch, and if I did, wouldn't I at least have planned a better escape than swimming across three hundred kilometers of fucking mud, without so much as a fucking sandwich, only to crawl up onto your fucking Strip after a fucking week to get stuck listening to your fucking whining? Does that make any sense at all?
"Or," — the voice leveling now, coming back under control— "did I just get screwed like everyone else, only I managed to get out alive? That might be enough to inspire a bit of ill-will even in a white N'AmPac have-it-all bitch like myself, don't you think?"