Sometimes she passed windows, and paused. Something else Atlantis had that the rifters hadn't: clear parabolic blisters shaped to actually draw strength from the crushing pressure. The view was nothing to write home about, of course. A lozenge of gray bedrock, reflecting dim light from the viewport. Occasional blinking stars, beacons endlessly flashing here there be power lines or construction stockpile. Very rarely, a rattail or some other unremarkable creature. No monsters. Nothing remotely like the ravenous glowing predators that had once plagued the rifters at Beebe Station.
Mostly just solid, unrelieved blackness.
Sometimes Rowan would stare into that sightless void and lose track of time. Once or twice, she even thought she'd glimpsed something looking back. Her imagination, perhaps. Her own reflection, thrown back from some unexpected curve in the teardrop perspex.
Maybe even her conscience. She could always hope.
A nexus ahead, a dim space where several corridors converged like the arms of a starfish. A choice to be made. Turning left would keep her on the perimeter. All other roads led inward—to control centers, to lounges, to hollow ganglia where people accumulated even when the lights were down. Patricia Rowan had no wish for company. She stepped left.
And stopped.
An apparition stood before her in the corridor, a dark wraith with empty eyes. Seawater trickled down its skin, left small puddled footprints on the floor behind. The figure was female; she was as black as an ocean.
The wraith reached up and split her face open. "Hi, Mom," she said.
"Lenie Clarke." Rowan breathed the words.
"You left the door unlocked," Clarke said. "I let myself in. Hope you don't mind."
Call for help, Rowan thought. She didn't move.
Clarke glanced around the corridor. "Nice place. Very spacious." A cold, empty look at Rowan. "You got a great deal on this. You should've seen the dump we were in."
Call for help, she's alone, she's—
Don't be an idiot. She didn't get into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean by herself.
"How did you find us?" Rowan said, and was relieved to hear dispassion in her voice.
"Are you kidding? You have any idea how many resources you people had to allocate to set this place up? And on such a tight schedule, too. Did you really think you'd be able to cover your tracks?"
"Most of them," Rowan admitted. "You'd have to be a 'lawbreaker to—"
Desjardins. But we canceled his access…
"Yeah, those crazy 'lawbreakers." Clarke shook her head. "You know, they're not quite so on-board as they used to be. We should talk about that some time."
Rowan kept her voice level. "What do you want?"
Clarke slapped her forehead in feigned epiphany. "Of course! I bet you're worried about ßehemoth, aren't you? What a waste, spending all those billions on this cozy little quarantine and all of a sudden here's Patient Zero taking a shit on the upholstery—"
"What do you want?"
Clarke stepped forward. Rowan didn't budge.
"I want to talk to my mother," the rifter said softly.
"Your mother's dead."
"Well, that depends on your definition." Clarke steepled her fingers, considering. "Genetically, yes. My mother's dead. But someone made me, I think. Remade me. Someone took what I had and replaced it with something else." Her voice hardened. "Somebody twisted me around and built me to their own specs, and fucked up pretty much every step of the way, and after all that's what parents do. Isn't it?"
Yes. Yes it is.
"So anyway," Clarke continued, "I've been on this, well, sort of a pilgrimage I guess you'd call it. I've been looking for some answers from the person that really abused me all those years. I figured she'd have to be some kind of monster to do that. Big and mean and scary. But you're not. You're hiding, Mom. The world's going to hell and here you are, cringing and cowering and pissing your pants while the rest of us try and deal with the mess you made."
"Don't you dare," Rowan snapped. "You arrogant pipsqueak, don't you fucking dare."
Clarke looked back with the faintest trace of a smile on her lip.
"You want to know who made the mess?" Rowan asked. "We tried to contain ßehemoth. We did everything possible, we tried to wipe it off the face of the earth before it ever got out, and who was fighting us every step of the way? Who let it out, Clarke? Who was spreading apocalypse every time she turned around, who was so hell-bent on her self-righteous crusade she didn't care who suffered? I'm not the angel of death. You are. I tried to save the world."
"By killing me. By killing my friends."
"Your friends? Your friends?" Rowan fought a giddy urge to laugh. "You blind, stupid little bitch! We took millions in collateral damage, do you understand? The refugees, the firestorms—I can't begin to count the people we killed to save the world from you. Did you even stop to think about the people who helped you? Do you know how many innocent fools got caught up in the myth, were falling over themselves to take a bullet for the great Lenie Clarke, and you know, some of them got their wish. And the rest—well, they're just as royally fucked by your grand crusade as anyone else." She sucked in breath through clenched teeth. "And you won, Clarke, are you happy? You won. We did everything we could do to stop you, and somehow it still wasn't enough, and now we've got our families to think of. We can't save the world, but at least we can save our own flesh and blood. And if you try to stop me from even doing that, I swear I'll kill you with my bare hands."
Her eyes were stinging. Her face was wet. She didn't care.
The rifter watched expressionlessly for a while. "You're welcome to it," she said at last.
"Welcome—"
"To your kids. Your life, this little hideyhole you've burrowed out for yourselves. Keep it. You're safe. I'm not even a vector any more."
"What, don't you want your revenge? Isn't that what all this is about? Don't you want to drag us back to the surface kicking and screaming to face the music?"
Clarke actually smiled a bit at that. "No need. You've already got a full orchestra down here." She shrugged. "You know, I owe you, in a way. If it hadn't been for you, I'd be just another drone in nine billion. Then you and your cronies came along and turned me into something that changed the world." She smiled again, a faint cold whisper of amusement. "Proud of me?"
Rowan ignored the jibe. "So why are you here?"
"Just a messenger," Clarke said, "telling you not to worry. You wanna stay here, that's just fine."
"And?"
"And don't ever try to come back."
Rowan shook her head. "Going back was never part of the plan. You could've saved yourself the trip."
"Your plans'll change the moment the situation does," the rifter said. "We're fighting for our lives up there, Rowan. We'd've stood a better chance if you c&c types hadn't got in and subverted the algorithm; you may have killed us already. But we could win. They say Anemone's a hellaciously powerful computing system, if we could only tame it."
"Right. Anemone." Rowan wiped her face. "You know, I'm still not convinced it even exists. Sounds too much like pseudomystical wish-fulfillment to me. Like Gaia. Or The Force."
Clarke shrugged. "If you say so."
She's never even heard of them, Rowan thought.Her past is irrelevant, her future's nonexistent, her present is hell on earth.