When the convulsions hit fifteen minutes later, he's not so sure.
"You look like shit," Lenie says.
Fischer hangs onto the railing, looks around the lounge. "Where—"
"At the Throat. On shift with Lubin and Caraco."
He makes it to the couch.
"Haven't seen you for a while," Lenie remarks. "How's your face doing?"
Fischer squints at her through a haze of nausea. Lenie Clarke is actually making small talk. She's never done that before. He's still trying to figure out why when his stomach clamps down again and he pitches onto the floor. By now nothing comes up but a few dribbles of sour fluid.
His eyes trace the pipes tangling along the ceiling. After a while Lenie's face blocks the view, looking down from a great height.
"What's wrong?" She seems to be asking out of idle curiosity, no more.
"Ate some shrimp," he says, and retches again.
"You ate— from outside?" She bends down and pulls him up. His arms drag along behind on the deck. Something hard bumps his head; the railing around the downstairs ladder.
"Fuck," Lenie says.
He's on the floor again, alone. Receding footsteps. Dizziness. Something presses against his neck, pricks him with a soft hiss.
His head clears almost instantly.
Lenie's leaning in, closer than she's ever been. She's even touching him, she's got one hand on his shoulder. He stares down at that hand, feeling a stupid sort of wonder, but then she pulls it away.
She's holding a hypo. Fischer's stomach begins to settle.
"Why," she says softly, "would you do a stupid thing like that?"
"I was hungry."
"So what's wrong with the dispenser?"
He doesn't answer.
"Oh," Lenie says. "Right."
She stands up and snaps the spent cartridge out of the hypo. "This can't go on, Fischer. You know that."
"He hasn't got me in two weeks."
"He hasn't seen you in two weeks. You only come in when he's on shift. And you're missing your own shifts more and more. Doesn't make you too popular with the rest of us." She cocks her head as Beebe creaks around them. "Why don't you just call up and get them to take you home?"
Because I do things to children, and if I leave here they'll cut me open and change me into something else…
Because there are things outside that almost make it worthwhile…
Because of you…
He doesn't know if she'd understand any of those reasons. He decides not to risk it.
"Maybe you could talk to him," he manages.
Lenie sighs. "He wouldn't listen."
"Maybe if you tried, at least—"
Her face hardens. "I have tried. I—"
She catches herself.
"I can't get involved," she whispers. "It's none of my business."
Fischer closes his eyes. He feels as if he's going to cry. "He just doesn't let up. He really hates me."
"It's not you. You're just— filling in."
"Why did they put us together? It doesn't make sense!"
"Sure it does. Statistically."
Fischer opens his eyes. "What?"
Lenie's pulling one hand down across her face. She seems very tired.
"We're not people here, Fischer. We're a cloud of data points. Doesn't matter what happens to you or me or Brander, just as long as the mean stays where it's supposed to and the standard deviation doesn't get too big."
Tell her, Shadow says.
"Lenie—"
"Anyway." Lenie shrugs the mood away. "You're crazy to eat anything that near a rift zone. Didn't you learn about hydrogen sulfide?"
He nods. "Basic training. The vents spit it out."
"And it builds up in the benthos. They're toxic. Which I guess you know now anyway."
She starts down the ladder, stops on the second rung.
"If you really want to go native, try feeding further from the rift. Or go for the fish."
"The fish?"
"They move around more. Don't spend all their time soaking in the hot springs. Maybe they're safe."
"The fish," he says again. He hadn't thought of that.
"I said maybe."
Shadow I'm so sorry…
Shush. Just look at all the pretty lights.
So he looks. He knows this place. He's on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. He's back in fairyland. He thinks he comes here a lot now, watches the lights and bubbles, listens to the deep rocks grinding against each other.
Maybe he'll stay this time, watch the whole thing working, but then he remembers he's supposed to be somewhere else. He waits, but nothing specific comes to him. Just a feeling that he should be doing something somewhere else. Soon.
It's getting harder to stay here anyway. There's a vague pain hanging around his upper body somewhere, fading in and out. After a while he realizes what it is. His face hurts.
Maybe this beautiful light is hurting his eyes.
That can't be right. His caps should take care of all that. Maybe they're not working. He seems to remember something that happened to his eyes a while back, but it doesn't really matter. He can always just leave. Suddenly, wonderfully, all of his problems have easy answers.
If the light hurts, all he has to do is stay in the dark.
Feral
"Hey," Caraco buzzes as they come around the corner. "Number four."
Clarke looks. Four's fifteen meters away and the water's a bit murky this shift. Still, she can see something big and dark sticking to the intake vent. Its shadow twitches down along the casing like an absurdly stretched black spider.
Clarke fins forward a few meters, Caraco at her side. The two women exchange looks.
Fischer, hanging upside down against the mesh. It's been four days since anyone's seen him.
Clarke gently sets down her carry bag; Caraco follows her lead. Two or three kicks bring them to within five meters of the intake. Machinery hums omnipresently, makes a sound deep enough to feel.
He's facing away from them, drifting from side to side, tugged by the gentle suction of the intake vent. The vent's grillwork is fuzzy with rooted growing things; small clams, tube worms, shadow crabs. Fischer pulls squirming clumps from the intake, leaves them to drift or to fall to the street below. He's cleaned maybe two meters square so far.
It's nice to see he still takes some duties seriously.
"Hey. Fischer," Caraco says.
He spins around as if shot. His forearm flails toward Clarke's face; she raises her own just in time. In the next instant he's bowled past her. She kicks, steadies herself. Fischer's heading for the darkness without looking back.
"Fischer," Clarke calls out. "Stop. It's okay."
He stops kicking for a moment, looks back over his shoulder.
"It's me," she buzzes. "And Judy. We won't hurt you."
Barely visible now, he rotates to a stop and turns to face them. Clarke risks a wave.
"Come on, Fischer. Give us a hand."
Caraco comes up behind her. "Lenie, what are you doing?" She's turned her vocoder down to a hiss. "He's too far gone, he's—"
Clarke cranks her own vocoder down. "Shut up, Judy." Up again. "What do you say, Fischer? Earn your pay."
He's coming back into the light, hesitantly, like a wild animal lured by the promise of food. Closer, Clarke can see the line of his jaw moving up and down under his hood. The motions are jerky, erratic, as though he's learning them for the first time.