I'm going to fucking kill you, Grace. I'm going to gut you like a fish.

"I'm going." she says. The hatch drops away beneath them.

"Do you honestly think you can force me to take you?" He brakes, turns, kicks out from under the light.

She follows. "Do you think you can afford to do this without any backup at all?"

"More than I can afford an untrained sidekick who's signed up for all the wrong reasons."

"You don't know shit about my reasons."

"You'll hold me back," Lubin buzzes. "I stand much better odds if I don't have to keep watching out for you. If you get in trouble—"

"Then you'll ditch me," she says. "In a second. I know what your battlefield priorities are. Shit, Ken, I know you."

"Recent events would suggest otherwise."

She stares at him, adamant. He scissors rhythmically on into darkness.

Where's he going? she wonders.There's nothing on this bearing…

"You can't deny that you're not equipped for this kind of op," he points out. "You don't have the training."

"Which must make it pretty embarrassing for you, given that I got all the way across N'Am before you and your army and all your ballyhooed training could even catch up with me." She smiles under her mask, not kindly; he can't see it but maybe he can tune in the sentiment. "I beat you, Ken. Maybe I wasn't nearly as smart, or as well-trained, and maybe I didn't have all of N'Am's muscle backing me up, but I stayed ahead of you for months and you know it."

"You had quite a lot of help," he points out.

"Maybe I still do."

His rhythm falters. Perhaps he hasn't thought of that.

She takes the opening. "Think about it, Ken. All those virtual viruses getting together, muddying my tracks, running interference, turning me into a fucking myth…"

"Anemone wasn't working for you," he buzzes. "It was using you. You were just—"

"A tool. A meme in a plan for Global Apocalypse. Give me a break, Ken, it's not like I could forget that shit even if I tried. But so what? I was still the vector. It was looking out for me. It liked me enough to keep you lot off my back, anyway. Who's to say it isn't still out there? Where else do those software demons come from? You think it's a coincidence they name themselves after me?"

Barely discernible, his silhouette extends an arm. Click trains spray the water. He starts off again, his bearing slightly altered.

"Are you suggesting," he buzzes, "that if you go back and announce yourself to Anemone—whatever's become of it—that it's going to throw some sort of magic shield around you?"

"Maybe n—"

"It's changed. It was always changing, from moment to moment. It couldn't possibly have survived the way we remember it, and if the things we've encountered recently are any indication of what it's turned into, you don't want to renew the acquaintance."

"Maybe," Clarke admits. "But maybe some part of its basic agenda hasn't changed. It's alive, right? That's what everyone keeps saying. Doesn't matter that it was built out of electrons instead of carbon, Life's just self-replicating information shaped by natural selection so it's in the club. And we've got genes in us that haven't changed in a million generations. Why should this thing be any different? How do you know there isn't some protect-Lenie subroutine snoozing in the code somewhere? And by the way, where the fuck are we going?"

Lubin's headlamp spikes to full intensity, lays a bright jiggling oval on the substrate ahead. "There."

It's a patch of bone-gray mud like any other. She can't see so much as a pebble to distinguish it.

Maybe it's a burial plot, she thinks, suddenly giddy. Maybe this is where he's been feeding his habit all these years, on devolved natives and MIAs and now on the stupid little girl who wouldn't take no for an answer…

Lubin thrusts one arm into the ooze. The mud shudders around his shoulder, as if something beneath were pushing back. Which is exactly what's happening; Ken's awakened something under the surface. He pulls his arm back up and the thing follows, heaving into view. Clumps and chalky clouds cascade from its sides as it clears the substrate.

It's a swollen torus about a meter and a half wide. A dotted line of hydraulic nozzles ring its equator. Two layers of flexible webbing stretch across the hole in its center, one on top, one on the bottom; a duffle bag, haphazardly stuffed with lumpy objects, occupies the space between. Through the billowing murk and behind clumps of mud still adhering to its surface, it shines slick as a diveskin.

"I packed a few things away for a return trip," Lubin buzzes. "As a precaution."

He sculls backward a few meters. The mechanical bellhop spins a quarter-turn, spits muddy water from its thrusters, and heels.

They start back.

"So that's your plan," Lubin buzzes after a while. "Find something that evolved to help you destroy the world, hope that it's got a better nature you can appeal to, and—"

"And wake the fucker with a kiss," Clarke finishes. "Who's to say I can't?"

He swims on, towards the glow that's just starting to brighten the way ahead. His eyes reflect crescents of dim light.

"I guess we'll find out," he says at last.

She'd avoid it altogether if she could.

There's more than sufficient excuse. The recent armistice is thin and brittle; it's in little danger of shattering completely in the face of this new, common threat, but countless tiny cracks and punctures require constant attention. Suddenly the corpses have leverage, expertise that mere machinery cannot duplicate; the rifters are not especially happy with the new assertiveness of their one-time prisoners. Impossible Lake must be swept for bugs, the local seabed for eyes and detonators. For now there truly is no safe place—and if Lenie Clarke were not busy packing for the trip back, her eyes would be needed for perimeter patrol. Dozens of corpses died in the latest insurrection; there's hardly time to comfort all the next of kin.

And yet, Alyx's mother died in her arms mere days ago, and though the pace of preparation has not slowed in all that time, Lenie Clarke still feels like the lowest sort of coward for having put it off this long.

She thumbs the buzzer in the corridor. "Lex?"

"Come in."

Alyx is sitting on her bed, practicing her fingering. She puts the flute aside as Lenie closes the hatch behind her. She isn't crying: she's either still in shock, or a victim of superadolescent self-control. Clarke sees herself at fifteen, before remembering: her memories of that time are all lies.

Her heart goes out to the girl anyway. She wants to scoop Alyx up in her arms and hold her into the next millennium. She wants to say she's been there, she knows what it's like; and that's even true, in a fractured kind of way. She's lost friends and lovers to violence. She even lost her mother—to tularemia—although the GA stripped that memory out of her head along with all the others. But she knows it's not the same. Alyx's mother died in a war, and Lenie Clarke fought on the other side. Clarke doesn't know that Alyx would welcome an embrace under these conditions.

So she sits beside her on the bed, and rests one hand on the girl's thigh—ready to withdraw at the slightest flinch—and tries to think of some words, any words, that won't turn into clichés when spoken aloud.

She's still trying when Alyx says, "Did she say anything? Before she died?"

"She—" Clarke shakes her head. "No. Not really," she finishes, hating herself.

Alyx nods and stares at the floor.

"They say you're going too," she says after a while. "With him."

Clarke nods.

"Don't."