Rifters don't worry much about privacy, for one thing. Not as much as you might expect from a population of rejects and throwaways. You might think the only ones who could ever regard this place as an improvement would be those with the most seriously fucked-up baselines for comparison, and you'd be right. You might also think that such damaged creatures would retreat into their shells like hermit crabs with half their limbs ripped away, cringing at the slightest shadow, or lashing out furiously at any hint of intrusion. It does happen, occasionally. But down here, the endless heavy night anesthetizes even if it doesn't heal. The abyss lays dark hands on the wounded and the raging, and somehow calms them. There are, after all, three hundred sixty degrees of escape from any conflict. There are no limiting resources to fight over; these days, half the habs are empty anyway. There is little need for territoriality, because there is so much territory.

So most of the habs are unguarded and unclaimed. Occupants come and go, rise into any convenient bubble to fuck or feed or—more rarely—socialize, before returning to their natural environment. Any place is as good as any other. There's little need to stand jealous guard over anything so ubiquitous as a Calvin Cycler or a repair bench, and there's hardly more that rifters need beyond these basics. Privacy is everywhere; swim two minutes in any direction and you can be lost forever. Why erect walls around recycled air?

Lenie Clarke has her reasons.

She's not entirely alone in this. A few other rifters have laid exclusive claims, pissed territorially on this cubby or that deck or—in very rare cases—an entire hab. They've nested refuge within refuge, the ocean against the world at large, an extra bubble of alloy and atmosphere against their own kind. There are locks on the doors in such places. Habs do not come with locks—their dryback designers had safety issues—but the private and the paranoid have made do, welding or growing their own fortifications onto the baseline structure.

Clarke isn't greedy. Her claim is a small one, a cubby on the upper deck of a hab anchored sixty meters northeast of Atlantis. It's scarcely larger than her long-lost quarters on Beebe Station; she thinks that may have been why she chose it. It doesn't even have a porthole.

She doesn't spend much time here. In fact, she hasn't been here since she and Walsh started fucking. But it doesn't matter how much time she actually spends in this cramped, spartan closet; what matters is the comforting knowledge that it's hers, that it's here, that no one can ever come in unless she lets them. And that it's available when she needs it.

She needs it now.