"Maybe you don't know that part of the story," Rowan continues. "You never wondered why we'd assign him to the rifter program in the first place? Why we'd waste a Black Ops Black Belt on the bottom of the ocean, scraping barnacles off geothermal pumps? It was because he'd started to slip up, Lenie. He was making mistakes, he was leaving loose ends all over the place. Of course he always tied them up with extreme prejudice, but that was rather the point. On some subconscious level, Ken was deliberately slipping up so that he'd have an excuse to seal the breach afterwards.

"Beebe Station was so far out in the boondocks that it should have been virtually impossible to encounter anything he could interpret as a security breach, no matter how much he bent his rules. That was our mistake, in hindsight." Not even one of our bigger ones, more's the pity. "But my point is, people with addictions sometimes fall off the wagon. People with self-imposed rules of conduct have been known to bend and twist and rationalize those rules to let them both have their cake and eat it. Seven years ago, our psych people told us that Ken was a classic case in point. There's no reason to believe it isn't just as true today."

The rifter doesn't speak for a moment. Her disembodied face, a pale contrast against the darkness of her surroundings, flashes on and off like a beating heart.

"I don't know," she says at last. "I met one of your psych people once, remember? You sent him down to observe us. We didn't like him much."

Rowan nods. "Yves Scanlon."

"I tried to look him up when I got back to land." Look him up: Leniespeak for hunt him down. "He wasn't home."

"He was decirculated." Rowan says, her own euphemism—as always—easily trumping the other woman's.

"Ah."

But since the subject has come up... "He—he had a theory about you people," Rowan says. "He thought that rifter brains might be…sensitive, somehow. That you entered some heightened state of awareness when you spent too long on the bottom of the sea, with all those synthetics in your blood. Quantum signals from the brainstem. Some kind of Ganzfeld effect."

"Scanlon was an idiot," Lenie remarks.

"No doubt. But was he wrong?"

Lenie smiles faintly.

"I see," Rowan says.

"It's not mind-reading. Nothing like that."

"But maybe, if you could…what would be the word, scan?"

"We called it fine-tuning," Lenie says, her voice as opaque as her eyes.

"If you could fine-tune anybody who might have…"

"Already done. It was Ken who suggested it, in fact. We didn't find anything."

"Did you fine-tune Ken?"

"You can't—" She stops.

"He blocked you, didn't he?" Rowan nods to herself. "If it's anything like Ganzfeld scanning, he blocks it without even thinking. Standard procedure."

They sit without speaking for a few moments.