"That wasn't—that wasn't a pet or anything, was it?" It seemed absurd. Then again, it wouldn't be any crazier than keeping a head cheese.

I wonder how she's doing...

"It was just a bug," Ouellette said. "It wasn't hurting anybody."

Clarke wiped her palm against her thigh; chitin and yellow goop smeared across the diveskin. "That just—that was wrong. That wasn't like any bug I've ever seen."

"I keep telling you. You're behind the times."

"So these things are old news?"

Ouellette shrugged, her irritation apparently subsiding. "They're starting to show up here and there. Basically, regular bugs with too many segments. Some kind of Hox mutation, I'd guess, but I don't know if anybody's looked at them all that closely."

Clarke looked at the sodden, withering landscape scrolling past the window. "You seem pretty invested in a—a bug."

"What, things aren't dying fast enough for you? You have to help them along?" Ouellette took a breath, started over. "Sorry. You're right. I just—you kind of empathize with things after a while, you know? Spend enough time out here, everything seems—valuable..."

Clarke didn't answer. The vehicle navigated a fissure in the road, wobbling on its ground-effect shocks.

"I know it doesn't make much sense," Ouellette admitted after a while. "It's not like ßehemoth changed much of anything."

"What? Look out the window, Tak. Everything's dying."

"That was happening anyway. Not as fast, maybe."

"Huh." Clarke regarded the other woman. "And you really think someone's throwing a cure over the transom."

"For Human stupidity? No such thing, I suspect. But for ßehemoth, who knows?"

"How would that work? I mean, what haven't they already tried?"

Ouellette shook her head, laughing softly. "Laurie, you give me way too much credit. I don't have a clue." She thought a moment. "Could be a Silverback Solution, I suppose."

"Never heard of it."

"Few decades ago, in Africa. Hardly any gorillas left, and the natives were eating up the few that remained. So some conservation group got the bright idea of making the gorillas inedible."

"Yeah? How?"

"Engineered Ebola variant. Didn't harm the gorillas, but any human who ate one would bleed out inside seventy-two hours."

Clarke smiled, faintly impressed. "Would that work for us?"

"It'd be tough. Germs evolve countermeasures a lot faster than mammals."

"I guess it didn’t work for the gorillas either.”

Ouellette snorted. "It worked way too well."

"So how come they’re extinct?"

"We wiped them out. Unacceptable risk to Human health."

Rain pelted against the roof of the cab and streaked along the side windows. Up front, the drops hurtled at the windshield and veered impossibly off-target, centimeters from impact.

"Taka," Clarke said after a few minutes.

Ouellette looked at her.

"Why don't people call it Maelstrom any more?"

The doctor smiled faintly. "You do know why they called it that in the first place, right?"

"It got...crowded. User storms, e-life."