It was a simple enough insight if you knew where the monsters came from. It was a simple enough splice if you knew how to code. Once those two elements came together, the whole revolution took about fifteen minutes.

Ricketts crashed at sixteen point five.

"I—ahhh..." A rattling sigh, more breath than voice. His hand hit the pallet with a soft slap; the handpad tumbled from his fingers. His telemetry staggered along half a dozen axes and fell towards luminous asymptotes. Clarke watched helplessly for ten minutes as rudimentary machines struggled to turn his crash into a controlled descent.

They almost succeeded, eventually. Ricketts leveled off just short of unconsciousness.

"We... did it," Phocoena translated. Ricketts had never taken the headset off.

"You did," Clarke said gently.

"Bet it would even...work."

"We'll find out," she whispered. "Soon enough. Save your strength."

Adrenocorticoids were stabilizing. Cardiac stuttered, then held steady.

"...Really want crash?"

He knew already. They'd discussed this. "N'AmNet for N'Am. Don't tell me it's not a good trade."

"Don't know..."

"We did this together," she reminded him softly. "You did this."

"To see if I could. Because you..."

Because she'd needed his help, and he wanted to impress her. Because some feral kid from the wildlands had never seen anything half as exotic as Lenie Clarke, and would have done anything to get a little closer.

It wasn't as though she hadn't known all along. It wasn't as though she hadn't used it.

"If wrong," Ricketts said, dying, "everything goes down."

If I'm right everything already has, and we just don't know it yet. "Rick...they're using m—they're using it against us."

"Lenie—"

"Shhh," she said. "Rest..."

Phocoena hummed and clicked around them for a few seconds. Then it passed on another message: "Finish what you started?"

She knew the answer. She was only surprised, and ashamed, that this adolescent had been wise enough to ask the question.

"Not finish," she said at last. "Fix." At least this part of it. At least this much.

"Friends would kill me if they knew," Ricketts mused from the other end of the machinery.

"Then again," he added—in his own voice this time, a voice like breath through straw— "I guess I'm...kind of, of...dying anyway. Right?"

Medical readouts burned like small cold campfires in the darkness. Phocoena's ventilators sighed through the silence.

"I think so," she said. "I'm really sorry, Rick."

A faint lip-smacking sound. The half-seen head moved in what might have been a nod. "Yeah. I kind of...thought... Weird, though. I was almost feeling... better..."

Clarke bit her lip. Tasted blood.

"...how long?" Ricketts asked.

"I don't know."

"Fuck," he sighed after a while. "Well...bye, I...guess..."