It doesn't seem to bother Lubin much. Nothing does. Of course, Lubin's teleop is being a lot less invasive than Clarke's. It's only taking samples: blood, skin, swabs from around the eyes and anus and seawater intake. Clarke's machine is digging deep into the flesh of her leg, displacing muscle and resetting bone and waving its gleaming chopstick arms like some kind of chrome spider performing an exorcism. Occasionally the smell of her own cauterizing flesh wafts faintly up the table. Presumably her injury is under repair, although she can't really tell; the table's neuroinduction field has her paralyzed and insensate below the stomach.

"How much longer?" she asks. The teleop ignores her without dropping a stitch.

"I don't think there's anyone there," Lubin says. "It's on autopilot."

She turns her head to look at him. Eyes dark enough to be called black look back at her. Clarke catches her breath; she keeps forgetting what naked really means, down here. What is it the drybacks say? The eyes are the windows to the soul. But the windows into rifter souls are supposed to have frosted panes. Uncapped eyes are for corpses: this doesn't look right, it doesn't feel right. It looks as though Lubin's eyes have been pulled right out of his head, as though Clarke is looking into the wet sticky darkness inside his skull.

He rises on the table, oblivious to his own gory blindness, and swings his legs over the edge. His teleop withdraws to the ceiling with a few disapproving clicks.

A comm panel decorates the bulkhead within easy reach. He taps it. "Ambient channel. Grace. How are you coming with those 'skins?"

Nolan answers in her outdoor voice: "We're ten meters off your shoulder. And yes, we remembered to bring extra eyecaps." A soft buzz—acoustic modems are bad for background noise sometimes. "If it's okay with you, though, we'll just leave 'em in the 'lock and be on our way."

"Sure." Lubin's face is expressionless. "No problem."

Clanks and hisses from down on the wet deck.

"There you go, sweetie," Nolan buzzes.

Lubin drills Clarke with those eviscerated eyes. "You coming?"

Clarke blinks. "Any place in particular?"

"Atlantis."

"My leg—" but her teleop is folding up against the ceiling as she speaks, its slicing and dicing evidently completed.

She struggles to prop her upper body up on its elbows; she's still dead meat below the gut, although the hole in her thigh has been neatly glued shut. "I'm still frozen. Shouldn't the field—"

"Perhaps they were hoping we wouldn't notice." Lubin takes a handpad off the wall. "Ready?"

She nods. He taps a control. Feeling floods her legs like a tidal bore. Her repaired thigh awakens, a sudden tingling swarm of pins and needles. She tries to move it. She succeeds, with difficulty.

She sits up, grimacing.

"What're you doing out there?" the intercom demands. After a moment, Clarke recognizes the voice: Klein. Shutting down the field seems to have caught his attention.