The bow wave catches her just before the body does. A shoulder rams into her side, pushes her into the bottom; mud billows up around her. A fin slaps Clarke in the face. She grabs blindly through the zeroed viz and catches hold of an arm.

"What the fuck!"

The arm yanks out of her grasp, but her expletive seems to have had some effect. The thrashing stops, at least. The muddy clouds continue to swirl, but by now it's all inertia.

"Who..." It's a rough, grating sound, even for a vocoder.

"It's Lenie." She brightens her headlamp; a billion suspended particles blind her in bright fog. She fins up into clearer water and points her beam at the bottom.

Something moves down there. "Shiiit...lights down..."

"Sorry." She dims the lamp. "Rama? That you?"

Bhanderi rises from the murk. "Lenie." A mechanical whisper. "Hi."

She supposes she's lucky he still recognizes her. Hell, she's lucky he can still talk. It's not just the skin that rots when you stop coming inside. It's not just the bones that go soft. Once a rifter goes native, the whole neocortex is pretty much a writeoff. You let the abyss stare into you long enough and that whole civilized veneer washes away like melting ice in running water. Clarke imagines the fissures of the brain smoothing out over time, devolving back to some primordial fish-state more suited to their chosen habitat.

Rama Bhanderi isn't that far gone yet, though. He still even comes inside occasionally.

"What's the rush?" Clarke buzzes at him. She doesn't really expect an answer.

She gets one, though: "ru...dopamine, maybe...Epi..."

It clicks after a second: dopamine rush. Is he still human enough to deliver bad puns? "No, Rama. I mean, why the hurry?"

He hangs beside her like a black wraith, barely visible in the dim ember of her headlamp. "Ah...ah...I'm not...." his voice trails off.

"Boom," he says after a moment. "Blew it up. Waayyyy too bright."

A nudge, she remembers. Enough to wake her. "Blew what? Who?"

"Are you real?" he asks distantly. "...I...think you're a histamine glitch..."

"It's Lenie, Rama. For real. What blew up?"

"...acetylcholine, maybe..." His hand passes back and forth in front of his face. "Only I'm not cramping..."

This is useless.

"...don't like her any more," Bhanderi buzzes softly. "And he chased me..."

Something tightens in her throat. She moves towards him. "Who? Rama, what—"

"Back off," he grates. "I'm all...territorial..."

"Sorry...I..."

Bhanderi turns and fins away. She starts after him and stops, realizing: there's another way.

She brightens her lamp. The muddy storm front still hangs beneath her, just off the bottom. It won't settle for hours in this dense, sluggish water.

Neither will the trails that lead to it.

One of them is hers: a narrow muddy contrail kicked into suspension as she arrowed in from the east. The other trail extends back along a bearing of 345°. Clarke follows it.