It takes a few moments to disentangle themselves from the antennae. It whips past and away, trailing a small float like a traffic cone. Clarke tumbles, lets the water brake her. Machine roars recede into grumbles, into mere tremors.

The rifters hang in empty midwater, silence on all sides.

Caraco points a sonar pistol straight down, fires. "Jeez. We're almost thirty meters off the bottom."

"We lose the squids?" Brander says. "That thing was really moving."

Caraco raises her pistol, takes a few more readings. "Got 'em. They're not all that far off, actually, I — hey."

"What?"

"There's five of them. Closing fast."

"Ken?"

"Uh huh."

"Well. He's saving us a swim, anyway," Brander says.

"Did anyone—"

They turn. Alice Nakata starts again: "Did anyone else feel it?"

"Feel what?" Brander begins, but Clarke is nodding.

"Judy?" Nakata says.

Caraco radiates reluctance. "I — there was something, maybe. Didn't get a good fix on it. I assumed it was one of you guys."

"What," Brander says. "The muckraker? I thought—"

A black cipher rises in their midst. His squid cruises straight up from underneath like a slow missile. It hovers overhead when he releases it. A couple of meters below, four other squids bob restlessly at station-keeping, noses up.

"You lost these," Lubin buzzes.

"Thanks," Brander replies.

Clarke concentrates, tries to tune Lubin in. She's only going through the motions, of course. He's dark to them. He's always been dark, fine-tuning didn't change him a bit. Nobody knows why.

"So what's going on?" he asks. "Your note said something about a muckraker."

"It got away from us," Caraco says.

"It was not happy," Nakata repeats.

"Yeah?"

"Alice got some sort of feeling off of it," Caraco says. "Lenie and me too, sort of."

"Muckrakers are unmanned," Lubin remarks.

"Not a man," Nakata says. "Not a person. But—" She trails off.

"I felt it," Clarke says. "It was alive."

* * *

Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, alone again. Really alone. She can remember a time, not so long ago, when she reveled in this kind of isolation. Who would have thought that she'd miss feelings?

Even if they are someone else's.

And yet it's true. Every time Beebe takes her in, some vital part of her falls away like a half-remembered dream. The airlock clears, her body reinflates, and her awareness turns flat and muddy. The others just vanish. It's strange; she can see them, hear them the way she always could. But if they don't move and she closes her eyes, she's got no way of knowing they're here.

Now her only company is herself. Just one set of signals to process in here. Nothing jamming her.

Shit.

Blind, or naked. That was the choice. It nearly killed her. My own damn fault, of course. I was just asking for it.