I tell myself I know this place, she muses. I call this my home.

I don't know anything.

Brander cruises just below her, lit from underneath by a seabed on fire. The world ripples with color, blues and yellows and greens so pure it almost hurts to look at them. A dusting of violet stars coalesces and sweeps across the bottom; a school of shrimp, royally luminous.

"Has anyone been—" Clarke begins, but she feels wonder and surprise from Brander. It's obvious he hasn't seen this before. And Lubin— "It's news to me," Lubin answers aloud, as dark as ever.

"It's gorgeous," Brander says. "We've been down here how long, and we never even knew this place existed..."

Except Gerry, maybe. Every now and then Beebe's sonar picks someone up in this direction, when everyone else is accounted for. Not this far out, of course, but who knows how far afield Fischer— or whatever Fischer's become— wanders these days?

Brander drops away from his squid and coasts down, one arm outstretched. Clarke watches him scoop something off the bottom. A faint tingle clouds her mind for a moment— that indefinable sense of some other mind working nearby— and she's past him, her own squid towing her away.

"Hey Len," Brander buzzes after her. "Check this out."

She releases the throttle and arcs back. Brander's got a glassy jointed creature in the palm of his hand. It looks a bit like that shrimp Acton found, back when—

"Don't hurt it," she says.

Brander's mask stares back at her. "Why would I hurt it? I just wanted to you to see its eyes."

There's something about the way Brander's radiating. It's as though he's a little bit out of synch with himself, somehow, as though his brain is broadcasting on two bands at once. Clarke shakes her head. The sensation passes.

"It doesn't have eyes," she says, looking.

"Sure it does. Just not on its head."

He flips it over, uses thumb and forefinger to pin it upside-down against the palm of his other hand. Rows of limbs— legs, maybe, or gills— scramble uselessly for purchase. Between them, where joints meet body, a row of tiny black spheres stare back at Lenie Clarke.

"Weird," she says. "Eyes on its stomach."

She's feeling it again: a strange, almost prismatic sense of fractured awareness.

Brander lets the creature go. "Makes sense. Seeing as how all the light down here comes from below." Suddenly he looks at Clarke, radiating confusion. "Hey Len, you feeling okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"You seem kind of—"

"Split," they say, simultaneously.

Realization. She doesn't know how much of it is hers and how much she's tuning in from Brander, but suddenly they both know.

"There's someone else here," Brander says, unnecessarily.

Clarke looks around. Lubin. She can't see him.

"Shit. You think that's it?" Brander's scanning the water too. "You think ol' Ken is finally starting to tune in?"

"I don't know."

"Who else could it be?"