Alice Nakata looks up from her pallet as the hatch sighs shut. Almond eyes, dark and startling, reflect in the dimmed light. One hand goes to her face: "Oh. Excuse me, I'll..." She fumbles at the bedhead compartment, where her eyecaps float in plastic vials.

"Hey. No problem." Clarke reaches out, stops just short of touching Nakata's arm. "I like your eyes, I've always— well..."

"I should not be sulking in here anyway," Nakata says, rising. "I'm going outside."

"Alice—"

"I am not going to just let her disappear out there. Are you coming?"

Clarke sighs. "Alice, the GA's right. There's just too much volume. If she's still out there, she knows where we are."

"If? Where else would she be?"

Clarke looks at the deck, reviewing possibilities.

"I— I think the drybacks took her," she says at last. "I think they'll take us, too, if we go after her."

Nakata stares at Clarke with disquieting human eyes. "Why? Why would they do that?"

"I don't know."

Nakata sags back on the pallet. Clarke sits down beside her.

Neither woman speaks for a while.

"I'm sorry," Clarke says at last. She doesn't know what else to say. "We all are."

Alice Nakata stares at the floor. Her eyes are bright, but not overflowing. "Not all," she whispers. "Ken seemed more interested in—"

"Ken had his reasons. They're lying to us, Alice."

"They always lied to us," Nakata says softly, not looking up. And then: "I should have been there."

"Why?"

"I don't know. If there'd been two of us, maybe..."

"Then we'd have lost both of you."

"You don't know that. Maybe it wasn't the drybacks at all, maybe she just ran into something... living."

Clarke doesn't speak. She's heard the same stories Nakata has. Confirmed reports of people getting eaten by Archie date back over a hundred years. Not many, of course; humans and giant squid don't run into each other that often. Even rifters swim too deep for such encounters.

As a general rule.

"That's why I stopped going up with her, did you know that?" Nakata shakes her head, remembering. "We ran into something alive, up midwater. It was horrible. Some kind of jellyfish, I think. It pulsed, and it had these thin watery tentacles that stretched out of sight, just hanging there in the water. And it had all these— these stomachs. Like fat squirming slugs. And each one had its own mouth, and they were all opening and closing..."

Clarke screws up her face. "Sounds lovely."

"I didn't even see it. It was quite translucent, and I was not looking and I bumped into it and it started ejecting pieces of itself. The main body just went completely dark and pulled into itself and pulsed away and all these shed stomachs and mouths and tentacles were left behind, they were all glowing and writhing as though they were in pain..."

"I think I'd stop going up there too, after that."