"I'm not—I didn't—"

"I don't care," she says. "Don't do it again."

Something moves at the corner of his eye. "Problem, Lenie? Need a hand?" Brander's voice.

She shakes her head. "No."

"Okay, then." Brander sounds disappointed. "I'll be upstairs."

Movement again. Sounds, receding.

"I'm sorry," Fischer says.

"Fine," Lenie says, and brushes past him into the wet room.

Autoclave

Nakata nearly bumps into her at the base of the ladder. Clarke glares; Nakata moves aside, baring teeth in a submissive primate smile.

Brander's in the lounge, pecking at the library: "You—?"

"I'm fine." She isn't, but she's getting there. This anger is nowhere near critical mass; it's just a reflex, really, a spark budded off from the main reservoir. It decays exponentially with elapsed time. By the time she reaches her cubby she's almost feeling sorry for Fischer.

Not his fault. He didn't mean any harm.

She closes the hatch behind her. It's safe to hit something now, if she wants. She looks around half-heartedly for a target, finally just drops onto her bunk and stares at the ceiling.

Someone raps on metal. "Lenie?"

She rises, pushes at the hatch.

"Hey Lenie, I think I've got a bad slave channel on one of the squids. I was wondering if you could—"

"Sure." Clarke nods. "Fine. Only not right now, okay, um—"

"Judy," says Caraco, sounding slightly miffed.

"Right. Judy." In fact, Clarke hasn't forgotten. But Beebe's way too crowded these days. Lately Clarke's learned to lose the occasional name. It helps keep things comfortably distant.

Sometimes.

"Excuse me," she says, brushing past Caraco. "I've got to get outside."

* * *

In a few places, the rift is almost gentle.

Usually the heat stabs up in boiling muddy pillars or jagged bolts of superheated liquid. Steam never gets a chance to form at three hundred atmospheres, but thermal distortion turns the water into a column of writhing liquid prisms, hotter than molten glass. Not here, though. In this one spot, nestled between lava pillows and safe from Beebe's prying ears, the heat wafts up through the mud like a soft breeze. The underlying bedrock must be porous.

She comes here when she can, keeping to the bottom en route to foil Beebe's sonar. The others don't know about this place yet; she'd just as soon keep it that way. Sometimes she comes here to watch convection stir the mud into lazy curlicues. Sometimes she splits the seals on her 'skin, basks face and arms in the thirty-degree seep.

Sometimes she just comes here to sleep.

She lies with the shifting mud at her back, staring up into blackness. This is how you fall asleep when you can't close your eyes; you stare into the dark, and when you start seeing things you know you're dreaming.

Now she sees herself, the high priestess of a new troglodyte society. She was the first one here, deep at peace while the others were still being cut open and reshaped by grubby Dryback hands. She's the founding mother, the template against which other, rawer recruits trace themselves. They come down and they see that her eyes are always capped, and they go and do likewise.