So he looks. He knows this place. He's on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. He's back in fairyland. He thinks he comes here a lot now, watches the lights and bubbles, listens to the deep rocks grinding against each other.

Maybe he'll stay this time, watch the whole thing working, but then he remembers he's supposed to be somewhere else. He waits, but nothing specific comes to him. Just a feeling that he should be doing something somewhere else. Soon.

It's getting harder to stay here anyway. There's a vague pain hanging around his upper body somewhere, fading in and out. After a while he realizes what it is. His face hurts.

Maybe this beautiful light is hurting his eyes.

That can't be right. His caps should take care of all that. Maybe they're not working. He seems to remember something that happened to his eyes a while back, but it doesn't really matter. He can always just leave. Suddenly, wonderfully, all of his problems have easy answers.

If the light hurts, all he has to do is stay in the dark.

Feral

"Hey," Caraco buzzes as they come around the corner. "Number four."

Clarke looks. Four's fifteen meters away and the water's a bit murky this shift. Still, she can see something big and dark sticking to the intake vent. Its shadow twitches down along the casing like an absurdly stretched black spider.

Clarke fins forward a few meters, Caraco at her side. The two women exchange looks.

Fischer, hanging upside down against the mesh. It's been four days since anyone's seen him.

Clarke gently sets down her carry bag; Caraco follows her lead. Two or three kicks bring them to within five meters of the intake. Machinery hums omnipresently, makes a sound deep enough to feel.

He's facing away from them, drifting from side to side, tugged by the gentle suction of the intake vent. The vent's grillwork is fuzzy with rooted growing things; small clams, tube worms, shadow crabs. Fischer pulls squirming clumps from the intake, leaves them to drift or to fall to the street below. He's cleaned maybe two meters square so far.

It's nice to see he still takes some duties seriously.

"Hey. Fischer," Caraco says.

He spins around as if shot. His forearm flails toward Clarke's face; she raises her own just in time. In the next instant he's bowled past her. She kicks, steadies herself. Fischer's heading for the darkness without looking back.

"Fischer," Clarke calls out. "Stop. It's okay."

He stops kicking for a moment, looks back over his shoulder.

"It's me," she buzzes. "And Judy. We won't hurt you."

Barely visible now, he rotates to a stop and turns to face them. Clarke risks a wave.

"Come on, Fischer. Give us a hand."

Caraco comes up behind her. "Lenie, what are you doing?" She's turned her vocoder down to a hiss. "He's too far gone, he's—"

Clarke cranks her own vocoder down. "Shut up, Judy." Up again. "What do you say, Fischer? Earn your pay."