And then, still stroking: "Why are you always so mean to me?”

"I'm not mean."

"Are too."

"You're not supposed to be here."

"Can't we just be friends?" She rubs up against him. "I can do this whenever you want—"

"Go away. You can’t stay here."

"I can, maybe. If it works out, they said. But we have to like each other or they could send me back—”

"Good."

She's crying now, she's rubbing against him so hard the bed shakes, "Please can't you like me please I'll do anything I'll even—"

But he never finds out what she'll even do because that's when the door slams open and whatever happens after that, Gerry Fischer can't remember.

Shadow, I'm so sorry...

But she's back with him now, in the cold and the dark where it's safe. Somehow. Beebe's a dim gray glow in the distance. She floats against that backdrop like a black cardboard cutout.

"Shadow..." Not his voice.

"No." Not hers. "Lenie."

"Lenie..."

Twin crescents, thin as fingernails, reflect from her eyes. Even in two dimensions she's beautiful.

Mangled words buzz from her throat: "You know who I am? You can understand me?"

He nods, then wonders if she can see it. "Yeah."

"You don't— lately you're sort of gone, Fischer. Like you've forgotten how to be human."

He tries to laugh, but the vocoder can't handle it. "It comes and goes, I think. I'm...lucid now, anyway. That's the word, isn't it?"

"You shouldn't have come back inside." Machinery strips any feeling from her words. "He says he'll kill you. Maybe you should just stay out of his way."

"Okay," he says, and thinks it actually might be.

"I can bring food out, I guess. They don't care about that."

"That's okay. I can — go fishing."

"I'll call for a 'scaphe. It can pick you up out here."

"No. I can swim back up myself if I want to. Not far."

"Then I'll tell them to send someone."

"No."

A pause. "You can't swim all the way back to the mainland."

"I'll stay down here...a while..."

A tremor growls softly along the seabed.

"You sure?" Lenie says.

"Yeah." His arm hurts. He doesn't know why.

She turns slightly. The dim reflections vanish from her eyes for a long moment.

"I'm sorry, Gerry."

"Okay."

Lenie's silhouette twists around and faces back towards Beebe. "I should get going."

She doesn't leave. She doesn't say anything for almost a minute.

Then: "Who's Shadow?"

More silence.

"She's a...friend. When I was young."

"She means a lot to you." Not a question. "Do you want me to send her a message?"

"She's dead," Fischer says, marveling that he's really known it all along.

"Oh."

"Didn't mean to," he says. "But she had her own mom and dad, you know, why did she need mine? She went back where she belonged. That's all."

"Where she belonged," Lenie buzzes, almost too softly to hear.

"Not my fault," he says. It's hard to talk. It didn't used to be this hard.