Clarke hears a brief, Lilliputian screech of metal against metal.

"How?" she asks.

Acton withdraws his hand, folds flesh back over the hole. "Not exactly sure yet." He runs another tool along the seam in his chest, sealing himself. He shrugs back into his 'skin, seals that as well. Now he's as whole as any rifter.

"I'll let you know next time I go outside," he says, laying a casual hand on Clarke's shoulder as he squeezes past.

She almost doesn't flinch.

Acton stops. He seems to look right around her.

"You're nervous," he says, slowly.

"Am I."

"You don't like being touched." His hand rests on her collarbone like an insult.

She remembers: she has the same armor that he does. She relaxes fractionally. "It's not a general thing," she lies. "Just some people."

Acton seems to weigh the jibe, decide whether it's worthy of a response. His hand withdraws.

"Kind of an unfortunate quirk in a place as small as this," he says, turning away.

Small? I've got the whole goddamn ocean! But Acton's already climbing upstairs.

* * *

The new smoker is erupting again. Water shoots scalding from the chimney at the north end of the Throat, curdles and mixes with deep icy saline; microbes caught in the turbulence luminesce madly. The water fills with the hiss of unformed steam, aborted by the weight of three hundred atmospheres.

Acton is ten meters above the seabed, awash in rippling blue light.

She glides up from underneath. "Nakata said you were still out here," she buzzes at him. "She said you were waiting for this thing to go off."

He doesn't even look at her. "Right."

"You're lucky it did. You could have been waiting out here for days." Clarke turns away, aims herself at the generators.

"And I think," Acton says, "it'll stop in a minute or two."

She twists around and faces him. "Look, all these eruptions are..." she rummages for the word, "chaotic."

"Uh huh."

"You can't predict them."

"Hey, the Pompeii worms can predict them. The clams and brachyurans can predict them. Why not me?"

"What are you talking about?"

"They can tell when something's going to blow. Take a look around sometime, you'll see for yourself. They react before it even happens."

She looks around. The clams are acting just like clams. The worms are acting just like worms. The brachyurans scurry around the bottom the way brachyurans always do. "React how?"

"Makes sense, after all. These vents can feed them or parboil them. After a few million years they've learned to read the signs, right?"

The smoker hiccoughs. The plume wavers, light dimming at its edges.

Acton looks at his wrist. "Not bad."

"Lucky guess," Clarke says, her vocoder hiding uncertainty.

The smoker manages a couple of feeble bursts and subsides completely.

Acton drifts closer. "You know, when they first sent me down here I thought this place would be a real shithole. I figured I'd just knuckle down and do my time and get out. But it's not like that. You know what I mean, Lenie?"