The chill starts in her chest, reaches her fingers before the sound of Acton's voice has died away. It's a coincidence. It's a perfectly normal question to ask.

"I said—"

"He disappeared," Clarke says.

"They told me that much," Acton buzzes back. "I thought you might have a bit more insight."

"Maybe he fell asleep outside. Maybe something ate him."

"I doubt that."

"Really? And what makes you such an expert, Acton? You've been down here for what, two weeks now?"

"Only two weeks? Seems longer. Time stretches when you're outside, doesn't it?"

"At first," Clarke says.

"You know why Fischer disappeared?"

"No."

"He outlived his usefulness."

"Ah." Her machine parts turn it into half creak, half growl.

"I'm serious, Lenie." Acton's mechanical voice does not change. "You think they're going to let you stay down here forever? You think they'd let people like us down here at all if they had any choice?"

She stops kicking. Her body continues to coast. "What are you talking about?"

"Use your head, Lenie. You're smarter than I am, inside at least. You've got the keys to the city here—you've got the keys to the whole fucking seaboard, and you're still acting like a victim." Acton's vocoder gurgles indecipherably—a laugh, mistransposed? A snarl?

More words: "They count on that, you know."

Clarke starts kicking again, stares ahead to the brightening glow of the Throat.

It isn't there.

There's a moment's disorientation — We can't be lost, we were headed right for it, has the power gone out? — before she sees the familiar streak of coarse yellow light, bearing four o'clock.

How could I have gotten turned around like that?

"We're here," Acton says.

"No. The Throat's way over—"

A nova flares beside her, drenching the abyss with blinding light. It takes Clarke's eyecaps a moment to adjust; when the starbursts have faded from her eyes, the ocean is a muddy black backdrop for the bright cone from Acton's headlamp.

"Don't," she says. "It gets so dark when you do that, you can't see anything—"

"I know. I'll turn it off in a moment. Just look."

His beam shines down on a small rocky outcropping rising from the mud, no more than two meters across. Jagged cookie-cutter flowers litter its surface, radial clusters shining garish red and blue in the artificial light. Some of them lie flat along the rock face. Others are contorted into frozen calcareous knots, clenched around things Clarke can't see.

Some of them move, slowly.

"You brought me out here to look at starfish?" She tries, and fails, to squeeze some hint of bored contempt through the vocodor. But inside there's a distant, frightened amazement that he has led her here, that she could be guided, utterly unsuspecting, so completely off course. And how did he find this place? No sonar pistol, compass doesn't work worth shit this close to the Throat...