When she gets there he's crawling across its back, digging a hole with his knife. Clarke's eyecaps can barely find enough light to see by, this far from the Throat; Acton cuts and slices in the light of her headlamp, his shadow writhing away across a horizon of dead flesh.

He's dug a crater, maybe half a meter across, half a meter deep. He's cut through the stratum of blubber below the skin and is tearing through the brown muscle beneath. It's been months now since this creature landed here. Clarke marvels at its preservation.

The abyss likes extremes, she muses. If it isn't a pressure cooker, it's a fridge.

Acton stops digging. He just floats there, staring down at his handiwork.

"What a stupid idea," he buzzes at last. "I don't know what gets into me sometimes." He turns to face her; his eyecaps reflect yellow. "I'm sorry, Lenie. I know this place was special to you somehow, I didn't mean to...well, desecrate it, I guess."

She shakes her head. "It's okay. It's not important."

Acton's vocoder gurgles; in air, it would be a sad laugh. "I give myself too much credit sometimes, Len. Whenever I'm inside, and I'm fucking up and I don't know what to do, I figure all I've got to do is come outside and the scales will fall off my eyes. It's like, religious faith almost. All the answers. Right out here."

"It's okay," Clarke says again, because it seems better than saying nothing.

"Only sometimes the answer doesn't really do much for you, you know? Sometimes the answer's just: Forget it. You're fucked." Acton looks back down at the dead whale. "Would you turn the light off?"

The darkness swallows them like a blanket. Clarke reaches through it and brings Acton to her. "What were you trying to do?"

That mechanical laugh again. "Something I read. I was thinking—"

His cheek brushes against hers.

"I don't know what I was thinking. When I'm inside I'm a fucking lobo case, I get these stupid ideas and even when I get back out it takes a while before I really wake up and realize what a dork I've been. I wanted to study an adrenal gland. Thought it would help me figure out how to counter ion depletion at the synapse junctions."

"You know how to do that."

"Well, it was just bullshit anyway. I can't think straight in there."

She doesn't bother to argue.

"I'm sorry," Acton buzzes after a while.

Clarke strokes his back. It feels like two sheets of plastic rubbing together.

"I think I can explain it to you," he adds. "If you're interested."

"Sure." But she knows it won't change anything.

"You know how there's this strip in your brain that controls movement?"

"Okay."