Now he swam free, descending toward darkness that no longer seemed to hunger for him. Tanner swam lower and lower. At first he seemed close enough to reach up and stroke the toes of the swimmers above him. It gave him a voyeuristic pleasure to see their frantic, paddling little bodies above him. But when he turned his face to the sunless water below him his stomach pitched at its implacable hugeness, and he turned quickly and made back for the light.

Each day he descended further.

He slipped below the level of Armada’s keels and rudders and descending pipeways. The long sentinels of weed that fringed them, that delimited the city’s lowest points, reached out for him, but he slipped past them like a thief. He stared at the deep.

Tanner passed through a rain of baitfish that nibbled at the city’s scraps, and then he was down in clear water, and there was nothing of Armada around him. He was below the city, all the way below it.

He hung still in the water. It was not difficult.

The pressure coddled him, tightly as if in swaddling.

The ships of Armada sprawled almost a mile across the sea, occluding his light. Above him, Bastard John fussed around below the docks like a hornet. In the twilight water around him Tanner saw a thick suspension of particles, life upon tiny life. And beyond the plankton and krill he faintly saw Armada’s seawyrms and its submersibles, a handful of dark shadows around the city’s base.

He struggled to overcome his vertigo; he made it something else. No less awe, but less fear. He took what was like fear in him, and made it humility.

I’m damn small, he thought, hanging like a mote of dust in still air, in a sea that’s damn big. But that’s alright. I can do that.

With Angevine he was shy and a little resentful, but he worked hard for Shekel’s sake.

She came to eat with them. Tanner tried to chat with her, but she was withdrawn and hard. For some time they sat and chewed their kelp bread without any sounds. After half an hour, Angevine motioned to Shekel, and he, well-practiced, stood behind her and scooped pieces of coke from the container behind her back into her boiler.

Angevine met Tanner’s gaze without embarrassment.

"Keeping your engines stoked?" he said eventually.

"They aren’t the most efficient," she replied slowly (in Salt, spurning the Ragamoll that he had used, though it was her native tongue).

Tanner nodded. He remembered the old man in the hold of the Terpsichoria. It took a while for him to say more. Tanner was shy of this stern Remade woman.

"What model is your engine?" he said eventually, in Salt. She stared at him in consternation, and he realized with astonishment that she was ignorant of the mechanics of her own Remade body.