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disappearing down the well into the wet room.
    â€œSorry,” she calls softly after—but downstairs the airlock’s already cycling.
    The hab is even more of a festering junk pile with the lights up. Improvised cables and hoses hang in loops, stuck to the module’s ribs with waxy blobs of silicon epoxy. Dark tumors of mold grow here and there on the insulated padding that lines the inner surfaces; in a few places, the lining has been ripped out entirely. The raw bulkhead behind glistens like the concave interior of some oily gunmetal skull.
    But when the lights come on, and Lenie Clarke sees with some semblance of dryback vision, the produce in the canister verges on psychedelia. Tomatoes glow like ruby hearts; apples shine green as argon lasers; even the dull lumpy turds of force-grown potatoes seem saturated with earthy browns. This modest little harvest at the bottom of the sea seems, in this moment, to be a richer and more sensual experience than anything Clarke has ever known.
    There’s an apocalyptic irony to this little tableau. Not that such an impoverished spread could induce rapture in a miserable fuck-up like Lenie Clarke; she’s always had to take her tiny pleasures wherever she could find them. No, the irony is that by now, the sight would probably evoke the same intense reaction among any dryback left alive back on shore. The irony is that now, with a whole planet dying by relentless degrees, the healthiest produce in the world may have been force-grown in a tank of chemicals at the bottom of the Atlantic.
    She kills the lights. She grabs an apple—blighted gray again—and takes a bite, ducking beneath a loop of fiberop. The main monitor flickers into view from behind a mesa of cargo skids; and someone watching it, lit by that bluish light, squatting with his back against accumulated junk.
    So much for privacy.
    â€œLike it?” Walsh asks, nodding at the fruit in her hand. “I brought ’em in for you.”
    She drops down beside him. “It’s nice, Kev. Thanks.” And then, carefully filtering the irritation from her voice: “So, what’re you doing here?”
    â€œThought you might show up.” He gestures at the monitor. “You know, after things died down.”
    He’s spying on one of Atlantis’s lesser medbays. The camera looks down from the junction of wall and ceiling, a small god’s-eye view of the compartment. A dormant teleop hangs down into picture like an insectile bat, limbs folded up against its central stalk. Gene Erickson lies faceup on the operating table, unconscious; the glistening soap-bubble skin of an isolation tent separates him from the rest of the world. Julia Friedman’s at his side, holding his hand through the membrane. It clings to the contours of her fingers like a whisper-thin glove, unobtrusive as any condom. Friedman’s removed her hood and peeled her diveskin back to the forearms, but her scars are obscured by a tangle of chestnut hair.
    â€œYou missed all the fun,” Walsh remarks. “Klein couldn’t get him to go under.”
    An isolation membrane. Erickson’s been quarantined.
    â€œYou know, because he forgot about the GABA washout,” Walsh continues. A half-dozen tailored neuroinhibitors curdle the blood of any rifter who steps outside; they keep the brain from short-circuiting under pressure, but it takes a while for the body to flush them out afterward. Wet rifters are notoriously resistant to anesthetics. Stupid mistake on Klein’s part. He’s not exactly the brightest star in Atlantis’s medical firmament.
    But that’s not uppermost in Clarke’s mind at the moment. “Who ordered the tent?”
    â€œSeger. She showed up afterward, kept Klein from screwing up too badly.”
    Jerenice Seger: the corpses’ master meat-cutter. She wouldn’t take an interest in routine injuries.
    On the screen, Julia Friedman leans toward her