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It was a beautiful day outside.  Fresh, golden, blue and cloudless.

“Tima, look after your sister.”
And just like that the whole thing was ruined. 

“But moooooooom,” she said in her most reasonable voice, “she’s BIG now, and-”

“No buts.  Go and pick out the flowers for the meal.”

And that was the Firm Voice, so she pouted but did it.  She took her flower-bag and her little sister’s hand and her pout and she stalked into the meadows with ill grace.

Bip wasn’t a bad sister, honestly.  But she was so small, and stupid in that way only very clever and very young children could be.  A cat was the only creature as troublesome.  So while in theory all she had to do was thrust her own (very small) flower-bag into Bip’s hands and say ‘fill this’ and ignore her, in practice she spent a busy who-knows-when picking over a very fine bush before she looked up and realized that Bip had gone missing exactly one who-knows-when ago. 

“Fuck,” she said, because mom wasn’t around and these things needed to be cherished even in the face of disaster.  “Double fuck with peppers,” she said, because innovation was to be embraced, and then “fuck,” because three was a good rhythmic number for anything. 

Then she started looking. 

“Bip?” she called in the meadow.

“Bippy?” she called under the flowerbushes. 
“Bippy mo mippy!?” she yelled in the shrublands. 
“Bip you little shithead!  WHERE ARE YOU?” she screamed in the forest.

Silence.  There would’ve been at least a giggle.

No, her little sister wasn’t there.  Which meant she was somewhere else, the one somewhere else she hadn’t checked yet because it was no fun and no good and just generally a bad time – not brutal, not painful, just wearisome and dreary.

Her little sister had gone off to see the dead.  Which meant she had to go too.

Ugh.

***

The gateway to the village of the dead was very pretty.  Smooth-polished stone, well-cut, and surrounded with carefully-groomed flowerbushes.  A bird’s-nest had been eked out atop the archway.  Probably a crow’s.  They liked crows. 

Tima had always thought it was all a bit insincere though.  You kept the gateway of the dead as pretty as a postcard for them, but you never visited unless it was a holiday. 

Or, apparently, if you were Bip and all you had to do was pick flowers with your big sister for more than five minutes.

She was absolutely going to give her shit over this. 

And with that thought to keep her warm and angry inside, Tima walked into the village of the dead and fell over, which was normal.

“Oh dear,” said a dry, dry, dry voice, and a brittle hand helped her up.  That was normal too.

“Are you alright?”

“Fine.  Thanks,” said Tima shortly.  The dead fussed over her a little anyways, brushing off dust and dirt and making annoyed noises.  She thought they might’ve been a relative once.  Maybe a great-great aunt?  Or a granduncle.  It was hard to keep track of your living relatives, once the dead got involved things got messy fast.  Best to let them care about it instead of you.  They had the time. 

“Have you seen Bip?” she asked. 
“Who?”
“My little sister.”
“Not sure, not sure.  Was just passing by, you know?  I had to go get some flowers and a crow-feather, so I was headed to the gateway.”
“You aren’t allowed out.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to go OUT, just put my arm out.  Sometimes the crows give you things if you ask nicely and have a few treats for them.  They like marbles.”

“You have marbles?”
“Why not?  Barrie makes them.”
Tima wondered how old Barrie was, and how long he’d been forgotten down here, and then she realized she was asking pointless questions in her head and dropped it like a hot brick.  “Thank you,” she said, because her mother had taught her long ago that rude thoughts in your head went away if you put polite words out of your mouth.

“Oh it’s nothing.  Best of luck.”
They must not have been a very old dead.  One of the things everyone knew was true: luck was for life.  The dead happened when it all ran out. 

***

Tima started with the obvious places first, the landmarks.  The places a curious not-quite-a-toddler-anymore would glimpse and scamper straightaway towards, wanting to get a closer eyeful. 

Bip wasn’t in the village square, where the dead merchants gave away bread and raisins for free to long patient lines of shoppers. 

Bip wasn’t in the cold forest, with its icicle trees and its snowflake bats that meeped and chuckled. 

Bip wasn’t playing in the sand at the edge of the wine-dark eversea, with its single towering wave that loomed up above the horizon and made the sun shimmer through it like a curtain. 

Bip wasn’t in the thickets at the edge of town, where the roads dissolved and the paths grew thin and the air was choked up with pollen and must and thick wetland air. 

Bip wasn’t even at her grandmother’s house, which was so new and shiny that it was barely even rotten yet.  Tima sat and had a cup while grandmother fussed over her and showed off all her new dead possessions, like her pet mice and her books and her clock with no hands that never needed to be wound. 

“It’s so nice,” she told Tima, “just to rest.”
“Yes,” she said.  “But I’ve got to find Bip first.”
“Oh, there’s no rush, no rush at all.  Things will happen.  That’s what being alive is all about, isn’t it?”

***

Tima was getting fed up with being alive.  It was very stressful when you were in the village of the dead; like being the only person wearing a hat on a sunny day.  People’s nods and cheery smiles seemed mocking, and it was a terrible battle not to scowl at them.  It was very rude to be angry with the dead, her mother had always said.  Mind you, her mother always told her to keep an eye on Bip, so she was already breaking some rules today. 

“Have you seen my little sister?” she asked the dead burglar, who was jimmying a window open. 

“No,” she said patiently.  “I’m very busy today.  There are lots of locks to snap.  It’s dangerous to leave things locked up here.”
“Have you seen Bip?” she asked the dead ferrywoman. 

“Nope,” she said.  “I’m fishing.  Can’t fish without paying attention, and I don’t think a little kid would be interested in that.”
“You’re really right,” said Tima. 

“No need to be grumpy about it.”

“Have you seen my stupid little sister?” she asked the dead fish. 

They flopped at her insolently on the dry bottom of the riverbed. 

“Stupid fish,” she told them, because there was no rule against insulting dead who were animals, and that made her feel better. 

“You’ll hurt their feelings,” admonished the dead ferrywoman.

“They don’t feel it.”
“No, but I do.  Why do you think my line has no hook?  Go get your sister and leave me be.”
“I would, but I can’t find her!” shouted Tima.  “None of you stupid dead know a thing about where she is!”
“Of course I know where she is,” said the dead ferrywoman.  “She’s on the isle of the ogre, being baked into a pie.”
“What!?  But you said-”

“I said I hadn’t seen her,” said the dead ferrywoman.  “And I haven’t.  But I hear a lot, sitting out here and keeping quiet.”
“How-”

“The fish, mostly.  Now go away.  You’re scaring them off.”

So Tima said “thank you” in her most begrudging and least sincere voice and left the ferrywoman and her fish behind as she trudged through the dusty riverbed all the way to the dry lake that held the isle of the ogre, which was mostly caked and crusted mud, thick with fibrous algae and sludgy with long-gone lakelife. 

“Hold still,” said a big grumbly voice as she approached the shanty-shack that took up most of the island’s peak. 

“I ammmmm,” said Bip – and it was definitely Bip, in high whine-form.  Nothing could cut through the air like a properly aggrieved Bip.  “But I’m bored, and it TICKLES.”
“It’s meant to tickle,” said the ogre, who was probably the ogre.  “It’s pepper.”
“It’s in my nooooooACHOO!”
“Careful!  Now I’ll need to add more pepper.”
“But it TICKLES!”
“But it’s meant to!”
Tima kicked open the door, and the first thing she saw was the ogre’s pepper-grinder, which was enough to capture her imagination for a long time.  Surely nothing needed that many teeth that wasn’t a shark?  Surely it didn’t need to be the precise size and shape of a cannon?  Surely, surely, surely. 

“It’s made from a cannon,” said the ogre defensively. 

“Oh,” said Tima.  She’d been thinking aloud again.  “Sorry.”

“That’s fine,” said the ogre, putting down the grinder one-handed.  “Is this your sister, Bip?”
“Uh-huh,” said Bip, who was picking at the edge of the pie crust.  The dish was bigger than their bathtub at home, and a lot deeper.

“And what did we agree on, Bip?”
“… I got to be in a pie?”

“No, Bip.”
“Please?”
“No, Bip.”
“Pleeeease?”
“You’re going home right now,” said Tima, who recognized this conversation and also how to mercifully nip it in the bud.  “And if you don’t tell her I wasn’t paying enough attention to you, I won’t tell her about how you tried to get yourself made into a pie.”

Bip pouted – and it was a good pout, all lower lip and burning sulkiness – but it was a white flag of an expression.  Tima had won, even if she hadn’t received the announcement of it.

“I take it we’re done here?” asked the ogre politely. 

“Yes please thank you,” said Tima.  “Sorry about your pie.”
“Oh, it’s no problem.  I wouldn’t have put her in the dish, but she insisted.  Wouldn’t stop talking about how I had to do it because it was in all the stories.”

“She’s pretty little,” said Tima.  “Sorry.”
“No, no, god no.  That’s where all the fun is.  Best have it while you can.”
“Here,” said Tima, and she threw her flower-bag to the ogre, who caught it in her big paws. 

“What’s this?”
“Some fun,” said Tima.  And she left, before she thought too much about why she did things.

Her mother would’ve said something about ‘building character.’

***

Bip was quiet all the way home – first from sulk, then from thought, then from exhaustion.  It was always an uphill walk out of the village of the dead. 

“Promise you won’t tell?” she blurted out as the gateway came into sight. 
“Won’t tell what?” asked Tima. 

“Won’t tell that –”

“Already forgot it,” Tima said hastily.  Maybe in a few years she’d understand figures of speech a bit better.  “It’s okay.”  And it was, which surprised her. 

“But I wasn’t supposed to see the dead.”
“Says who?”
“Says everyone.”
“Bippy, everyone says that, but nobody means it.”

Bip’s face did that thing where it turned inside out.  “Whaaaaatttt?”
“Mom says if we didn’t see the dead now and then nobody’d understand anything about everything.  It’s not allowed, but you’ve got to do not allowed things or else you’re not properly alive.”

“Oh,” said Bip. 

“And you’re not allowed to say any of that to anyone.”
“But you told-”

“What did I just say about doing not allowed things?” demanded Tima, and the puzzled silence while Bip worked that one out followed them both all the way home to mother.

She could see why people liked teaching things.  It was almost as fun as teasing.  And that satisfaction lasted her all the way through her scolding for losing her flower-bag. 

It had been a very good century for the people of Pallist.  At its dawn they hadn’t known anything about anything, and by its conclusion they knew everything about everything.

They didn’t know anything about the sky.  So they sent up balloons full of instruments and big metal tubes full of cameras and eventually small noxious capsules crammed full of bodies and then they felt satisfied enough to proclaim themselves experts.

They didn’t know anything about the sea.  So they dragged it with great nets and diligently recorded and named the strange things that died, gasping, on the decks of their ships; and plumbed it with radars and sensors; and sent down small but invincible robots with fiendish sample jars and mechanical arms, and by the end of THAT they were confident that they could be called its masters.

As above, so below.  Above and below were both known, so that put an end to that alright.  And throughout the classrooms and lecture-halls and churches of Pallist there was a great satisfaction and reassurance, bordering on smugness.  It was good to be in the know, and what was left to know?  Five years left until century’s end and they had mastered it all.

This was very dissatisfying to adjunct-professor Hilbert.  But nobody listened to him. 

His colleagues wouldn’t listen to him because he was just an adjunct-professor.  His students wouldn’t listen to him because he was still technically a professor.  His administrators wouldn’t listen to him because he wasn’t their boss. 

“How good it is, to know everything!” they would all say. 

“Well, not quite EVERYTHING,” he told them.

“Yes indeed!” they all said.  And then they went back to not even pretending to pay him any attention. 

In retrospect, this might have been the last point at which someone could have easily done something.  Five minutes of some generous stranger’s life and that would’ve been enough.

Well, maybe ten.

Fifteen?

***

Adjunct-professor Hilbert was going on sabbatical.

“You don’t get sabbaticals,” his administrators told him.  “You’re an adjunct-professor.”
“It’s very, very, very important,” he told them earnestly.  “I’m on the cusp of finding out everything we don’t know about everything.”
“We know everything about everything already,” they told him.

“No we don’t.”

“You’re fired.”
He left the building unusually determined and cheerful for a man who’d just gotten sacked without leave, but nobody was paying attention to ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert.  This had its advantages, because he got to bring home all his personal belongings and also some interesting odds and ends from a few of his former colleagues’ laboratories. 

Nobody suspected Hilbert.  How can you suspect someone that doesn’t exist?

***

Ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert’s husband was worried about him. 

“I’m worried about you,” he told Hilbert.

“That’s nice,” said Hilbert, who was up to his elbows in something on top of their roof under a downpour at midnight.  “Can you bring me some tea, please?  It’s a bit nippy.”
Ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert’s husband – whose name was Bernie – sighed and groused and called him out very thoroughly inside his head but still went ahead and got him some tea. 

“What does this thing do again?” asked Bernie as he handed Hilbert his tea (chacomale, with a squirt of lamenn). 

“Oh, it finds things,” said Hilbert.  “Things nobody’s paid attention to; things we don’t know anything about.”

“But we know everything about everything,” said Bernie.  “We know everything about everything above us, and we know everything about everything below us.  What else is there?”
“The horizon,” said Hilbert. 

“What about it?”
“What indeed,” said Hilbert smugly.  Then he chugged his tea and sent Bernie back with the mug and responded to further questioning by pretending he was deaf, something that he was very fond of despite being thirty-five and in possession of perfectly adequate health and genes.

Bernie felt bad about this later, but realized (correctly) that there hadn’t been any chance in hell he could’ve changed his husband’s mind.  Everyone needs someone to ignore, even the most ignorable of us – and once they’ve found them, they never let go. 

***

Of course, Bernie wasn’t the only person who had a chance to be let in on some of the details of what was afoot.  Careful retracing of Hilbert’s weekly routine allowed for some witnesses to be found after the fact.

“Distances should be clear,” he said.  “Precise.  Measurable.  None of this – this – this perspective helps with that.  Lies and nonsense, all of it!  Look at my finger – see?  Does it REALLY seem smaller now that it’s farther away?  Look at it again – see?  Does it REALLY seem bigger now that it’s closer.”
“Please get your finger out of my face, sir.”
“This is very important!  It’s about the TRUTH!”

“Sir, you need to let go of the cart.  It belongs to the store.”
“The TRUTH!  And that’s why I need this grocery cart.  To give us all the truth.  To damn the illusions that reality has swathed us in.  To eat away at the ignorance that has stultified our collective consciousness like a wet warmed blanket.  To show us all what we’ve been missing!”
“Let.  Go.  Of.  The.  Cart.”
“MURDER!” screamed Hilbert.  “HELP!”  And while the stockswoman was busy calming down the startled flocks of senior citizens and rubberneckers that heard THAT nonsense, ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert absconded with his grocery cart. 

It had been one of the only ones without a sticky wheel, she recalled.  That really sucked. 

***

The neighbours complained.  The hammering was going on too long and loudly, to say nothing of the chainsaw.  Very strongly-worded and stern letters were left on Hilbert and Bernie’s doorstep by the bushel, and Bernie read them thoroughly before forwarding on the most persuasive to Hilbert, who shredded them for use as insulation in the cryonic compartment of his mechanism, which now covered their entire roof and was beginning to ooze off its sides like melting ice cream. 

“What is that thing?” inquired their next door neighbour suspiciously.  Her name was Beetrace, and she was very old and very tolerant of weirdness.  But she preferred it to be happening somewhere else, to someone else. 

“A tool,” called down Hilbert. 

“What for?”
“To murder the horizon.”
“Oh,” said Beetrace.

Then she went back indoors and called the police.  They thanked her for her time and said they’d send someone over as soon as they got around to it, which was never.

***

Four months later the science reporters and chief editors of the Alembic, the Macroscope, the Files Quarterly, and every paper of Pallist received a letter.

Dear sirs and madams and all others.

This night I will pierce the final, unknown veil of ignorance that pervades our great land: the one that is so comfortable and known to us that we cannot perceive of its limitations.  I speak, of course, of the horizon.  Too long has it hidden our world from itself through this paltry medium of ‘distance.’  What the hell is distance anyways?  Garbage, that’s what.  A needless constraint forced upon our eyes and minds by curvature and deceit! 

I, ex-adjunct-professor Boran Hilbert, intend to discard that deceit.  Tonight.  History is in the making at eight o’clock.  Be there promptly, please.  And bring some cameras. 

All of the recipients immediately sorted it into their trash without reading past the first headline, with the exception of the Beddergle Bugle, which needed a local interest column and had about four hours left to get it filled. 

So they sent Stipley, who was the youngest and least likely to complain aloud about it. 

The traffic was bad and Stipley had to stop for gas, and thus was history preserved.  He arrived five minutes past in a terrible wheezing mess and had to stop and catch his nerves and get out his notepad and pen and go back for his pen and find it under his car’s seat and forget where his notepad was and find it in his left hand and swear for about thirty seconds and then he found the ladder leading up to the roof and had just put his hand on it when something went ‘bzop.’

It wasn’t a sound.  It was a feeling that ran through Stipley‘s hand and the ladder and the house and the ground and the air and everything, absolutely everything. 

He said it made his nose ache, or at least the space that comprised his nose, which he insisted to his grave was quite different. 

Then the ladder made sense. 

It made perfect sense.  Stipley could see every bit of it in direct relation to every other bit of it and its precise position in everything in every way, and it was the worst thing he’d ever seen. 

So he looked at the house.

He saw that too.  Perfect position.  Perfect location. 

Stipley, who at this point didn’t much care if he got fired, staggered away from the horrible, horrible, horrible place he’d been five minutes late to, towards his car, which might take him away.  He fumbled at the door-latch, confused by how he could see its exact proportions from every angle and that every angle was both everything and nothing, and in an effort to tear his eyes away from the angst of seeing something so boring and familiar turned into something so alien he made the grave mistake of looking up.

The Hilbert family home was atop a small hill that trailed down towards the lake.  It had a good, long view, and Stipley saw every inch of it. 

Every particle of it.

Every place in it. 

Every house, every tree, every leaf, every bit of asphalt, every speck of pavement, every (temporarily comatose) squirrel, every pebble, every wave.  And then his eyes crawled upwards, inexorably, and he saw that the horizon was gone. 

Or more precisely, dead. 

So Stipley saw all the way.  Mercifully for only a few seconds before he blacked out, but they were the longest seconds of his or indeed anyone else’s life.  Not that time or space meant much to him on that evening. 

***

At some point the machine went ‘bzip’ and everything went back to normal.  Bernie, who’d been napping, woke up with a start and went up to the roof to check on Hilbert.

He wasn’t there anymore.  He was the most not there anyone had ever been. 

***

It was a very, very sober dawn the next morning.  Some people sat in bed with their eyes shut; some made very strong tea (baronet bakely, with a splash of milt) and went outdoors to stare at the sky as hard as they could.  Some just fidgeted with their pens.  Everyone was thinking far too hard about not thinking about it.  And throughout the classrooms and lecture-halls and churches of Pallist there was a great terror and nervousness, bordering on hopelessness.

In the end, things didn’t go back to normal because normal is a negotiated subjectivity that doesn’t truly exist unchangingly but flows from the past into the present and towards the future only within human perceptions.  But Pallist’s perceptions of it never did go back to the way they’d been, and they never took as much pride in what they knew about the worlds above and below. 

The machinery that was taken from ex-adjunct-professor Hilbert’s roof was incomprehensible, besides the shopping cart.  It was returned, and it still didn’t have a sticky wheel, but it would only ever go in straight lines and was eventually donated to a museum because the lines were too straight to make sense and it drove four separate shoppers into nervous fits. 

Beetrace died in her sleep two days before the machine was turned on.  It probably had nothing to do with it. 

Bernie remarried six months later to a nice man who listened to him. 

The Beddergle Bugle had the most important exclusive ever known.  Six months later the paper folded, but Stipley had already quit and gone to live in a valley somewhere. 

Not one person ever claimed that they knew everything again.  Or spoke of the notion as if it would be good. 

Nobody blamed Hilbert.  How can you blame someone that doesn’t exist?

It was a quiet night.  No birds, no bugs, even the surf seemed to have shut its mouth.  Combined with the soft liquid afterglow of the sunset, and the whole world looked like it was ready for bedtime. 

Not that Eliza would be sleeping anytime soon.  It was rude to nap at a funeral, especially if you were half the guests and also responsible for taking a shift at the oars.

“Almost there?” she asked.

“Little bit,” said dad.  He was chewing his pipe again.  She’d still never seen him smoke.  Maybe that was what this was about; he wanted to make sure there were no witnesses before he lit up.  He was going to push her overboard to keep his secrets safe, just like the pirates of old. 

“How little?”
“You’ve got air enough to row,” he said.  His jaw flexed, and she wondered if he was just going to bite through the stem. 

Eliza sighed and wheezed and bent back to her task, and once again let her eyes brush over the bundle tied in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in sailcloth and the strongest mooring-line the docks could offer. 

If only her grandmother hadn’t been such a sturdy woman, this would be a lot easier. 

***

“That’ll do,” dad said.  “We’re in a good spot.  Has to be five fathoms.”

“Really?” asked Eliza, rubbing her arms.  “Why?”
“Don’t ask me, I don’t know.  This is a lot older than me, zizzy.  Older than granny too.”
“How do you know about it then?”
He nodded at the bundle.  “From when we sent off HER mama.  Now sit tight and keep an eye out, best as you can.  We don’t want to miss the start.”
“Start of what?  Shouldn’t we be putting her over?”  Not that she was in a rush or anything, but what was there to wait for?

“You’ll know it when you see it.  Trust me.”
So she sat, and she watched, and the rubbing of her arms turned from soreness to shivers as the dark cold air came rolling in with the night.  It was getting hard to see… whatever it was that she was looking for.  Not that there was anything to look for at all.  Smoky clouds, black sky, dark water, and a single little slice of something moving through the waves, rigid as a plank, intense and sure as a prowling mother.

Eliza pointed at the solitary shark-fin.  “Is that it?”
Dad nodded.  “Yep.  Good eyes.”
“Now what?”

“Now,” said dad, as he took off his cap and settled just a little more firmly into his seat, “we watch.”

***

It was hard to see until it came alongside the boat, slow and steady as it was.  Not much light left to work with, and the fish’s own countershading.  But it circled slow and steady closer still and at last it was close enough to touch as it patrolled, ramrod-stiff, soldier-sure, a hand’s-span from the  gunwhales. 

It was an awfully big shark, Eliza thought.  And they weren’t in a very large boat.  But dad was relaxed – no, not relaxed, but not nervous – and if he wasn’t worried she wasn’t about to show it either. 

And besides it wasn’t doing anything worrisome.  No bumps, no nudges, no mouthing.  Just a steady march, an endless spiral, each twist and turn of the ring coming with a barely-exaggerated roll of its sides to flash its milky underbelly into the night and show the strong curved line of its mouth, tight-shut. 

Then she saw the second fin. 

And the third.

And the fourth. 

She stopped counting at six and looked at dad, just to be sure.  He was still sitting, sucking his pipe, eyes wide but nostrils unflared. 

“Dad?” she prodded, just to be sure.

“More than I remembered,” he said.  “That’s all.  Keep watching.”
She turned back to the waves and the circling half-moons and tried to count them again.  This time she got up to sixteen before getting confused and second-guessing herself.  Were more of them coming in that quickly or were they already there, rising and fall beneath the surface?  Big and little and thick and slim, pointed-snouted and snub-nosed, there were so many of them, so many kinds.  A fat tiger, a needle-faced blue, a little slip of a thing with black-smeared fins, a slow and swaggering white-tip and a surly broad-sided bull, and so many more, from the length of Eliza’s arm to twice her height and more, dancing and revolving and turning just out of reach of the oars. 

However many there were, it doubled.  Then doubled again.  One more time.

And it was then, with the ocean more thick with sharks than water, that the singing began.

***

It was low and solemn and as weighty as a hammer-blow, and it pressed down with the force of a time that had nothing to do with clocks or calendars and everything to do with the grinding ache of geology, measured in accumulated drifts, in erosion, in speciation and extinction. 

There were no words and there was also no sound that came from no throat, no vocal chords, no lungs, not even a tell-tale splash.  Just waves and wind and darkness and the song, thick and heady and rich as blood in the water, swaying from side to side and vibrating up through the boat and into Eliza’s bones.

Dad’s pipe was quivering in his mouth.  So was his mouth.  So was his entire body. 

Eliza’s palms were itching like mad.  This wasn’t the first time, and she felt a moment’s deep regret for never asking granny about it before it was too late.  She might’ve told her a few things.

Of course, she hadn’t ever told her about THIS, so. 

Maybe it was because she’d never asked?

It was crawling deeper now, past the skin and muscle and calcium, up into the parts of her that watched.  She’d never really felt her own nerves-as-nerves before, but now they were lighting up, reporting on a sensation she’d never really imagined before: something just for them.  Living lightning, sparking and hissing from where her body moved, breathed, beat. 

Her freckles felt like they were glowing. 

Smell it.  Touch it.  Feel it.  She’d never imagined a song that appealed to every sense but the ears, but it was shockingly good and she wondered how they all knew the words, even if there weren’t any.  A lot of these animals – the ones she recognized – weren’t exactly social butterflies.  But they were flank to flank, tail to snout, mouths swallowing the same water and in each other’s spaces and there were no arched backs, no gaping jaws, no exaggerated swings of the skulls, just a smooth dance.  No personal space.  No space at all. 

There was no song.  The emptiness in everything screamed wide so hard that Eliza almost yelled. 

“Now,” said dad, and he sounded as loud and intrusive as a barking seal at a Sunday service.  “Help me with her.”

So she did, clumsy though her body felt in the thinness of the empty world above the real one, and as the heavy mass of sailcloth and mooring-lines slipped free from her hands into the water she could’ve sworn it felt more supple and flexible than it had when she brought granny aboard back on land.  But it was out of her hands now before she could think on it, and then it was sinking and the choir was in hot pursuit, mouths open wide now, jaws lunging from their bodies in lightning snaps, teeth aglitter with the very same last reflected scraps of light that made their eyes into little torchlights. 

Down, down, down, as the scraps of cloth and shreds of rope came free, a spiral inside a spiral, and then at its conclusion a stillness that made Eliza’s brain jump and her body freeze. 

Dad held up his hand. 

***

It was too dark to see now, but the fin was unmistakable anyways.  It poked up through the water almost shyly at first, hesitant, but then it built and built as the body beneath grew in strength and surety until it was full-sail, proud as a mainmast in full flight, steady as a drumbeat, alive as sure as anything that could be. 

She circled the boat once, twice, three times – close, then far, then close again.

And then she was gone. 

***

Dad lowered his hand.  “NOW it’s done,” he said.  And he threw his pipe overboard. 

***

Eliza had the oars the whole way back, but she didn’t complain and didn’t groan under it.  She was thinking.

At least now she thought she might have an inkling as to how granny had always brought back the best catches. 

Or why dad had married someone who’d never so much as seen the sea before she came to town with him. 

Or why he never swam himself, and had been so put out when she’d learned how, alongside all the other children – and such slow learners they’d been too. 

And, maybe, just maybe, why granny had always told her not to speak of her wisdom teeth, all sharp sixteen of them.

She didn’t share any of her thoughts.  Dad looked cross – although that might have been because of his pipe.  His lips were still trying to chew on something that wasn’t there. 

So they went back in silence – dull silence, not the kind they’d just lived through – and dad went inside and Eliza stowed the boat and the oars and stood up and bent over and without actually thinking it through crawled underneath it, inside it, and breathed in.

It was very dark and damp and it smelled of seawater and life and death.

Oh, it was right. 

It was very right.

But she had a long ways to go before she could be there, so she sighed away the air in her lungs and stood up on her legs and walked indoors, to the light and the land and her warm family, and put away her thoughts for a while.

They would be there when she was ready. 

The bell had tolled. 

The swan had sung.

And the sign on the front door had been swung from OPEN in blue to CLOSED in red.

Archmage Gilbert, master of the arcane arts and proprietor of Gil’s Diner, Souvenir Stand, and Bait Shop was close to death. 

Atop his highest chamber, three floors above the customer’s entrance, he summoned his employees by intercom and made manifest his will. 

“Apprentices,” he told them all, through jaundiced eyes and haggard beard-breath, “I am at death’s door.”
“Told you to quit smoking,” said Terry.

“Shut the fuck up, Terry.  Now I am due to leave this world, but for a wizard of my potency, such things are not inevitable.  When I die, leave the left window of my room open and I will return.  But I will not leave you to do this out of the goodness of your hearts – or even for the wage I pay you.”
“Below minimum,” said Terry.

“Shut the fuck up, Terry – and besides, I let you keep the tips.  Mostly.”  Archmage Gilbert coughed phlegmily.  “Now, stand you there and let me bequeath your inheritances.  George!”
George straightened up.

“As the chief oilaturgist of my diner, you have sweated and steamed over many carcasses animal, vegetable, and mineral alike.  To aid you in your further endeavours, I give unto you mine All-Fryer, which can bread and grease up just about anything you can fit in it – and most things will fit in it, if you try.”

George bowed low.  “Thank you, archmage Gilbert.”

“Yeah, yeah.  Krystal!”
Krystal saluted. 

“You have hawked many wares to many morons for many moons as my scammagician, and I respect that level of scheming in an apprentice.  To you I give my tricky scanner, whose laser will read any barcode not once not twice but three times, and will never give away what it’s up to through tell-tale beeps.  Charge everyone and spare no wallets.”
Krystal grinned.  “Will do, archmage Gilbert.”
“Wonderful thanks.  Terry!”
“What?” asked Terry.

“You have sold the least out of all three of my apprentices, and indeed the least of any apprentice I’ve ever had.  In fact, more than once I’ve caught you actively encouraging customers not to shop here but to go to Pete’s Prawnhooks down the road, and twice that I’ve heard of you’ve insinuated that I chop up people’s stray pets for chum.  As thanks for your unstintingly lousy job, I decree that you shall be thrown into the fibbling octobeast’s tank.”
“Hey-”

“Immediately.”
“Bu-”

“Chop chop!”

It took six minutes for her fellow apprentices to get Terry down the stairs, mostly because she wouldn’t stop biting.  In the meantime, and with great annoyance, archmage Gilbert, master of the arcane arts and proprietor of Gil’s Diner, Souvenir Stand, and Bait Shop, expired.

***

“Got any more band-aids?” asked George.

“Nope, used the last one on my finger,” said Krystal.  “Fucking hell that hurt.  Now we just need to go upstairs and open that window.”

There was a loud crunching noise.

“Fuck,” they agreed, and then they ran up the staircase two at a time until it ended on a splintered set of steps in the middle of the air.

Above them two great flocks of gulls capered in the sky, a thousand strong all told, angrily fighting over the crumbling remains of the third story of Gil’s Diner, Souvenir Stand, and Bait Shop and more specifically archmage Gilbert’s extremely mortal remains.  An agreement was reached when the body unspooled down the middle, and away they sped, screaming and shitting as they went.

“I’ll take the north flock,” said Krystal.  “That’s his left half.  That’s his good half.”
“I’ll the south flock,” said George.  “Can’t do much without a right half, even if it’s the bad half.”

And so the two former apprentices and employees of the great archmage Gilbert girded their loins and cleaned their teeth and packed up their toolbelts and set off.

***

Three hours later Terry finally got the flibbering octobeast to let her out of the tank.  It had been exceptionally clingy today, and kept hoping she’d give it extra treats. 

“No, I didn’t sneak any fries today, fuck OFF,” she told it as she pried the last hopeful tentaclaw from her shirt. “That’s a good boy.  Good fuck off.  Now where the hell is everyone?”
The lights were off, the fans were silent, and there was a note on the counter explaining everything in a rough sort of way. 

“Figures,” said Terry.  “Well, serves them right.  I’ll just clear out the safe and leave.”

Five minutes later she remembered Krystal had the safe key, broke a window, and crawled out. 

***

In the meantime, long had George quested southward, over hill and through dale, up and down and all around, to the farthest tip of the edge of the rim of downtown, where the restaurants lurked all along the waterfront and took the wallets of many a tourist.  He hadn’t seen feather nor flitter of a gull the whole way, but he was confident that he was on the right track.  Archmage Gilbert had given them some serious indigestion. 

At length the tell-tale white spatter ended at the rim of a great steel wall that soared up to nigh the height of the restaurant itself, a bin fit to trash creation, a garbage skip that could hold a dump in itself and have room for more.  And from high high up on its rim came the distant aaike aiiike awk awk awk awk awk of seagulls.

“There we are,” he said with satisfied surety, and so spitting swiftly, started to scale the surface.  But though George pulled and heaved and clambered until his arms were sorer than a monkey’s buttocks, the peak of the dumpster came no closer. 

“Haw!” came from below him.  “Looking for something?”
George looked down and then back up and was eye to eye with a great ogre of a restaurateur.  His teeth were tombstones and his eyes were deadly burning coals and he never stopped smiling. 

“Yes,” said George guarded, putting one hand to his belt.  “The remains of my late master, the archmage Gilbert.  They have been stolen by a flock of seagulls who reside atop your dumpster.”
“My dumpster, my property,” said the restaurateur unfeelingly.  “Code of the cooks.”
“Be that as it may,” said George stubbornly, “I am a cook myself.  And I know that if I challenge you to a fry-off, you’ll have no choice but to accept.  If I win, I claim my master’s body.”
“Sure!” said the restaurateur brightly.  “And if I win, I get to eat you!”
“Wait,” said George.

“Nah,” said the restaurateur.  “Starting now, time limit of five, we’ll use my kitchen.  GO!”
And they went, George unsheathing the all-fryer as he went.  With fury and vinegar and onion tears he roared through the degrees, pouring all his heart and soul and hope into the All-Fryer, which swallowed his every ingredient and begged for more.  Though the ogre’s cabinets were damp-sealed shut and his shelves seven feet and more off the ground, they finished at the same time. 

“Deep-fried hamburger salad with funnel cake rings,” said George, shaking clean the All-Fryer and sheathing it with a smug expression.
“Why, that’s just what I made,” said the restaurateur, with far too big a smile.  “I believe I win the tie, however.”
“What?  Why?”
“I also deep-fried my fryer.”
“Fuck!” swore George, but he was already shoulder-deep in the ogre’s mouth and vanishing fast and so he could do naught but flip the cheeky bastard the middle toe as he went down.

***

Krystal walked north and north until she found the place where the boardwalk ended, the long pier.  And at the tip of the long pier, on crumbling concrete and purest rust, huddled together for warmth and peevishness, stewed a full flock of gulls. 

“There you are,” said Krystal happily.  And she walked forwards to them, but the gulls saw her coming and noisily hopped into the water, swearing in bird words at her. 

“Hah!” cackled a creaking voice.  “You’ll never get close to them that way!”
Krystal looked up and saw that she was being watched by an ancient purveyor of beach glass knick-knacks of glittering eye and craggled sun-crisped ears.  “Mind your own business, you old fart,” she said politely.  “I’m just retrieving the body of my master, the archmage Gilbert.  Those flying rats have taken it.”
“Fat chance you’ll get it back,” sniggered the glass-seller, scratching at their chin until the flakes fell.  “But I can do it for you.”
“Hah!”
“BET I can do it for you.”
“Double hah!” said Krystal.  “Hah, then hah.  Now I’m going to go get it.”
So Krystal moved towards the end of the pier again, where the gulls had resettled, and she moved with all the silent and ingratiating grace of a true salesperson, nothing but a velvet touch and a warm smile and a comforting sunny aura that encouraged you to think that maybe the world wasn’t such a bad place after all and maybe you really were getting the long end of the stick this time, just because someone was such.  a.  nice.  guy.

The seagulls swore a blue streak at her and took off again.

“Shitlizards!” she screamed at them.

“Shitasaurs,” said the glass-seller.  “Those are dinosaurs, not lizards.  Bet you I can get to them before you can.”
“Not likely,” snorted Krystal. 

“Bet you a million dollars.”
“Bullshit.”
“Bet you five bucks.”
“Eat my shorts.”
“Bet you that shiny-looking hand scanner you got on your belt.”
“Sure, why not, see if I care.”
“Cool,” said the glass-seller.  Then she tucked her thumbs into her belt, hoisted up her singular pant, and strolled down to the end of the dock. 

“Nice day we’re having oh eh what’s going on here nice to see you nice to see you same shit different day eh nice weather oh but I heard it might rain later on can’t complain nobody’s listening hah hah hah you know me right don’t mind me just passing through-”

The gulls were dead asleep by the time the glass-seller stood among them. 

“How’s that then?” she called back, but Krystal too had been bored utterly unconscious, and so with a shrug the glass-seller took the tricky scanner from her belt and also her belt and also also her shoes. 

***

Terry moved slowly but surely, tracking footprints in fecal material, sniffing the air for bodyspray and fried foods and cheap plastic and strawberry shampoos.  She muttered as she walked, dark words from dark languages learned from prawn buckets and worm cases, invertebrate slurs that would make boneless bodies grow limp with horror. 

The anger kept her going all the way to the great gleaming surface of the dumpster, and atop it she heard the shrieks and roars of a seagull flock.  And beneath it she saw an ogre restaurateur taking a smoke break. 

“Hey there,” he said. 
“Fuck off,” she told him. 
“I like your attitude.  Hey, I ate someone that smelled sort of like you but less tentaclawy a while ago.”

“My co-worker,” said Terry.
“Yeah, they lost a bet.  Double or nothing?”
“What’d they bet you?”
“Oh, the body of some old guy up there.”
“Sure, I’ll take those prizes-”
“Great!”
“-and for the double I take them back too.”
“Aw shit.  Well, rules are rules.  I challenge you to a fry-off.”
“Your kitchen?”
“My kitchen.”
“Deal.”
The restaurateur’s mouth was only worse when grinned wide.  “Let’s go.”
Terry walked in and swore a blue streak.  “Fucking hell, seven-foot shelves?  Really?”
“Last guy didn’t complain.”
“Last guy wasn’t five foot three.  This isn’t fair!”
“Life isn’t fair,” said the ogre, with the warm glee of someone who had a lot to do with that. 

“Aw, c’mon.  Please?  Just give me a stepstool.  Please?”
“Nah.”
“Okay, fine.  But I need a fryer at least before we start.  That’s part of the setup.”
“Seems reasonable,” said the restaurateur, and he reached up and leaned over and pulled a fryer off the shelf and as he did so Terry kicked his feet out from underneath him and held him face-down in his own oil vat until he stopped squirming. 

“Something smells good out there,” said someone from around the ogre’s mid-gut.”
“Get out of there, George,” said Terry.  “Krystal in there with you?”
“No?  She went north.”
“Great.  Great.  Just great.  Listen, cut your own way out or whatever.  Bye.  It’s been shit working with you.”
“You too!” said George.  And as Terry walked out the door she heard the tell-tale hum of the All-Fryer’s blender attachment starting up.

***

Finding Krystal was easier.  Terry just walked north up to the pier and found her sitting on a park bench. 

“Hey.”
“Hey.  Didn’t we feed you to the fibbling octobeast?”
“Yeah.  You got the key to the safe?”
Krystal frowned.  “No?”
“Wow, great job.  Better take keyholder off your resume.”
“Hey, it wasn’t my fault.  That glass-seller took my shoes.”
“So?”
“That’s where I kept them.”
Terry sighed and rolled her eyes and blew a raspberry.

“Fuck off.”
“Make me, shithead.  I’m quitting.  If I get your stupid shoes back, I keep the key.  Deal?”
“Whateverr.”
“Whateverrrrrr.”
The old glass-seller perked up as Terry approached. 

“Want some beach glass wares?” she inquired.  “Hand-carved myself.  This one used to be a beer bottle.  This was a lightbulb!  And this is a window-pane someone smashed down on Lakeshore Boulevard last week!”
“No thanks fuck off,” said Terry.  “I want my ex-coworker’s shoes back.”
“Won ‘em fair and square.”
“Don’t care.”
“I know you are but what am I?”
“Rubber.  And you’re glue.”
“Safety!” said the glass-seller.
“Only works in tag.”
“Shoot.  Well, I like those shoes.  I wanna keep ‘em.”
“Tell you what,” said Terry.  “First one to pick up a seagull and bring it back over here without hurting it wins the shoes.”
“Deal!” said the glass-seller.  “And I get to keep your shoes too.”
“Whatever.  I’m going first.”
So Terry cleared her throat and squared her shoulders and straightened her back and narrowed her eyes and jutted out her chin and clenched her fists and flexed her biceps and braced her legs and took one step and the entire flock of seagulls took off the end of the pier as one, screaming fucking murder at the top of their lungs.  It took an hour for them to settle down again, mostly because the glass-seller wouldn’t stop laughing. 

“Shut up,” said Terry crossly.

“ahahahahhahHURKahahahahahahHURKahahh.  Aha.  Hah.  Okay, I’m fine now.  Watch how it’s done!” cackled the old merchant.  And she spat on her hands and began to lurch forwards, half-amble and half-mosey, a stream of nauseating drivel oozing from her and suffocating the air itself with leaden banalisms.  Ears sank.  Minds fogged.  Time died. 

“… and that’s the problem with people today,” said the glass-seller, as she cradled the rigid, glassy-eyed body of the seagull back to her stall.  “No respect no how for age and experience and wisdom why when I was young I knew better and if I didn’t my mother would thrash me black and bl-”

Her voice died in her mouth.  Terry was still standing.  Still staring. 

“How?” demanded the glass-seller. 

“I sold bait to fishermen,” said Terry.  “For six summers.  Full-time.”
“Oh,” said the glass-seller.  And that was when she realized she’d stopped droning, but only a little after the seagull put its beak in her face and wouldn’t stop.

“Bye,” said Terry to Krystal. 

And she left, but with the key.

***

At length the two apprentices of the archmage Gilbert made their way home to Gil’s Diner, Souvenir Stand, and Bait Shop, worn and tired and dripping gastric juices and gull feces.  At their heels circled five-a-hundred birds each.

“I bring the mortal remains of our master,” intoned George, “within the fibres of these birds and their digestive systems, his soul sings strong.”
“I also bring the mortal remains of our master,” said Krystal.  “These ones ate him too.”
“Bones and all?”
“Yes.”
“They were VERY hungry.”

“Yep.  Now usher them in.  Go on!”
They ushered them in, and in, and in.  Five hundred wings times two for birds times two great flocks, spiralling up the stories of Gil’s Diner, Souvenir Stand, and Bait Shop, filling up the air.  The kitchen was a birdcage; the souvenirs were pelted with guano; the fibbling octobeast quivered in its tank.

“Archmage Gilbert!” called George.

“Master of the arcane arts!” yelled Krystal.

“Proprietor of Gil’s Diner, Souvenir Stand, and Bait Shop!” roared George.  “Here is your body!”
“Here is your soul!”
“Beyond death you have travelled, beyond you will still!”
“Return now, and let the world see you once more!”
“Arise!”

“Arise!”
ARISE

Every bird alit, every bird flew, and every single seagull spiralled up up up the staircase and out of the broken shell of the building’s third floor and up into the skies with a thunderous blast of flatulent spellery.

“That didn’t work,” said George.

“No.  It didn’t.”
“Hey, did you count the gulls?
“No.  Did you?”
It took nine tries to get it done, and by the time they did they still hadn’t remembered to check the safe.

***

By then Terry was miles away on the bus and still moving.  It’d been easier to get passage than she’d hoped; the way the seagull refused to let go of the glass-seller’s eye had been surprisingly helpful.  She’d have to buy it some fries when they got home.

Wherever home was.  Ah, they’d figure it out. 

The plesis were the first warning when the wave came. 

It must’ve been something in the water, some tingling pressure they could feel from afar.  They honked their long calls and swung their long necks and dove and all of a sudden Tarci was the most alone she’d been while fishing in a very, very long time. 

And she was also without fish.  They knew what was up too. 

Then the pteros were screaming and all in the air at once and if that hadn’t been her final wake-up call, the water vanished. 

Yes, ten minutes ago had been time for Tarci to do something.  Now was the time to be too late. 

***

She was running uphill, and she wasn’t going to get far enough, and for some stupid reason all she could think of was her dock.

It was a good dock.  Tarci had pulled it together herself; sunk the piles amongst curious marine saurs, turned straight trees into trim planks, seasoned it and proofed it and guarded it against rot and worm. 

Hell, it was a good day, too.  Blue, blue, achingly blue sky with just enough wispy white to contrast and flavour it pleasant.  The sun was strong but not deadly.  The breeze was light and happy.  What a miserable thing to have happen on such a good day!  You finally got yourself some room to… yourself, you turned a piece of mesospace into a place, a home, and what happened?  Some little tectonic belch a thousand miles away sent god’s ripple hurtling at you.

Ah, her legs were hurting and she was smacking her feet into rocks.  She shouldn’t look back now.

She looked back now.

The horizon had risen and was growing clearer.

Tarci tripped, spun, and accelerated.  Too slowly.

***

The dock had been the last thing she built, really. 

The hou – the home was an ongoing project, but that wasn’t a work of ‘building’ by now, not really.  Just accumulation and the odd bit of subtraction.  There was a roof, sort of, and there were walls, kind of, and she’d been responsible for some of them and the jumble of stone on the hilltop had taken care of all the rest.  Now she removed leaf litter, evicted any fellow tenants who starting trying to bite her or leave over-smelly messes, and put in shelves.

The cache had been something she’d built, but it wasn’t really hers.  The important pieces of the boat were sealed tight and safe under earth and boards and cloth, where the world couldn’t touch them and she could reclaim them if the need came.  It was a ship-place, a cradle. 

And the tools and odds and ends like rods, spears, splints and spars weren’t really ‘building’ things.  That was just practical fidgeting.  Keeping her hands busy.

So Tarci was surprised to find herself realizing, at that very busy moment, that she had an awful lot of investment in that dock and she was going to be very very sad to see it wiped off the face of the world.

There was a sound like surf, but walking closer. 

She tried to run faster and couldn’t.

***

It wasn’t lonely. 

Tarci had neighbours, just not the talkative kind.  Stand-offish, but not impolite.  They did their business and she did hers.  The pteros fished over the shallows; the plesis foraged the reefs and snuck fish from her line; and the odd passing therasaur island-hopping generally stayed out of the rocky heights she’d made her principle home, so there was no need for unfriendly business.  In the end everyone was comfortable ignoring each other at almost any range.  She knew the nesting rookeries of the pteros almost as well as they did by now; and they would sun themselves on her roof.  She’d fished next to a birthing plesis pod for hours without them so much as raising a flipper to her.  She knew every tree that would inevitably ram into her face on her midnight walk back from her makeshift still to her home, and thinking of how all of that was about to be very very different was so suddenly painfully sad that it almost drew her mind off the change in pitch she was hearing in the roar of the oncoming surf.

It was peaking.  It must have hit the shallows.  Maybe the reef would block some of the worst of it ahahahahahaha no. 

The heights were still ages away; had she really walked this path so casually just this morning?  Dying out of breath and sweaty was just embarrassing. 

The trees would go, the brush would fly, and she’d be swept clean off the island and out the other side in whatever number of pieces would seem appropriate except there, to her right, was the cliffside.

And there, in the cliffside, were crevices.

Tarci was already dead if she thought about it, so she didn’t bother thinking about it.  Just turned, lunged, twisted, dropped, wheezed, shimmied on her belly, plunked into a cranny in the rock that seemed tall enough to just barely hold a fat lizard.  And had frequently, judging from the smell.  Something edged in fluff scraped at her palms.  Feathers.  Maybe a juvenile therasaur had moulted in here.

The roar was too loud to hear anything, but she felt the snort of warm air in the cramped space as clearly as if it had been a bellow.  And that was when she saw the glittering eyes.

Oh.  A juvenile therasaur WAS moulting in here.  A good-sized one too; bigger than Tarci and with its adult teeth coming in; proper and sturdy serrated blades to carve through anything it could hunt, fish, or beachcomb.  Amazing it had managed to fit into this crevice.  Maybe it had been using it for weeks and weeks as it grew up; how had she failed to notice it, anyways?  Maybe one of the passing adults had left a clutch.  Maybe

And then the wave came. 

***

There were three parts to it and they each lasted ten thousand years.

First the shadow.  Pitch black in the afternoon, sudden as a thunderbolt.  The therasaur’s eyes were the only thing in the world, shrinking back as it hissed and bared its teeth.

Then the push.  The air, the ground, everything vibrating, a drumroll that refused to die down until it drowned itself out and there was nothing left but

The water.

***

It’s tearing claws. 

It’s solid stone.

It’s a hand the size of the world squeezing.

And it’s in every single cranny corner and crack of Tarci and the therasaur’s little nook; trying to carry them with it and tear them apart and smash them together all at once and after another.

Her leg might be broken.  Or torn off.  Or buried knee-first in the therasaur’s stomach.

It might have drowned.  It might be alive.  It might be chewing on her.

Her hand is holding something and it could be the stone walls she was clinging to for dear life or empty iron-hard currents or just her own fingernails as she was abducted by the sea.

***

But life can get used to anything anywhere, so after one thousand years by her mind’s reckoning and about ten seconds by her heartbeat’s Tarci started to relax a little.

She was holding something.  It was probably stone.  Her back hurt.  That was probably stone.  Her foot felt like it was being torn off and smashed into pieces.  It was probably poking out of the crevice.  Something very heavy but slightly malleable – and occasionally pointy –  was smushed against her torso.  That was probably the therasaur.

That was probably the only reason both of them hadn’t been sucked out along with the rest of the water, gentle and kind though the current that had slid in with them had been.  They’d combined their meager body masses into a sort of impromptu cork.

Nose to nose, actually.  She thought.  It was still sort of hard to find anything, but there were some bubbles flowing over her face that could be it panicking quietly.

Oh right.  No air.

***

The current was reversing.  The wave had passed over the island entirely.  This was just the backwash.  Just a little longer with her muscles aching, with her hands scrabbling for new grips as the ungodly pull at her body turned backwards and tried to drag her away.

Just a little longer.

A

Little

frustrating that her mother had been half-right and she was going to die alone and unhappy alone she didn’t mind unhappy yes but she wasn’t alone she had a terrified drowning animal with her if it didn’t claw through her trying to keep its own grip lose her grip lose it lose it lose it lose ah ah ah

Ah, there it was!  A gasp, a shudder, an inhalation that shook her down to her toes, and she was coughing violently into the face of a wheezing therasaur, choking to death on her own newfound breath.  If her throat wasn’t already-occupied and didn’t feel like it had been rubbed down with sand she’d laugh at it, poor squawking thing, as damp and feeble and half-dead as a newborn.

So instead she kissed it on the nose.  Then it made the most horrible undignified snotty sound and she kissed it again and it did it again and finally she was laughing, really laughing, and it was the absolute most painful thing imaginable and the best thing she’d ever felt in her life. 

***

The therasaur was more distressed than she did.  It clung to her as dead, shivering weight, only moving itself at last when she (slowly, painfully) began to eel her way free of the rock crevice.  Then it scrabbled after her with terrified haste, clawing her foot somewhat badly on the way.

She swatted its nose and swore at it.  It chirroughed wetly and ducked low in the universal subadult symbol of I’m Very Sorry, Mother. 

“Fine,” she said, looking around the denuded, shredded remains of what had once been a perfectly tangled hillside. Yes, she reckoned this was as close as anything could come to being born twice.  Out of a cramped wet safety in a wide horrible place, weakly.   “Come on home.  Let’s see what shelves are left standing.”  Something silvery flopped at the corner of her eye, then the other corner, then all over the place.  Fins.  Gills.

She grinned.  “And I hope you like fish.”

Wrong again, mom.  Wrong all the way. 

***

It did.  A lot. It was a good thing she had time to work on a new fishing rod. 

“Kannister Kars, Inquisition line, how may we assist you?”
“Hi, is this the inquisition line?”
“Yes, sir.  How may we assist you?”
“I just had a little problem.  It won’t start.”
“Your kar won’t start, sir?”
“Yeah.  Hasn’t started since I bought it two weeks back, not once.  I don’t get it; it worked fine at the dealer’s.”
“I see.  Have you tried pressing the little round button on the keyfob, sir?”
“Oh yeah!  Over and over and over!”
“That’s your problem, sir.  That’s the locking mechanism.  Press the smaller square button next to it.”
“Oh.  Oh, it’s working.”
“That’s great news, sir.  Do you have any other inquiries?”
“No, no.  Other than it not starting, it’s been perfect.  I love the kar.”
“Wonderful.  Thank you very much for calling us, sir, and have a pleasant day.”

***

“Kannister Kars, Inquisition line, how may we assist you?”

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh… is this the inquisition line?”

“Yes, sir.  How may we assist you?”

“Ahhhhhh.  Well.  Errrrrrrrrrrr.  My kar broke out of my garage.”
“That’s very unfortunate sir.  Can you describe the circumstances in which this occurred?”

“Well, ahhh, it went right through the garage door.  It was down.  The door, the door was down.”
“Oh no!  Can you describe the circumstances in which this occurred?”
“I was just showing, well, you know, that is, showing my uhhhh neighbour how it has AI control.  And I, I, I, I showed him.  With the button, err, the button.  I pressed the summon button.”
“And that was when the kar drove through your garage door?”
“Ahh, yes.  Went through the garage door.  Then it, well, didn’t stop until it was right uhm next to uuhhhh.  Me.”
“That sounds like it was working properly, sir.  All Kannister Kar vehicles with AI summon features will activate and drive to their owner’s sides when the summon button is pressed, proceeding by the most direct route and ignoring any obstacles.”
“The.  The thing was………you see….my neighbour.  He was ah.  He was uh.  He was between me and the garage door.”
“That sounds very unfortunate sir.  I recommend you and your neighbour both contact your respective insurance companies to settle this amicably.”

“His uhhhh.  His daughter called a lawyer.  A lawyer.”
“That sounds very unfortunate indeed sir.”
“Is there ah anything err you can can can can can do to help help?”
“During your trial, sir, you can demonstrate the truth of Kannister Kar’s promises by pressing the summon button.  It will drive to your side by the most direct route and ignore any obstacles.”
“Oh.”
“Do you have any other inquiries?”
“I ah.  Don’t think…so.  I do love the kar, you ah know that right.”
“Absolutely.  Thank you very much for calling us, sir, and have a pleasant day.”

***

“Kannister Kars, Inquisition line, how may we assist you?”

“Hi, my family is having some troubles with our kar’s facial identification system.”
“That’s unfortunate, ma’m.  Please describe the problem as precisely as you can.”
“Well… it works just fine with my husband and myself.  The kar automatically unlocks for us, it responds when summoned, it stops before it touches us if we’re too close to it while moving.  Just perfectly.  But… our children.  Well.  We’ve had a couple of close calls.”
“Has the kar struck one of your children, ma’am?”
“No!  God no.  But it smashed one of Ezekiel’s toy trucks yesterday.  Another inch and it would’ve been his fingers!”
“Ma’am, can I ask you to check your make and model?  It’s possible your kar’s AI has been upgraded to our Alpha Prime package, leading it to see rival vehicles as competitors that must be eliminated.  Your child’s toy, from the proper perspective, could have been mistaken for a full-sized vehicle, or as the offspring of one, which must be crushed before it could reach reproductive age.”
“No, no.  It’s just a basic model B.”
“I see.  Ma’am, may I ask how old your children are?”
“Five and six.”
“That matches our secondary hypothesis.  The AI systems in Kannister Kar’s software suites are powerful tools, ma’am, and our facial recognition software is top-grade.  But the particularities of its programming prevent it from recognizing children.”
“You mean… it sees their faces changing as they grow up and think they’re different people?”
“No, ma’am.  The AI doesn’t register them as sapient and treats them as it would any other animal it encounters on the road.  May I remind you that ‘squirrel braking’ and other such so-called-‘humane’ driving tactics are the cause of many motor vehicle accidents?  Best to just power on through and grit your teeth when you feel the bump.  It’s all over in a flash.”
“Oh no.”
“In the meantime, it’s strongly recommended that you keep your children at maximum distance from your kar.  As long as they’re not in visual contact with it and keep quiet, it should never know they’re there.”
“Well, that’s a relief.  I was worried I’d have to pay for an upgrade!  Not that I wouldn’t want one if I had the spare cash this month.  I love the kar, you know.”
 “Great.  Thank you very much for calling us, ma’am, and have a pleasant day.”

***

“Kannister Kars, Inquisition line, how may we assist you?”

“Hey my kar won’t start.”
“Have you tried pressing the little round button on the keyfob, sir?”

“No, that’s the locking mechanism.  And I’ve pressed the little square button on my keyfob too.  Hell, I even put the key in myself – like some damn peasant – and turned it and it just grunts and mutters and doesn’t budge.  Worked fine for three months?”
“Can you describe the sounds your kar is making sir?”

“Thick and grinding and sounds maybe a bit like…well, I’m not sure.  I asked a buddy of mine who does linguistics, he said it almost sounded like Aramaic.”
“Modern, Middle, or Old Aramaic, sir?”
“Old.  But it was hard to tell; a lot of it just slid in and out of hearability.  Real low-pitched stuff; made all the furniture in the house shake and now we keep finding dead mice in the garage with blood leaking out of their ears.”
“Okay sir, this narrows things down a lot.  May I ask if you have any stairs in your house?”
“What?  No, no.  It’s a bungalow.  But it’s in a good neighbourhood, high resale value.  Pricey.”
“That’s unfortunate, sir.  It sounds to me like your kar lacks vertical structure in its local spatial imprint, and its AI is starting to forget which way is down.  This forces it to conclude it’s incapable of movement and causes low-grade psychosis.”
“Holy shit!  How expensive is this gonna be to fix?”
“Well, you can reboot the AI by inserting the iron rod in your komplimentary kar kit directly into its sarcophagus and holding it there until five minutes after the hissing stops, but that’s a temporary measure.  To ensure a proper housing environment for your kar, you have two popular options.  One, you can erect a small tower – if integrated with the main structure of your home, a simple two-story turret will suffice; if freestanding, a three-story minimum is expected.  Treehouses won’t work.”
“That won’t fly with my homeowner’s association.  Little pricks are already sore at me for the doghouse.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”
“How was I supposed to know you aren’t allowed to put up neon displays?  It’s no worse than next door’s shitty Christmas lights.  Which are still up, by the way.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.  Two, you can dig a well underneath your house – you can cover it if you like, but with nothing more substantial than a metal grating.  Either of these two renovations will permit the kar’s AI to accept the notion of other dimensions and reintegrate itself with your interpretation of reality.”

“There’s only one group of well guys around and they can go fuck themselves.  Little pricks testified against us in that legal dispute last year.  ‘Contaminated’ my ass.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.  There is a third option, but it’s somewhat less reliable and will not be covered by your insurance policy in the event of damages.”
“What ever is?  Hit me.”
“Remove the sarcophagus’s nails with a crowbar and commune directly with the AI once it is exposed.  Don’t do this with another person in the home or you run the risk of a rapid localized lotus-expulsion event.”
“Remove the nails, talk to the AI, right right right.  Thanks, that’s great.  Love the kar, by the way.”
“That’s very good to hear.  Thank you very much for calling us, sir, and have a pleasant day.”

***

“Kannister Kars, Inquisition line, how may we assist you?”

“Hello, this is Juliette Simmons, calling from the Packet Daily.”
“It’s always a pleasure to speak to the technology press, Ms. Simmons.  How may we assist your organization?”

“I would like to set up an interview with Mr. Strank, please.”

“Mr. Strank is a very busy man, but we can schedule a remote conference within –”

“Not a remote conference, if you please.  This is a face-to-face interview.”

“Ma’am, access to CEO Strank’s personal lead-lined submersion kannister underneath mount Vesuvius is strictly limited to intimate friends, his immediate family, and his top subordinates.  You are none of the above.”

“See, that’s just the sort of thing I want to talk to him about.  Why the secrecy?  Why hide from the press?  And speaking of immediate family, why exactly did he name his son Damien Megatron Strank, because that’s-”

“Ma’am, as I’ve said before, Mr. Strank is a very busy man, and prefers to spend his precious open time on interviews regarding substantive matters, not with muck-racking or celebrity gossip.  He is solely concerned with matters of scientific import.”

“And that’s another thing: the image.  He won’t shut up about science, but all he does is sell kars and build gravitic catapults.  He shot down Hubble three months ago; how does that square with his image as an innovator and lover of knowledge?”
“’Move Fast and Break Faster’ is Kannister Kars’s motto for a reason, ma’am, and if you continue with these unsubstantiated and slanderous allegations against our company’s actions you will be prosecuted to the fullest possible extent of the law.  Mr. Strank has no time for you.”

“I see.  This conversation is, of course, a matter of public record.”

“You haven’t said it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Ma’am, you haven’t said you love the kar.”
“Well, I don’t have any particular enmity towards it, I just-”
“Say it.”
“Wha-”

“Right now.”
“Bu-”

“It’s too late.  They can’t be recalled now.  Make peace with yourself, Ms. Simmons.  You should have done it.  You should have loved the kar.”

***

“Kannister Kars, Inquisition line, how may we assist you?”

“Hi, I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but is this the inquisition line?”
“Yes, ma’am.  How may we assist you?”

“My kar just vanished.  While I was driving it.  Good job I hadn’t left the driveway yet.  Is there something I did wrong, or…?”
“No, that’s expected at the moment.  Stay calm and stay indoors and it should be back shortly and no worse for wear.  You may have to rinse some stains off the hood, but they’re entirely cosmetic.”
“Oh, that’s a relief.  Thank you so much.  I really love the kar, you know.”
“I know, believe me.  Thank you very much for calling us, ma’am, and have a pleasant day.”

It had happened entirely because of good intentions.

That’s what Grace said, that’s what she maintained, and that’s what she argued.  Jack had just been walking out with the first frosts of the season, all shiny and sharp, and as he slammed the door the very tip of the end of the longest of the frosts had gotten caught – snip-snap! – in the doorway. 

And Grace had picked it up because she was a tidy and clean good girl who wanted to help dad, and then she had taken it upstairs and tried to fix it because she was so earnest and responsible and mature, and she had repaired it by jamming the stump onto a screwdriver like a hilt because uhh.

Because she was resourceful!

Yeah!  That seemed plausible. 

And from there it was just common sense to return the repaired frost to Jack so she’d snuck out of the house and it needed to be tested so of course she’d veered off his trail just a bit and at that point she stopped thinking of excuses because she sincerely doubted either of her parents would let her get that far. 

***

She started with a pond.  There was a skating rink on it, but nobody was around so there was plenty of time to sit down and doodle. 

Frosting things was easy, right?  Dad did it all day, so how hard could it be, right?  And her frost was broken, but that really just meant it was easier to hold since it had a proper handle now, right?  And this was just practice so she didn’t have to get too uptight about it, right?

Right!

And that was why it was okay that she drew nothing but dicks on it.  It was educational; you didn’t get better at anything without lots of repetition.  And the ones that were shaped funny were deliberately abstract, so that was okay too. 

Really, this wouldn’t have happened if she’d had more thorough sex ed.  She was actually being an autodidact.  This was all completely true and mom and dad couldn’t be angry at her for it.  They should be mad at themselves. 

***

Grace ran out of surface room on the pond after dick number seven hundred and forty-six, so she moved on.  Plenty of practice under her belt, so she was probably definitely qualified to test the frost PROPERLY now.  On a window, where it mattered. 

And hey, what was a better window than the giant glass hedron protruding from the flank of the provincial museum?  It was nothing BUT windows!  Pick an angle, it was a window. 

So she picked somewhere up top and took a deep breath and placed the frost against it and pushed it right through in a shower of glass. 

“Woops.”
She adjusted the angle and tried again. 

CRASH tinkle tinkle BANG THUD

“Woops.”
Maybe if she tried it from the other side. 

skkkkkreeeeeeeSMASH

“Woops.”

Oh well.  She had a LOT of space to practice in, and by attempt sixty-eight she was just scraping the shit out of it so that was a big improvement. 

***

By the time Grace filled the last pane of the museum’s hedron, she felt like she’d really improved.  So she took it with her as a reference.  Honestly it surprised her how good she’d gotten.  As a matter of fact, she was so good that it was probably a waste to give the frost back to dad right away when she could help cut down his workload.  Wouldn’t that be a nice surprise?  He’d be so shocked and pleased and happy and would definitely let her put more marshmallows than usual in her hot chocolate afterwards.  Yes, that would absolutely be what happened.  Totally.

So she’d start with some of the tricky stuff he hated doing and almost never got around to, to make him the happiest.  Like Florida!  She couldn’t remember the last time Jack had made it to Florida.  He must REALLY hate it there. 

Grace wanted to see an alligator. 

***

Alligators were less friendly than Grace’s books had led her to believe.  For one thing, they didn’t smile at ALL (maybe that was just crocodiles?), and for another they usually didn’t let her frost more than a scale or two before diving into the water and hiding at its bottom until she got bored of waiting and left.  They were very anti-social creatures. 

Now, the snapping turtles, THOSE were much more relaxed.  Some of them let her do patterns on their shells for entire minutes before they tried to bite her, and although her repaired frost now bore a healthy array of nicks and chips and scrapes from terrifying bite force she knew they didn’t really mean anything by it, silly old things. 

The humans were much less reasonable.  She did one window on one building and everyone started losing their minds, shouting and waving and screaming.  Two?  You’d have thought the sky was falling. 

Fine, be that way.  If they didn’t want to look at her art on the windows, she’d just do it somewhere else.  The roads were nice and flat!  Yes, that would be a great place to draw.  Maybe the highways, since they were so wide.  She could draw a lot of dicks on those.  Her parents would be so proud that she was taking art seriously. 

***

The back country roads were much better, really.  Sure they weren’t as smooth and well-graded, but they were littered with fewer flaming pileups of wreckage and yelling people.  Grace was astounded that humans were so careless about driving.  No wonder Jack didn’t own a car if this was what happened to them all the time. 

She finished her latest artwork and stepped back to frame it properly, then nodded in satisfaction.  Yes, that was a pretty good attempt.  She’d been focused too narrowly before, she’d limited herself artistically, constricted her vision, choked her talent, suffocated her imagination.  There was more to life than dicks.  There was also balls. 

Now she just needed a place to really get some practice in.  Maybe Jamaica?  Dad didn’t go there too often either. 

He was going to be SO HAPPY. 

Something nippy tickled the back of Grace’s neck, and the sky was suddenly full of faint grey light.  Somewhere in the distance a wolf howled, long and lonely and aching. 

Oh!  Mom was here!  She must be about to tell her what a good job she was doing!

“Grace Julianne Frost.”
Oh. 

Maybe not. 

It was a beautiful bloody dawn, ripe and red and just leering over the watery horizon.  It was days like this that made you happy to be alive and about to make other people dead. 

“Just so you know,” said Sawyer, “your efforts at denying fate are doomed to inevitable failure.”

Their opponent shifted from foot to foot, clutching the rail at the edge of the tower. 

“There is nowhere to run.  Nowhere to hide.  We’re miles and miles from any other form of shelter.  And at the snap of my fingers, this tower will swarm with very pointy guards.  Beneath you is a gargantuan pool filled with many highly specialized murdering organisms I have created with my own two hands and several gene sequencers.  At last, I HAVE YOU RIGHT WHERE I WANT YOU!”
The seagull yawked twice, lifted its tail and shat once, and took off. 

“Damnit,” said Sawyer.  It had been so very nearly satisfying too.

Maybe they really were getting lonely. 

Relocating to the central Pacific had seemed like such a good idea at the time.  Any moron who’d ever so much as smelled a secret lair knew you wanted to minimize the number of meddling fools that could stumble upon your projects while maximizing the unharvested resources available.

But there was a fine but true distinction between a minimal number of meddling fools and a negative number of meddling fools, and Sawyer was beginning to feel that it was a very significant thing.  A secret lair was all well and good, but an unknown lair was the loneliest place they could imagine. 

They sighed as they looked down at the sea.  Far, far below the fins of their marine patrol circled; above them the tower tapered to a spire, then a needle.  And around them, nothing but the big beautiful empty horizon and a tiny dot. 

Oh.  That was new. 

***

The long-form helioradar had already probed the intruder thoroughly by the time Sawyer got to it: a tiny and malformed dinghy laden with a single bedraggled and wildly hairy occupant.  They slumped in the midst of a stupor, baked under the sun and desiccated by the waves. 

Dead or alive?  If it was one or the other it was only barely.  Still, they were a witness.  A secret base had to stay secret, right? 

The gull landed next to the motionless form, pecked at it three times, then had its neck snapped and its body messily devoured. 

“Ah!” said Sawyer.  Still alive then, and ferociously practical.  Maybe it would be a waste to exterminate a witness here.  Yes, it would be a waste.  Perhaps they could be a minion.  It had been ages and ages and ages since Sawyer had a minion, and that had only been the grad student assigned to them back at the university.  No killer instinct, no loyalty. 

A minion wouldn’t go amiss. 

So Sawyer’s hand slid away from the evaporating ray and towards the tidal manipulator, and with a steady chug and whirr the currents bent to their whim and sent the drifting lifeboat through the floating perimeter locks and through the sharks and in and in towards the inevitable maw of their secret lair, where everything was seamlessly sterilized by waves and waves of antiseptic mists.  There was delicate equipment in there, and Sawyer didn’t want any of it getting covered in castaway cooties.

***

The castaway opened her eyes again six hours later in the medical casket, wrapped in some nanocarbon chains and a profound network of medical equipment.  Her skin was flushed with rejuvenating fluids and before her stood Sawyer, whose legs were starting to hurt and who really wished they’d brought a chair or something because the urge to fidget was getting strong and their legs hurt. 

First impressions, first impressions.  So long since they’d had to make them.  Dramatic pause first.  Was that long enough?  Was it too long?  Better start. 

“Hello,” said Sawyer.  “Wait, shit.  Ignore that.  Welcome to my secret larre.  I mean lair.  Shit.  Sorry, it’s been a long time since I talked to anyone.”
The castaway stared.  It was a good stare.  Flat, heavy, leaden.  Silence poured out of it like blood.  Sort of like the faint bloodstains on her cheeks and chin and lips.

“I suppose it’s been a long time for you too,” said Sawyer.  That must be why their voice felt so tinny. 
“The last thing I got to eat was a raw seagull,” said the castaway.

“Oh!  Yeah.  Yes.  I saw that.”
The incredibly tiny beeping of the mechanized IV station was the loudest sound in the universe. 

“How’d it taste?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Ahahaha that’s great.  Just great.  Hey!  How’d you like a job?”

The blink that emerged on her face was the slowest ever measured.  Each lid closed like steel shutters, and raised twice as grindingly.  “A what?”
“A job!  I need a minion.  To ah you know um keep away the err secret agents.  From my secret lair.  This secret lair.  Which is mine.”

“Where is it?”
“It’s secret.  Nobody knows.”
“You want me to keep a place nobody knows about secret.”
“Yes!”

The castaway considered this.  “Maybe.”
“Great.  Wonderful!  You’ll start tommmmmmokay then, how about, ah, I show you around first?  Get to see the place!  It’s great, great.  Good location.  Good view.”
The nanocarbon chains were loosed, the medicine was unlatched, and the castaway fell over. 

“Oh right.  Fixed the muscular atrophy but you might need a moment to get used to that.  Want a cane?”

***

The castaway did not want a cane but she took one anyways. 

“Top of the line stuff, top of the line,” said Sawyer as they descended the elevator shaft.  “Lightweight but superdurable.  And it’s neutrally buoyant!  I made the whole tower out of it.”
“It’s rebar.”
“Lightweight but superdurable rebar!  And down here’s where you get to see it in action, at the perimeter circumpool.”

The castaway peered over the waves.  “That mesh wall?”
“Oh, the mesh only stretches above the surface for a few feet.  Beneath it, that’s all Sawyer Alloy.  Keeps the sharks in.”

“The sharks.”
“Oh yes!  The sharks!  Hang on a second, I’ve got some here, I’m certain – just the wrong pocket.  Oh maybe the wrong pants, hah.  Sorry.  One second.  Just….one more…second.  Aha!”
Sawyer produced a small dried mackerel, overhanded it, and applauded happily as a smooth and streamlined head broke the water’s surface to snipe it before it even touched the waves. 

“Lovely animals, just lovely.  Two separate entirely original species, and they keep the trespassers out.  If I had trespassers.  Besides you.  Who isn’t a trespasser.  You know, I do more than just metallurgy out here: I’m a real dabbler in artificial marine ecologies.  Do you like barnacles?”
“I’ve eaten them when I had nothing else.”
“Oh.  Well, do you like eating them?”
“No.”
“These are intended to sink ships and they taste pretty bad, so you should like them.”
“Interesting.”

“Yes!  I could talk all day about them but maybe another time.  There’s plenty of that, right?  Right.  Right!”  Sawyer slapped their hands together briskly.  “Right!  Let’s see the elevator shaft!”
“Again?”
“We were on our way to see this, so I didn’t really show you it.”
“It’s a big tube filled with tanks.”
“A very important big tube filled with tanks!  Why, if its skin were ever punctured, the whole hydroferrocatalytic balance of the lair would be thrown off, and I’m sure you can imagine the results!”
The castaway shrugged. 

“Well.  Maybe another day?”

***

“Living quarters!  This is where I sleep and eat and research.”
“And put me in caskets.”

“Don’t touch that panel; that activates the harpoon cannons, and I want to reserve ammunition.  And yes, the medical room is here too.”
“The closet next to the fridge.”
“Oh, it’s part of the fridge unit.  Why would I want to keep my delicate medicinal compounds exposed to the stifling heat of the atmosphere?”
“You keep them in with your food?”

“That has never caused a problem.”  Except for the time with the marrow paste that had looked like mayonnaise, but Sawyer thought they could tell her about that later, when she’d accepted the job.  It would be good for her to avoid making THAT mistake; they weren’t sure the toilet could take another round of abuse. 

“And of course the view is lovely from here,” said Sawyer.  Someone had to say something, obviously, or else it would get awkward.  That would be terrible. 

“Where is the view?”
“Out the window.”
“No.  Where are we?  Where is this?”
“Oh, we can go over that on the observation pinnacle.”

***

Sawyer really hoped the wind up there wasn’t spoiling the castaway on the whole notion of staying. 
“Do you need a jacket?”
“Please.”
“Here, take mine.  Take mine.  Just don’t put your hand in that pocket, it has an omnilateral remote in it and you might mess with the lair’s settings.  So!  This is the navigation pane, and as you can see we’re somewhere in this GPS-blocked mesh here.  Owe that to the counternav satellite my professor gifted me on graduation, a real peach of a thing to do.  The roof can endoscope downwards to envelope the deck, if need be.”
“Why isn’t it down at all times?”
“Well,” said Sawyer.  “It’s for intruders.”

“What kind?”
“You know.  INTRUDERS.  Secret agents.  They’re always the ones that come stumbling into secret lairs.  There haven’t been any yet.  But there will be!  Which is why I want you.  To help me.  With intruders?”
“How.”
“When they’re standing here, confronting me – they’re going to confront me, right.  I explain my master plan to them.”
“Like…”
Sawyer realized that the disconcerting feeling that had been occupying their face for the past hour was probably embarrassment, and didn’t care for it.  “Well.  I’m working one out.  Have to get your ducks in a row before you shoot for the moon, right?  Right!  And when I explain it –”

“Your master plan.”
“-right, when I explain my master plan to them, standing here, as they confront me, I press this button right there – on that pane?  Disguised as a rivet.  And it drops out this whole section of the balcony, and plunk they go!  Down into the perimeter circumpool!”
The castaway squinted.  “Which section of what balcony?”
“Are your eyes alright?” asked Sawyer anxiously.  “I thought I flushed out all the salt and sun damage, but that solution was a little new and it worked alright on the seagulls but maybe”

“They’re fine.  Just didn’t see where.”
“Oh, it’s over there.”
“Where?”
“There!”
“Where?”
“Here!”
“Right,” said the castaway.  And she pushed the rivet. 

***

Sawyer didn’t say a word.  People don’t usually say a word when they’re that surprised. 

But they did make a sound, which was something like “Erp.”
Then they hit the water, which made a lot more sound and a big splash.

“Blorb,” they continued.  Smooth, seamless flesh circled them.  Something frictionless and alive touched their legs.  “Blorg!  Cough.  Bleagh.”
Somewhere above, just a fraction louder than their coughing, there was the slight hum of crisp, well-maintained machinery. 

“Oh FUDGE,” said Sawyer.  And then they were yanked underwater just as the harpoon cannons started up. 

The meta-sharks surrounded them, thrashing them deeper and deeper and away from the nasty little barbs.  One of the big females tugged at a release hatch and pulled the emergency oxygenator over to Sawyer’s panicking hands; a smaller specimen delicately dragged it over their face, only making a few cuts and nicks in the process. 

“Blurb,” said Sawyer around the mask, which meant thank-you. 

The meta-sharks understood.  They understood better than Sawyer did, probably.  They were so proud of them. 

The harpoon cannons had stopped, which probably meant that the castaway was looking for bigger guns.  She wouldn’t find any, of course – who needed bigger guns than harpoon cannons? – but she might find something else, like the electric matrix that could fry the surrounding waters for seven leagues, or the atmospheric launch controls that would convert the masking satellite into a very angry orbital ICBM or the flash-cloning command for the CATASTROPHE SQUID. 

Well.  Only one way out then. 

Sawyer sighed into their mask as they unsheathed their quasi-shark. 

***

The quasi-shark occupied a tricky metaphysical position relative to the rest of the perimeter circumpool’s occupants.  On the one hand, it took up too much space; on the same hand, it also took up none at all, practically speaking. 

On the other hand, it couldn’t breathe in water; on the first hand again it couldn’t breathe at all. 

And finally and firstly it also wasn’t real, it was just persistent. 

It was also Sawyer’s best friend, although they would never tell the meta-sharks that.  It would make them sad. 

So they only let the quasi-shark out for a couple of seconds, to avoid consequences, which was long enough for it to remove nine-tenths of the tower’s mass from sea level up in eleven-tenths of a bite. 

“Blurb,” said Sawyer as the shark’s wavelength collapsed back into its sheath, which meant thank-you.  The quasi-shark understood, doubtlessly, and probably always would have. 

The meta-sharks also understood something rather different that had slipped Sawyer’s mind, which was why they each very gently grabbed a different limb and began to tow them away rapidly as the whole hydroferrocatalytic balance of the lair was thrown off, turning it inside out and upside down and then about seven hundred meters into the air and six thousand meters straight down. 

***

Well. 

That was that, then.  Time to start over.  Drat. 

Still, Sawyer reflected, any day where you learned something was a good one.  And today had been very educational. 

A secret lair might be less lonely than an unknown lair, true, but a lair with true friends and pals was never lonely at all. 

Also, they should really put biomonitors in their deathtraps.  That ejection platform should never have worked on them, let alone the harpoon cannons. 

It was awful outside – the fog had rolled in early and turned the air into big damp clotted clumps; failed cloudlettes that sank low over the streets and blocked eyes and made you gasp like an old man just to keep breathing if you walked fast. 

I liked it.  When it was nasty out like this nobody looked outside; nobody was outside.  And that made it easy to crawl under the fence through the old service gate and into the back of the old junkyard. 

Plenty of good things back here, guarded only by a nasty old bastard with a scrapgun.  But he was old and fat and would be stuck in his office all night; sipping warm shit out of a mug. Why should he put his ass out there in the cold and damp?  Weren’t there cameras for that?

Yes there were, and I knew where all of them were aimed at.   So in the end everyone was happy.

Not like anyone was going to make proper use of this stuff anyways.  Dead scutters piled six high; stacks of dismembered industrial electronics; hell, there were even old automobiles down there somewhere, buried deep down where their frail husks were shielded from the worst of the rusting air.  This was worse than garbage.  At least garbage had to get stuffed away first before it was safely forgotten. 

A screwdriver.  A chisel.  A crowbar.  A pick.  And sometimes a rock. 

It was amazing what you could persuade to come home with you.  It was all a matter of finding the right place and the right angle to approach it from. 

And the right footing. 

I always forgot about the right footing.  That night I always-forgot-about-it while I was balancing on a completely stable heap of corroded vending units, which suddenly weren’t there anymore and then took me with them someplace new. 

When the floor stopped, it was dark.  Proper dark, not the nice fuzzy fog that I’d been so happy to see earlier.  The kind of dark that wouldn’t know what a light was if you showed one to it, and would probably eat it whole. 

Nothing down here had seen the sun in a very long time, and for a long horrible minute I was sure – absolutely deadbolt-certain – that was going to include me.  My ankle was broken or my arm was trapped or my spine was twisted or my airways were blocked and I was going to be down here for the rest of time, buried too deep to even rot. 

One limb.  Two limbs.  Four limbs.  All flexing, turning, twisting freely. 

My chest moved.  Oh, I could still breathe, I’d just forgotten to try. 

Fuck.  Thank fuck.  But fuck. 

***

My hopefully-temporary new home wasn’t big enough to stand up in, but I could still measure out paces if I hunched double.  Not quite as roomy as my apartment, but closer than I wanted to admit.  A little damper.  And the smell was different; flatter, more metallic.  No rot, no mould, no ratshit.  Just the corroded air of ancient machines. 

And a sound so low-pitched and gentle that I almost mistook it for a headache at first.  Then I knew better: it was the junkyard, settling.  Ten million tons of smelted and broken ore, crushing itself all around me. 

The walls were uneven conglomerates of pressure-fused metals; forged under their own weight.  No way out, but there was air after all – leaking in through wherever I’d come from. 

I did an inventory.  I’d lost the crowbar and the pick.  I couldn’t find my chisel.  My screwdriver’s entire pocket was torn away. 

But I had a rock. 

Right place, right angle.  I just had to loo

I just had to feel for it. 

It was tricky work; tapping around in the dark like that.  Felt like a coalminer’s child from centuries past; crammed into a space nobody else would fit in and told to chip it bigger without being crushed.  Every smack of stone-on-metal came after I’d spent minutes examining the whole wall I was aiming at. 

It was one of my air vents.  Theoretically, this was a way out.  Pessimistically, it could also lead to me collapsing some or all of the openings that were letting me breathe. 

It’s amazing how you can focus on a job when you think it’s all that’ll let you stay alive.  I couldn’t have said how long I spent down there in the dark, but I can tell you that it felt like no time at all.  I smacked through the last hinge, braced, lifted, heaved, tore, crawled forwards into freedom. 

And into another wall. 

There was still airflow, but I wasn’t out yet.  I was inside something else.  Something a little smaller and a little closer.  The buzz of the junkyard was louder here; trapped in a tin box with me and… hmm…

My hands moved slowly, wary of sharp edges and grinding gears and whirling turbines and dog knew what else. 

… trapped with me and a tiny generator.  And, if I wasn’t mistaken, its access panel had a lightsource. 

Most of the things I’d taken out of this place had been in pieces, and only worth anything when rendered down into smaller pieces yet.  But I knew how to build if breaking wouldn’t cut it, and even if I’d never exactly done it in the dark, in REAL dark before, well. 

Like I said, it’s amazing how you can focus. 

And it wasn’t a very complicated generator.  So I snapped this to that and spliced the other over and crossed my fingers and used my rock to flip the switch and hoped I wouldn’t explode. 

With impossible, violent, furious force, nothing happened.  It happened so hard that I almost fell over.  It happened so loudly that I slapped my hands over my ears and whimpered, and when I uncurled I could still hear it ringing inside my head, and that was when I knew I was missing something that wasn’t nothing at all. 

The buzz had stopped. 

And while I sat there and tried to decide what THAT meant, a new sound came, curling up from all around me.  Creaking and squealing and grunting, the metal was curling back.  Pulling away.  Walls became doors, and behind them, tunnels slowly flickered into light – burning, flickering, faint-as-the-sun light.  I wanted to cover my eyes again. 

I compromised and peeked through my fingers as I stumbled upright and onwards.  The ceiling in here was obviously higher than I’d thought. 

***

Whatever I’d started moving with that little generator, or how, it wasn’t finished. 

Oh, the halls and tunnels and cramped guts I crawled through were still as damned death again, rock-solid, unflinching.  But as my eyes got used to seeing again, I realized that the lights weren’t stable.  They crawled ahead of me and they shut behind me, breaking in their sockets. 

Something was moving me, ushering me.  Herding me. 

And at the end of the line, when the tunnel bent and corkscrewed in on itself into the nastiest crawlspace I’d ever seen before dropping into a knotted tangle of guts that could’ve been a complete ventilation hub long ago, I wasn’t surprised to see myself face to face with another generator. 

A completely different generator of course.  If the other one had been old, this was prehistoric.  It might’ve run on gas for god’s sake.  It was bone-dry.  Dead-empty.  A starved old monster, bones without skin or flesh. 

I got it running anyways.  And the world heaved when I wasn’t looking, and the way behind me wasn’t the one I’d come in through, and when I walked every footfall echoed through invisible pits and out through hidden channels and it came back as

CAN

YOU

HEAR

ME?

***

Every four steps.  Eight.  Sixteen.  Thirty-two.  Sixty-four.  The question never changed. 

It soaked up and down in me until it turned into vibrations I could pretend weren’t real, just impacts, just garbage, just noise, just trash. 

Doors opened for me.  Metal moved for me.  Lights died for me.  Air pumped for me. 

And over and over it asked me as I shut it out, as I turned the switches and mended the wires and felt things moving far below. 

CAN

YOU

HEAR

ME?

I dropped my rock.  It fell down a grate that hadn’t been there, fell into oils that were draining away into hidden reservoirs for hidden reasons. I swore, fumbled, slammed my hand against the floor and a screwdriver fell out of it. 

The next generator ran on coal.  The next hall, the lights were a solid bar above me, unfailing, undying. 

CAN

YOU

HEAR

ME?

It was hot down here, and getting hotter.  I took off my jacket.  I threw away my jacket.  I tied my shirt around my waist and shuffled along in my drenched sports bra and wished I was wearing shorts and felt the plating of the floor beneath me steam against my beaten old shoes. 

New vents opened above me.  Dead fans rattled to life again. 

I didn’t recognize the thing I was fixing.  I fixed it. 

CAN

YOU

HEAR

ME?

Light – real light, skylight, that soft glow that comes from pollution and fog and a nonstop city’s glow – was beaming down on me.  Shafts were opening above my head, trickling with dewy moisture.  Dead leaves and gravel showered down on me as gently as raindrops. 

There was a door.  A real door, with a handle. 

I opened it. 

Behind it was a rusted old room, every feature eaten by orange crust.  And in its center, a little crumpled column, torn from a kind of vehicle older than my grandfather’s grandmother. 

And in it were a pair of keys. 

I reached out and turned them and I knew I shouldn’t have.  But it was how it was. 

The door was still open behind me, but I couldn’t see out of it.  All the fog, and as my legs took me through and out I’d never, ever, ever been happier to see and feel and be bathed in anything and everything as much as that thing. 

I was outside the junkyard.  I was outside of the metal.  I was outside and I was going to go home and I was going to eat my awful shitty breakfast and be happy and I was just realizing that the buzzing hadn’t stopped and it wasn’t in my head. 

It was humming through my feet, through the sidewalk, through the street, through the wires overhead, through the smooth concrete walls around me. 

I didn’t understand until it took its first step right over my head, slamming down through the street like it was damp paper. 

CAN

YOU

SEE

ME?

***

Miraculously, the pants pocket I kept my flask in was still there.  I’d lost my wallet, but right now I needed this more anyways.  The world was already drunk and I had to catch up fast. 

My legs weren’t working again yet.  I dangled them over the craterous edge of one of the footprints and sat there in the middle of the road as I sipped. 

It was out of sight by now.  Not quite out of hearing, and definitely not out of mind.  I could hear the faint rising sound of a lot of voices turning into one voice that was starting to panic. 

There was definitely an opportunity here, I figured.  A lot of running folks.  A lot of abandoned things.  A lot of stuff being thrown aside that nobody would ever expect to see again, and hey, if they wanted that, I could help them with it.  The right place and the right angle. 

But I wasn’t going anywhere until I finished this. 

The Battle of Julaho is infamous for a reason, and famous for still more. 

It is famous for its unprecedented nature: two fully modern navies at the height of their power colliding while in use of cutting-edge and untested military technology, every move and countermove spontaneous and fresh.  It is famous for the sheer brilliance on display: despite being surrounded by unknowns, both admirals acted with astonishing speed and grace in adapting to their enemy’s capabilities.

It is infamous for its casualty count.  If only one side or the other had displayed less technical skill or aptitude for destruction, a great deal of lives could have been saved.  Incompetence would, perhaps, have been a humane thing that day. 

***

“ENEMY CONTACT.”

Shorri sat bolt upright in defiance of eight months of learned habit and six months of training, slamming her forehead directly into the unyielding and immovable object that was a bulkhead.  She saw six stars and seven seagulls and one giant swear, which she immediately let out of her mouth. 

“Language!” called Munzu from below her, already up and at them and halfway out the door, and for a moment Shorri wondered if she could get away with reporting that as deliberate sloth in the line of duty but it was too evil and too late besides and she was too busy running to think of much else. 

Where the FUCK had they come from?

***

The engagement of the two armadas off the Julaho Hailbanks of the qkkrA glacial rift was not the first step in the battle; rather, it was the beginning of the end.  Days of careful cat-and-mouse planning, stalking, and silence had concluded in this: the moment where each admiral could no longer avoid enemy contact nor improve their own positioning.  There was no shock to be had: only grim anticipation. 

***

Where the FUCK had they come from?  One minute jzzA had been asleep at her post, gently nodding alongside her anti-flycraft gun, then she’d been nearly eyeball-to-eyeball with an enemy captain taking the air atop her ship’s carapace, mouth as wide open and foolish as her own. 

If she’d been a little quicker on the trigger this engagement might have started very favourably.  But the hatchway was right there and the other woman was a bit quicker on the uptake than she was and the opportunity slid away to the land of regrets, daydreams, and other such ephemeral and timewasting nonsense. 

So instead jzzA slammed her palm on the local alert siren while screaming her head off, and soon she had plenty of company with the same opinions that she did.  Then she held down the trigger on her gun until she remembered to take the safety off.

***

The Quyalmarian armada that day was the Third Exploratory Fleet under the command of Admiral Ulcafuge, destined to blockade and strangle qkkrA’s crevasse-port.  It consisted of three Catastrophe-class dreadtertles, a flank guard of seven Snarler slipserpents, and the admiral’s flagshark: the Insinuation. 

Against them was the freshly-formed kkrrU Home Guard, whose last ship had been carved free only six days prior.  Fourteen clasheR bergie bits and four grindeR growlers; commanded by Admiral crrA atop the englaciator tindeR.

The opening volleys were exploratory, calculated affairs, designed to probe the strengths and weaknesses of the unknown.  Each shot was placed with scientific precision. 

***

“ALL HANDS FIRE” came roaring out of Xerxes’s synthesized meganerves, passed directly through Shorri’s skull, reverberated against the polished oriachulum bracing of the dreadtertle’s bones, and echoed back again twice as loudly. 

“Huh?” she said. 

Munzu kicked her. 
“Oh!” Shorri said, and somewhere in the middle of that she realized she was holding down the trigger on their main cannon, which was making angry metallic noises as it overheated on an empty chamber.  “FUCK!” 

“LANGUAGE,” screamed Munzu into her ear. 

“SHUT UP.”

***

Advantage so often goes not to the side with the newest technology – in fact, more often than not it’s turned against them.  Teething problems can prove fatal when presented with as tough a nut to crack as a determined foe.  Yet the firing solutions of the Home Guard, barely-tested as they were, theoretical as they had been until scant months ago, performed flawlessly under pressure.  For once, the laboratory conditions had foreseen the battlefield’s demands almost exactly.

***

jzzA was not religious or sacrilegious in any particular measure – the product of a friendly household – but she swore to and against any ghost that was listening that if she lived through this she would personally hand them the pulsing kidneys of the profoundly stupid fatherfucker that had designed her anti-flycraft gun.  The idiotic thing was incapable of aiming at any point lower than the fimbulice railing it was mounted to, and when it was mounted on the hull of a vessel of tindeR’s stature… well. 

WELL. 

If it wasn’t sitting atop the highest point of the enemy’s hulls, she wasn’t hitting it.  Their flags were in ribbons now under the hail of her fire.  What a wondrous job she was doing. 

***

By the conclusion of the battle’s first hour, both armadas had fully grasped the other’s strength – the impassive brittle barricades offered by the fimbulice-forged surfaces of the Home Guard; the nigh-instantaneous maneuverability offered by the intravenous ichor booster-shots mounted against the main veins of the Third Exploratory Fleet’s livevessels.  In mere minutes gut and raw intellect had comprehended not only the form of the enemy but their innovations, formed a counter-stratagem, and passed it down the chain of command.  The engagement had ceased to surprise: now it was simply a matter of innovative, destructive mathematics. 

***

“IS THAT THEM?” asked Shorri.

“FUCK IF I KNOW,” said Munzu, probably.  Shorri’s ability to read lips was as badly battered by the main cannon as her hearing had been; all those vibrations turned everything into a badly-shot film. 

Not as badly-shot as they were.  Fuck, she wished she knew if they were even aiming at the enemy.  It could just be an iceberg.  She hoped it was the enemy; this would be the most embarrassing way to get court-martialed ever.  ‘Your Justice, I was sincere in my belief that the chunk of meandering ice was in fact an actively-firing kkrrU ship of war; I spent over an hour attempting to destroy it based upon this very reasonable judgement, and I defy anyone else to claim they would have done differently.’  If she were lucky her execution could make it into the history books. 

“FIRE,” she said anyways.  She’d always wanted to be famous, might as well be for this as for anything else. 

***

If an act of mass death can be called a masterstroke, the firing trajectory plotted by the fourth gun deck crew of the dreadtertle Xerxes was surely one.  The blood-heated missile struck the invincible sides of the tindeR at an angle so perfect that it avoided the fate of all its sisters and failed to shatter.  Instead, it slid along the main hull, careened through the reinforced battledoors of the bridge, and had shed just enough of its momentum that when it reached the far wall of the command hub it shattered rather than penetrating. 

The resulting shrapnel led to the instantaneous death or mortal wounding of all staff present.  But Admiral crrA, despite being perforated by boiling metal, was cool as her vessel itself.  As the ship’s cryonic maintenance system began to crack itself apart around her, forcing the dissolution of the fimbulice core that held the beleaguered tindeR together, she offered up her final, crucial orders. 

One can only imagine the heights to which her career would have ascended should she have survived the battle; as it was, it remains her singular and shining achievement.  Many would have killed for such. 

***

jzzA wasn’t sure where she was meant to be anymore since her anti-flycraft gun had melted to the rails, but she was sure where she WASN’T meant to be and on a deck that was awash in blood and steam wasn’t it.  She was just trying to find new orders, that’s right.  A radio or something.  An officer!  The bridge had both of those, and it was heavily armoured and that was a nice coincidence. 

As she stumbled inside, she realized that she probably should’ve unlocked the door.  Which hadn’t been shut, come to think of it.  Or there at all.  And oh, oh, oh that was a lot of blood and bits and she was throwing up frantically, bracing herself on the mutilated remains of what had probably been at one point the admiral’s command desk.  The air was too thick here; it was filled with dripping and squishing and harsh static and oh ghosts.

“Ghosts,” she wheezed.  “Ghosts ghosts ghosts.  Fire and fuck and low hells take them.”

Then she resumed vomiting. 

***

A lesser commander would never have thought to deploy the prototype ‘ghost’ flash-freeze tactical cryonic system at such a dangerous moment.  The technology was overbuilt beyond even tindeR’s specifications; requiring a deft touch to manage without risking severe damage even on a tranquil sea with all hands working carefully.  Admiral crrA’s final command risked causing irreversible damage to the close-packed formation of the Home Guard, if it worked at all – much of the englaciator’s core systems team was already dead, killed by the fire of the Xerxes. 

Nevertheless, impossible though it was, it was done. 

***

It took a moment for Shorri to understand what had happened, and why Xerxes had halted so abruptly that she’d only remained upright by her death-grip on her fire controls.  The answer came out of the corner of her vision. 

When she’d last pulled the trigger, the Insinuation had been breaching towards an enemy growler over the shattered remnants of its sister-ship; the flagshark’s jaws wide and its dental batteries jerking forwards to open fire. 

As the smoke cleared, she saw that it was still mid-breach.  And was going to remain as such indefinitely. 

All around them, around Xerxes, around the entirety of the Third Exploratory Fleet, the surface of the sea – down to every wave and ripple – had been flashed into unyielding fimbulice. 

“Fuck,” said Shorri, in a voice she was astonished she could hear in the sudden silence before the hailshot struck the cannon battery next to them. 

***

Even in that moment, the battle could have swung either way.  Superweapons or no; casualties or no; everything still hinged on one irreplaceable thing: the nerves and will of the sailors of both armadas.  They fought in the face of death and disfigurement with no thought to their own lives, only for the greater good of their nations and loved ones.  No quarter was asked for until there was no other option, and although the toll from such bravery was terrible, no life spent so valiantly can be considered truly wasted. 

***

jzzA realized she was still alive, and was appalled despite herself. 

Surely the shrapnel of the bridge had impaled her. 

Surely the disintegration of the tindeR’s solidity under her feet had trapped her. 

Surely the violent internal explosion that had turned the ocean solid had vaporized her. 

Surely the force that had launched the dismembered corpse of the bridge into the air and into the side of a half-burning dreadtertle had crushed her. 

But there jzzA was.  All four limbs.  Probably her head, too.  Standing even, swaying, lurching, tripping and rolling and flailing her way upright until she was on the deck of a strange ship facing strange faces surrounded by flaming wreckage and warm air and her pistol was in her hands. 

She dropped it. 

“I surrender completely,” she said. 

***

The victory was a credit to both sides, but the weight of it fell to the kkrrU Home Guard.  They had lost an expensive experimental weapon, an englaciator-class flagship, and one of the bravest and most cunning minds to ever travel the waves, but they had won the battle and captured or annihilated the entirety of the Quyalmarian Third Exploratory Fleet.  Though not a single soul survived the death of the tindeR, let it never be said that a single one of them will be forgotten: by their nation, by their enemies, by history. 

***

“Who won?” asked jzzA.   The towel was too small, which she supposed matched the people.  Then she saw Shorri pull one over herself shivering and realized no they were just very sad and inadequate towels.  It was strangely disappointing to see your enemy so shoddy. 

“Right now?” asked Munzu.  “I think you did.”

“I mean the battle.”
“Oh, the enemy.  I think.  We’re surrendering shortly.”

“Fuck.  I’m dead meat.”
“What?  Why?”
“Do you know what the penalty for surrendering in the midst of an ongoing battle is in the navy?” asked jzzA. 

“No,” said Munzu. 

“Imagine yours then double it.”
“Oh,” said Munzu. 

“Ouch,” added Shorri, who was now mostly dry and offering her sad, inadequate, now-damp towel to jzzA. 

“I already have one, thank you.”
“It takes two to get anything done.  Trust me.”
She did. 

“So,” she said at long last, once the idea had finally grown large enough to escape her skull, “what will you do with me?”
“Why would we do anything with you?” asked Munzu.  “You’re our good pal, the third and final survivor from all of gun deck four.”

“Who’s going to ask otherwise?” added Shorri.  “Some dip from the bridge?  They don’t exactly know our faces.”

“And it’s not like they’re going to be in position to order anything, soon as this is all over.”

This all made considerable sense. 

“Maybe I could try being jzAz,” she mused.  “I’ve always wondered how that’d feel.”
The look Munzu and Shorri exchanged was universal. 

“No?”
“Try ‘Jasz,’” Munzu said. 

“Please,” Shorri said. 

“For the love of god please.”
“I’m beginning to regret surrendering.  I think winners don’t have to deal with this sort of thing.”
“You knew what you were getting into when you signed on, sailor,” said Shorri.  “Welcome to the navy.”