The water was now just below his chest.
“Can all of you swim?” Omicron shouted over the gush of the water.
The pistol was clasped between Ayla’s knees and she was trying to warm herself by crossing her arms and rubbing. Cadie’s arms were also crossed, but it was Cam who rubbed between her elbows and shoulders. The rifle was on his back with the strap across his chest.
“No,” Cam said. “The closest we’ve ever come to swimming is hydromills.”
“Get up the ladder,” Omicron commanded. “Quickly.”
Cam pushed Cadie ahead of him and she began to climb.
The commander had managed to get to his feet and was wading his way back to the rungs. “What about me?” he asked. “I can’t swim with my arm like this.”
Omicron moved toward the man, lifted his arm above the surface, and drove the steel handle down into the commander’s skull. The man instantly dropped beneath the water and did not resurface.
Ayla stared at the huge Neo.
“He would have pulled them off and drowned them,” Omicron said. The water was up to Ayla’s chin. “What about you? Can you swim?”
“I’ll be fine,” Ayla said. Her lips were blue and she was shivering. She felt the pistol slip away from between her knees. “You find us a way out.”
“I’m going to see if I can pry that grate up,” Omicron said.
“Go,” Ayla said. “Hurry.”
Omicron nodded, took a deep breath, and disappeared beneath the surface.
Ayla lifted herself up on her toes and raised her chin, and then finally began treading water. Cadie and Cam were both at the top of the ladder, Cam standing on the rung below Cadie, wrapping himself around her as though he could protect her from what was coming up from below. The commander’s body had surfaced and was bobbing against the wall.
Omicron resurfaced and gasped. Ayla could see that he still had the steel handle in his hand.
“Anything?” she shouted at him.
He shook his head. He looked around the room again, and Ayla knew that meant he was looking for other options, which they both already knew weren’t there. It suddenly become eerily quiet as the water level reached the mouth of the pipe and then continued to rise beyond it. The ceiling felt very low now and Ayla realized that her head was even with Cam’s feet.
Omicron began hyperventilating in preparation for another dive. He was trying to see down into the water below him.
“Hey,” Ayla said in the sudden stillness. Omicron looked up. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” Omicron said.
“No,” Ayla said. “I mean for everything. I mean just in case.”
Omicron watched her for a moment, then nodded. “You’re welcome,” he said, then filled his huge lungs to capacity and was gone.
He came up one more time and Ayla begged him not to go back down. The tops of their heads were nearly against the ceiling and the tiny space was now filled with Ayla’s sobs. Cam and Cadie had each other—Cadie’s eyes closed, Cam whispering something to her—and Ayla didn’t want to be alone. She clung to Omicron and raised her head, gasping with desperation at the remaining pocket air.
“Please,” she pleaded. “Please stay with me.”
“I have to try,” Omicron said. “Just one more time.”
“I don’t want to be alone,” Ayla said.
Omicron looked around the sliver of horizontal space remaining—his eyes stopping on Cam and Cadie in the corner, and then on the commander’s body bobbing against the wall in his own separate pool of blood—and then he looked back at Ayla.
“You’re not alone,” he said. There was a riveted joint at the top of the pipe and he reached up and grasped it with one hand and held Ayla against him with the other. They had to bend their necks to keep their mouths above the water, and Ayla choked and sputtered.
“Take me down,” she pleaded. “Please. I can’t do it myself.”
Shadows leapt around them as light filtered up through the dark water. Cam’s whispered prayers could be heard between Ayla’s desperate sobs.
“You will see him again very soon,” Omicron told Ayla. “And then you will never be alone again.”
He held her tightly against his chest and then let go of the pipe.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
NEUTRAL BUOYANCY
THE ONLY SOUND AYLA COULD hear beneath the frigid water was Omicron’s powerful heart. His arms were around her and her cheek was pressed against his chest. It occurred to her that, in the end, their lives were inextricably linked after all, but it was not through fear, or force, or through a high-frequency radio signal calibrated to his autonomic implant. Ayla and Omicron were connected for no reason other than that they had chosen to be.
They neither sank nor rose, but floated together in perfect neutral buoyancy—their combined density roughly equal to that of the fluid around them. Ayla was beginning to arrive at a form of internal neutral buoyancy: a feeling of peace that was consuming the panic and starting to open up space for acceptance. She was glad that Omicron’s heart would continue beating long after hers had stopped—that the last thing she would ever know was a closeness to another human being.
Ayla was so much at peace, in fact, that some part of her was annoyed when the stillness was shattered by a rapidly escalating whine. She felt herself being tugged around and down, and when she opened her eyes, she saw a vortex forming beneath them and reaching up toward their feet. The direction of the tug suddenly and violently reversed as Omicron began beating at the water with one arm while the other kept Ayla pinned to his torso. Ayla’s panic instantly returned as she again began experiencing the contention between her diaphragm’s instinct to suck in as much air as her lungs could hold, and her trachea’s determination to prevent the passage of fluid. Horrible, guttural noises were coming from her throat when she heard Omicron gasp and then felt her own head suddenly above the surface. She gasped, as well, again and again, until her breathing became an insatiable pant. The pocket of air above them was filled with reverberating cacophony—male and female voices shouting things she couldn’t understand, and with the tumult of rough moving water. Ayla saw Omicron reach up for the riveted joint in the pipe above them but it was already too far away. He rolled onto his back and pulled her on top of himself in order to keep her face above the water, and she watched the chamber spin as they fell in sync with the vortex below them. The pipe above became the axis around which the rungs with Cam and Cadie at the top rotated. The descent was surprisingly rapid—more like a controlled fall—and it ended with a thump as Omicron’s body hit the grate.
Her bodyguard relaxed his arms and Ayla rolled off. Between breaths she heard feet tapping at rungs and she knew that Cam and Cadie were descending. She tried to stand but found that she was too dizzy, either from the hyperventilating or the spinning or both. When she looked around, she saw the commander’s pale body, both pistols, and the handle that Omicron had broken off the access hatch all caught in the drain.
Omicron helped her to feet and held her steady, and as her breathing slowed, the voices around her started making sense.
“I think so,” she heard Omicron say. “Just give her a minute.”
“They must have thought we were dead,” Cam said. He still had the rifle on his back.
“No,” Omicron said. “They would have waited to make sure.”
“Then what happened?”
Omicron took one of the pistols out of the drain and shook the excess water from it. “Let’s wait and see,” he said.
After inspecting the weapon, he turned it on its side and jerked back the slide. A round was ejected into the air, arced, and fell into his huge open palm. He worked it up between his fingers, squeezed, and crumpled the metal casing as easily as if it had been Mylar. Both the primer and the bullet fell through the grate at his feet and Omicron peered inside the ruined jacket, verifying that it was empty. Ayla had already picked up the other pistol, and when Omicron tossed his aside, sh
e passed him the live one.
They had already begun a fresh evaluation of the room when they heard the seal on the larger cargo door break. Omicron took one last look around, presumably hoping to find something that might serve as cover. Finding nothing, his left hand joined his right on the handle of the pistol, and he pointed it at the door.
“Get behind me,” he told Ayla.
Cam took Cadie’s arm and guided her gently behind him, then took the rifle off his back. He pointed it at the ceiling and checked one side of it, then the other—flipped a switch, then flipped it back. Omicron watched him try to figure the weapon out for a moment, then reached over and took it from him with one hand and passed him the pistol with the other.
“Here,” he told the boy. “Just point and shoot.”
Cam nodded.
“On my order,” Omicron added.
“Right.”
Ayla had never seen a door or a hatch that operated like this one. It floated directly toward them for a moment until it had fully cleared the opening behind it, then four recessed arms conveyed it in a shallow arc to the side. Behind it, Ayla saw an intense purple-white glow, and then another one beside it. She assumed they were black lights intended to activate their incarceration suits, but they were far brighter than the ones she’d seen before, and nobody’s suit reacted. It was darker outside the chamber than it was inside, and it took Ayla’s eyes a moment to adjust and reveal that both sources of illumination were coming from the same machine: some sort of massive bipedal tank probably at least three meters tall, both arms ablaze with jets of purple-white plasma erupting from heavy industrial torches. Beside it was a man holding the most exotic-looking rifle she’d ever seen. It was a combination of long sleek rails, a giant round magazine, and bristling electronics. Ayla was surprised to see that her party was not the one being targeted, but rather the three guards lying facedown on the floor just outside the door.
“Who are you?” Omicron called.
“Who the hell are you?” was the response from man beside the mech.
Omicron lowered his rifle, then reached over and took the pistol from Cam. He squatted and placed both weapons gently on the metal grate.
“It looks like we’re friends,” he told the man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHINA BASIN
WHEN CHARLIE REACHED OVER and grasped Luka’s hand, he pulled it away. He knew that she was anticipating what he was thinking, but he was trying as hard as he could not to think it. He had just witnessed almost exactly what Val must have gone though during the last moments of her life—heard the same desperate, stifled pleas and pounding, and sensed the same horror and loneliness that she must have felt. Luka knew that responding to Charlie was the right thing to do—that she was probably seeking comfort for the loss of her sister as much as she was offering it for the loss of his wife—but any form of acknowledgment meant a torrent of emotion for which he was not prepared.
Luka’s wife, Valencia Blanca-Talleyrand, had been one of only a few adopted children in the entire history of the San Francisco. After submitting over a dozen applications, Charlie’s parents were finally granted permission by the Procreation Committee to have a second child, only to discover they were unable to conceive again. Both parents made their living by taking whatever shifts they could get at the Mission Bay Water Treatment and Purification Facility, Muir Electrolysis Station, and the Presidio Air Filtration Base, and although they were never able to produce proof, they believed that one or both had been exposed to chemicals or radiation that affected their fertility. When the San Francisco began accepting child refugees to help run the assemblers, in exchange for dropping all official complaints and inquiries, the Talleyrands were given the rare opportunity to legally adopt a son or daughter of their choice.
Luka remembered Charlie’s parents bringing her to the orphanage in China Basin and visiting with the children. Sometimes they left with one for a few hours, then brought him or her back, usually clutching some kind of homemade doll or crude toy. Luka wondered if they would ever visit with him, or maybe even take him out for an afternoon to play at the old Miraloma Park, but they never did, and he still remembered wondering why. He tried to figure out what the differences were between him and the kids they did pick, and how he could be more like them. He wondered what it was about himself that he was not hiding well enough, or what he didn’t have that the other kids did, or what exactly they saw—or didn’t see—when they scanned the room and their eyes briefly touched on him, and then always kept going. But most of all, Luka wondered if the reasons the family didn’t want him were all the same reasons his parents had made the decision to give him up in the first place.
Eventually the couple began visiting with the same little girl repeatedly, and even keeping her overnight. Luka didn’t know Valencia, but he had spent enough time watching her that he knew every detail of her appearance. Her skin was the color of the syrup they were sometimes given to sweeten their soy porridge, and her eyes were the color of pure copper. Her lips were full and pink, and from the moment she arrived, she had always clung to some kind of dingy and threadbare purple stuffed animal that Luka couldn’t identify. Even when she came back from her visits with new stuffed animals made of socks and buttons and other scrap material, she abandoned them beneath her cot and never protested when they went missing. Finally the little girl went on her last overnight visit with the Talleyrand family, and although Luka waited every day for her to come back, she never did.
Charlie and Valencia were always close, but they didn’t always get along very well as children. And according to all the stories Luka had been told over the years, they weren’t particularly well-behaved children, either. Rather than competing for their parents’ attention, the two sisters seemed to prefer to compete for their disapproval, and Val almost always won. She’d been accepted aboard the San Francisco specifically for assembly technician training, but from the moment she saw the terraces and vertical farms in the center of the rig, she insisted that all she would ever be was a grower. After being dismissed from the foundry for excessive insubordination (or, according to the explanation section of the discharge form, “insufferable temper tantrums”) only two months after she started, she spent four years training at the Pacific Medical Center. But rather than becoming the doctor or even the nurse that her parents hoped, she was once again dismissed for insubordination. She subsequently spent the next five years working alongside her parents, helping to ensure that the San Francisco was never without clean air and water, then four years doing various jobs at the refinery before one of her many requests to the Labor Committee to be transferred to Yerba Buena Gardens was finally approved—probably more to mollify her than out of any real need to rebalance resources. According to Val, she was told by her supervisor on her first day of work that this was her final chance to make herself useful aboard the San Francisco above deck. The only place left for her to go was the one place nobody who had any options ever went: down below into the deep-sea mines.
But the ultimatum turned out to be moot. As Luka eventually learned for himself (very much the hard way, as he recalled), by far the easiest way to deal with Val was to simply give her what she wanted. Once she felt she’d been listened to and had her opinions (though some might say “demands”) sufficiently respected, she was usually not only extremely cooperative, but in the context of her career, also remarkably industrious. Val proved such a competent grower that after only sixteen months, she was promoted to a junior supervisory role, and then eventually up to foreman. From then on, she was continually turning down promotions that threatened to take her away from the hands-on physical labor that she loved and instead confine her to a desk where she would spend most of her time reducing friends and coworkers to resources; the miraculous harvests that they produced to caloric output; and the families whose lives they sustained to nothing more than quantifiable units of demand.
The better you did your job, Val used to say, the sooner someone tried to
take it all away from you.
Meanwhile, Val’s sister—then known as Charlene Abigail—did not have it in her to sustain long streaks of rebellion, and therefore got most of it out of the way all at once. She’d been an excellent student and teaching assistant who appeared singularly focused on dedicating her entire life to academics by first becoming a lead teacher, then eventually the administrator of Mission Dolores, and finally—if all went according to her parents’ plan—the chairwoman of the Education Committee. But all of that changed on her seventeenth birthday when the application she’d submitted without her parents’ or sister’s knowledge—the request to transfer down below into the deep-sea mines—was instantly approved. The next day, she cut and colored her hair, and traded her closetful of long synthetic dresses for heavy utility pants and one-piece engineering suits. A week later, on the first day of her new job, standing before her new colleagues and peers, Charlene Abigail Talleyrand introduced herself as Charlie.
While Val might have been willing to indulge her disposition toward oppositional and defiant behavior for longer periods of time, Charlie proved willing to take hers much further. However, like her sister, Charlie had finally found the one place aboard the San Francisco where she felt she truly belonged. Education and administration were safe and comfortable, but depth charges, nautilus-class excavators, atmospheric diving suits with self-contained rebreathers, and compression and decompression chambers that allowed miners to survive at depths as far down as it was possible for humans to possibly go were unfamiliar and exotic and challenging, and were the things that still reminded Charlie almost every single day of her life that she was alive.
Mr. and Mrs. Talleyrand’s dreams of at least one daughter ascending even a single socioeconomic rung were now hinged entirely on marriage, and were therefore further imperiled first by Charlie’s determination to date water rats exclusively, and then by Val’s fluke reacquaintance with an assembly technician named Luka. It happened while she was standing outside Yerba Buena one evening during shift change, waiting for a coworker she’d been on several dates with. Luka was maneuvering a calibration cube between loitering pedestrians when Val looked up and caught him watching her. She stopped him with a hand on his arm on his way past—the very first time, Luka clearly remembered, that they’d ever touched.
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