June had moved the refrigerator again.
On Mara's phone the kitchen appeared sideways, then righted itself. Her daughter stood barefoot on a chair, holding a measuring tape against the wall. The refrigerator waited in the middle of the floor with its cord trailing behind it. A magnet shaped like a lemon had fallen off and lay under the chair.
"You said the plug reached," June said.
"I said measure it."
"I did."
"With what?"
June showed her the tape.
"Before you moved it."
The tender rolled gently under Mara's boots. She was wedged beside a deck locker, out of the wind, with a cup of coffee trapped between her knees. Behind June, late-afternoon sun caught a glass of water on the counter. Mara could almost smell the hot dust of the little apartment. They had carried that refrigerator upstairs together in July. The stairwell paint was still on her good work pants.
"It looks better there," June said.
"You can't open the oven."
June looked down. Her mouth opened, then closed. She turned the phone away, which did not prevent Mara from hearing what she said.
"Language," Mara said.
"You taught me that one."
She had. She remembered precisely where, too: a parking lot in Sacramento, a jack that had collapsed, June eleven and intensely interested in the part of the lesson that had nothing to do with changing a tire.
"Take everything out first," Mara said. "It'll move easier."
"There are three eggs and some mustard in it. I don't need a salvage assessment."
Mara put the coffee down.
The back of June's head filled the screen. She had cut her hair herself again, badly at the nape, and was wearing a shirt Mara had bought her when she was fourteen. The shirt said MUSIC IS ORGANIZED NOISE. June had considered it unforgivable until she needed something to sleep in.
"I have my leave dates," Mara said. "Starting the twelfth. Twenty-one days."
June kept studying the refrigerator.
"I put them through. Sal signed."
"Okay."
"The recital's on the eighteenth. I'm there."
"It's not a recital."
"You called it a recital."
"Because you know what that is. It's a paid booking. People get drinks. If you talk between songs, nobody throws you out."
"That'll be a relief."
June made a small sound which might have been a laugh. She climbed down from the chair and picked up the lemon magnet. Beyond her window someone was practicing a trumpet, three uncertain notes, over and over. Mara watched her daughter's hand close around the magnet. A nick in the yellow paint showed silver underneath.
"What are you playing?"
"I've sent you the set list twice."
"I'm asking you."
"Some of mine. Some things I know you won't like."
"I like everything you play."
"That's actually more annoying."
Mara smiled. June did not, but her face had softened. Then the tender's deck speaker called Mara's name, and the softness went.
"I'll call you after," Mara said.
"After what?"
"The briefing."
"Are you going down?"
"We haven't decided."
"You always say that before you go down."
Mara watched the Atlantic-blue dot of her own connection flicker in the corner of the screen. It was the Pacific underneath her, but June had once asked why an app used a little blue world that did not bother putting their side of it in view. She could remember that remark and could not remember the title of her daughter's first song.
"June. I do want to come."
"Then come," June said.
Neither spoke for a moment. The trumpet tried its three notes again.
"Don't drag the cord under the wheels," Mara said.
"Bye, Mom."
The kitchen disappeared.
Mara held the black screen until cold coffee wet the knee of her coveralls. Then she got up, swore with less inventiveness than she had taught June, and went inside.
The operations room smelled of warm electronics and the orange Hester Lin had peeled over the chart table. Hester was separating white threads from a segment with the patience she denied human beings. Kit Roan stood behind her eating the discarded segments. At the far screen Sal Okafor had opened an image of the seabed station.
Mara knew the image. It was the picture printed on the project's public material: three bright drums descending a shelf of black rock, lit windows, a yellow vehicle at the docking collar. An artist had put fish outside the windows. Fish were an inexpensive way of giving a three-thousand-meter habitat the friendliness of an aquarium.
Beside it Sal displayed the current view.
Only the top drum had lights.
"How current?" Mara asked.
"Forty-seven minutes. Free camera pass from their work crawler."
The picture moved. A pale shape crossed a small window below the dock. Stopped. Crossed back.
"That's a person," Kit said.
Nobody answered him.
Sal enlarged a graph. Mara had seen bad oxygen traces before. They usually made a slope, followed by a terrible amount of empty space.
"Nine days?"
"Nine days," Sal said. "Three independent sensors. Their physician says the sensors are correct."
Mara leaned closer. The trace rode the bottom of the graph. Total cabin pressure remained ordinary. Nitrogen, some carbon dioxide, the residual gases of a room. No useful oxygen.
"An isolated compartment?" she asked.
"One. Single-person emergency shelter. We know at least one person is in it. Five at the station total. No diving party away, no missing contractors. Five."
The pale shape in the window stopped again. Mara could make out an elbow. A person's hand pressed flat against the glass.
"Show her the message," Hester said.
Sal brought it up beneath the image.
WHATEVER WE TELL YOU, LEAVE US.
Six words, no punctuation in the original. Sent through an emergency acoustic packet two hours earlier, under Imani Bell's identifier.
"And then?" Mara asked.
"Nothing from Imani. Dr. Vale says she's exhausted and frightened."
Mara looked at him.
"Leonie Vale?"
"She asked for you."
Hester put down her orange. Kit's hand paused over the peel.
Eight years ago Leonie had sat on Mara's father's bed and trimmed the sharp edge of his thumbnail because he kept catching it on the sheet. The room had been hot. Her father had wanted the window open and then shut and then open. Mara had wanted to do something large enough to make a difference. Leonie had asked her to get a nail clipper.
She had not thought of that thumbnail in years.
"Is she hurt?"
"She says they're all alive. She's asking for recovery. She specified the powered service rig, the hydraulic head, and an operator who can work a load while it's moving."
"That's our rig."
"Yes."
Mara put both hands on the table. Outside the operations room, a loose latch tapped against a cabinet with each slow roll. Nobody had fixed it because this was a vessel that went out to fix other things.
Hester pulled a seat toward her and sat down backward. "My capsule can take eight. That includes us. I can mate to their collar if the frame hasn't shifted past tolerance. I don't have to use their air. I don't have to use their batteries. But if those people have something transferable, I've got one cabin."
"We stay masked on entry," Mara said. "No physical contact until Kit has a look. Sample isolation. Capsule stays closed behind a clean boundary."
"And if they refuse?" Kit asked.
She looked at the hand in the window.
"We find out what they're refusing."
Kit had a photograph propped against his mug. It showed an orange sofa, a crooked floor lamp and two cardboard boxes. He caught her looking.
"Don't start."
"It could be the light."
"It's a good sofa."
"A whole family could sleep under it in an emergency," Hester said.
"You're both banned from my apartment."
Sal turned the volume up. Through static a woman's voice said Mara's name.
The recording broke, resumed. "Please send the cradle attachment, not only patient recovery. The dock is holding. I can help you with the rest. Mara, if that's you listening, I need you here."
Leonie had always had a slight rasp in her voice, a place it caught when she was tired. Mara heard it now and felt an unreasonable relief. A familiar voice in an impossible room.
Sal stopped the recording.
"I'm not sending you because you know her," he said. "You're the best load handler I've got within two days. If there's another person you'd rather have beside Hester, say so."
Kit lowered the photograph flat on the table.
"I'm going," he said. "Before anyone volunteers me for something stupid and generous."
"You understand what we're taking seriously here," Sal said to Mara.
"The warning. The readings. The people moving."
"All three."
He was waiting for her to give him a comforting version, the sort she had occasionally given him as a younger woman and regretted before she finished the sentence. She studied the station. The bottom drum lay at a slight angle to the others. Its foundation shoes had sunk on the downslope side. A connecting service frame still supported something heavy beyond the light.
"I want the new camera pass before we leave," she said. "And their actual load drawing. No promotional diagram. If the dock shifts, Hester aborts. Nobody votes on that."
"Accepted," Hester said.
"We go in to assess and recover people. We don't decide up here that they're already dead."
Sal nodded once. "I'll stay over you."
He closed the artist's picture.
In the change room Mara pulled on the thermal liner beneath her coveralls, checked the wrist seals, checked them again when Kit knocked her elbow reaching for his bag. His hair was wet. He had shaved a strip beneath his jaw and missed another beside his ear.
"Did you call anybody?" he asked.
"My daughter."
"I texted my landlord."
"Emergency contact?"
"Told him the bathroom fan's still broken. Figure if I don't come back he can carry that around."
Mara tightened a boot.
Kit sat down beside her. For a while they listened to Hester arguing with the launch crew beyond the door. Hester did not consider the phrase good enough an engineering description.
"You know the doctor well?" Kit asked.
"She helped with my dad. At the end."
"Good?"
"Very."
He nodded. She could see that he was about to ask something else and had decided not to.
Mara opened June's messages. There was the set list. There were two recordings she had downloaded without playing. She selected the first. A piano sounded softly through the phone's speaker. Then June's voice, talking to someone in the room, saying, No, leave that mistake. I like that one.
A winch started above them. The deck shivered.
Mara downloaded both recordings again to make sure they were stored on the phone, then put it inside the dry inner pocket above her heart.
On deck, daylight had gone thin and silver. The capsule hung in its launch frame with its curved hull wet from the test dunk. Hester was already inside. Kit climbed after her, bending awkwardly under the circular hatch. Mara laid one hand on the hull. It was cold enough to sting her palm.
Sal came across the deck.
"Venn."
She turned.
He handed her a new cup of coffee with a fitted lid. Nothing else.
She took a long swallow before she climbed in. It was too hot, bitter, ordinary. She finished half of it while Hester checked her harness, and left the rest in a holder by the hatch.