Benji had made rice.
He explained the rice while Mara worked the narrow feeding port on her mask. It had been in a sealed packet, heated on the low-power plate, and she did not have to eat it if she was worried. The water came from an unopened bottle. The spoon had been washed with treated water. He could show her the treatment record, although it was on the station network and the network kept forgetting the date.
"Benji," Leonie said. "Let her decide."
"I am. I'm giving her the information."
Mara looked at the bowl. A little ridge of steam rose from it. There was a piece of carrot in the rice and something green chopped very fine.
"How did you get a carrot down here?"
"The same way everybody else gets carrots."
"I mean now. Nine days."
"It wasn't nine days old when we arrived. It was three weeks old. Carrots are heroic."
Kit, seated at the far end of the table, looked up from his instrument. "I'd have put money on that being the last sentence I'd hear in this room."
Benji smiled. The joke had reached him a moment late, and Mara liked him for smiling anyway. She set the bowl down, unlatched the little port and pushed the spoon through. Warm rice, salt, an enormous, immediate human pleasure. Her throat tightened. She had not realized she was hungry.
Hester remained at the dock, one hand on the open capsule door, and ate a sealed bar. Mara could see her on the crew camera. Between the two of them lay a carefully guided air hose and a wired data lead, newly connected to the station's surviving surface path. Sal had received the first measurements and sent back a single request: video. Hester was assembling it from Kit's camera and the station feeds.
Mara did not know what Sal would do when he saw Jonah trying to put soy sauce on rice with hands that no longer shook.
"I used to have to ask her to do this," Jonah said, catching Mara's glance. "At the end. Before the end, I mean. My fingers went a bit useless."
"He insisted on that bottle," Leonie said. "The top was broken. We had other bottles."
"They didn't have the correct sauce."
"They had the same sauce."
He tipped a small brown stream into his bowl, stopped it cleanly, and held the bottle up in triumph. Leonie looked at his hand. For a moment her face lost every guarded thing Mara had seen in it.
"Show-off," she said.
Nessa did not sit. She stood at a wall screen, one hip against a cupboard, her bowl untouched beside her. The carrier lines at her waist slipped into a moving guide which gave her a short radius of freedom. When she went too far, the guide clicked, and she moved back with an angry little shrug.
"If we're eating, can we eat in the capsule?" she asked.
"After the assessment," Mara said.
"I've given you the load file."
"I need a patient assessment too."
"I am a patient. I want to leave."
Leonie put her spoon down. "Nobody is saying you can't."
Nessa looked at her. Something passed across her face, not surprise, not quite disbelief. She folded her arms.
Kit adjusted the instrument at Jonah's wrist. "How long have you had this fitting?"
"Since I acquired my new plumbing. Nine days."
"Pain around it?"
"Not now."
"Before?"
Jonah glanced at Leonie. She had picked up her spoon again and was moving a single piece of rice across the bowl with its edge.
"I was too busy to notice at first," he said.
Mara ate another mouthful. The mask's little port clicked shut between bites. Nobody else at the table needed that device. They sat in the stale, oxygenless gas as comfortably as if they had opened a window. But their dinner was slower than hers. Benji kept lifting his spoon, considering it, putting it down. Leonie drank water. Jonah ate with a determined appetite that looked like an old habit carried out for somebody else's benefit.
"Does it taste different?" Mara asked him.
"Yes."
"How?"
"Like somebody described rice to the wrong part of my head."
Benji made a miserable sound of recognition. "Exactly. Except not exactly. Salt works. Temperature works. This—" He took a bite and chewed. "This used to be the good part. The frying. I can tell it's there, but it doesn't arrive."
He swallowed and looked away from the bowl. Mara noticed that he had given her the portion with the most carrot.
"Can you skip meals?" Kit asked.
Leonie answered. "We still need water and material feed. The tissue doesn't build us from nothing. We found that out."
She drew her cardigan sleeve back. The skin of her forearm had sunk between the bones. Clear threads branched over the wasted muscle, taut as drawn stitches.
"How much?" Kit said.
"More when there's repair. Less appetite than we need. I make them eat."
"She makes herself last," Jonah said.
"I have eaten."
"You moved it around."
Nessa turned away from the wall screen. "Can you two save that for when we're up?"
Jonah lowered his eyes to his bowl. Leonie went very still.
Mara set her spoon down. She wanted to collect the bowls, stand them up, organize them into a line for the hatch.
"I need to see where this goes," she said, indicating Jonah's carrier line.
Kit put his instrument down. "So do I."
The physician nodded. "The Bore Room. After Imani."
"Now," Nessa said.
Mara turned toward her.
"The support record?" Nessa tapped the wall screen. "You'll want to look now. Then you can tell me if all this is worth the time."
Mara rose. Her feed hose caught on the bench end, and she had to reach down to free it. The little struggle put her face close to Jonah's neck. She could see fine droplets at his hairline, a pulse beneath a strip of membrane. Warmth came off him. A living man's warmth.
He shifted his chair to give her room.
"Sorry," he said. "I keep forgetting we all have tails."
At the screen Nessa showed her the lower foundation shoe. Before the event it had sat square against the seabed, the load passing down through a wide base. Now a dark space lay under half of it. A structural frame extended from the Bore Room past the damaged joint to the exterior rail.
"How much settlement since the event?" Mara asked.
"Twenty-eight millimeters at the shoe. Four here since this morning. Most of the dead weight's still on the foundation. The service support takes a share of the equipment load."
"And when the shoe moves?"
"It redistributes."
"Where?"
Nessa pointed at the frame. "There. I know."
"Have you unloaded it?"
"With what? The main lift drive lost power. The local hydraulic rig is stalled against the cradle, and our crawler can't develop the force."
"What's in the cradle?"
Nessa's eyes went to the paired lines on the wall.
"Our end of the thing."
Mara bent closer to the screen. The frame was still intact. A secondary bearing beneath it allowed the lift rail to move independently when the station settled, but only within its travel. The old position marks did not tell her whether it had already reached the stop.
"I need a close view of that bearing. No heavy move until we've got it."
"That's what I told her."
"Who?"
"Leonie."
Behind them a spoon struck the table. Jonah had knocked his off reaching for water. Leonie picked it up before he could bend, took it to the little sink and rinsed it. Jonah watched her do it. Nobody mentioned the noise.
Nessa pulled up the bearing camera. Its housing was clouded, its light reflecting off a veil of pale growth. Mara could make out the round end plate, a load pin, the dark vertical stripe that marked the station-side jaw.
"Can you wash that lens?" Mara asked.
"We have been doing it. It comes back."
On the screen the veil trembled. The movement traveled outward from the pin, faint and coordinated. Mara had the sudden sick impression that something had turned its head toward them.
Then the view shuddered, and the illusion broke. The camera was vibrating with the pump beside it.
"Leave that one running," she said.
Kit called her on the private channel. "I've got a problem with pulse measurement. Not just finding one. The blood's moving, but it isn't doing it the way my monitors expect. I need time."
"Take it."
"They're warm. They're awake. They can answer me. I don't have a reading that tells me what a safe patient looks like here."
She watched the veil around the bearing. "Start with what hurts. What they can do. Things changing."
"Already doing that."
"I know."
He turned the private channel off.
Nessa looked between them. "Are you saying there's a problem?"
Mara met her eyes. "We're trying to work out how to carry you safely."
"I'll sit on the floor. I'll fit wherever you want."
"Space isn't the problem."
"Then make the problem the thing you solve."
She left the screen and collected her bowl. In the little sink the rice slid out in a wet lump. Benji started to say something, stopped, stood to help her with the bowl. She would not give it to him. He moved back.
Mara returned to the table. Her own dinner had cooled. She ate it anyway, the last few bites tasted through the sealed port while Leonie quietly coaxed Jonah to finish his water. The kettle was empty. Benji refilled it from a marked container and wrote the amount on a pad beside the sink. His handwriting was rounded and painstaking. He underlined the total twice.
When Mara stood again, Leonie held out a small wrapped square.
"Ginger," she said. "For the mask nausea. You were swallowing too much at the door."
Mara took it. "You noticed that."
"I used to do retrievals too. A long time ago. I remember."
Their gloved and bare fingers almost touched.
"How's June?" Leonie asked.
"Nineteen. Playing music for actual money."
Leonie's eyes brightened. "Oh, Mara."
"Don't. I'm going to make a terrible fuss all by myself."
Leonie laughed, and this time Mara managed to laugh with her. Then the woman reached for an empty cup, and the transparent line beneath her wrist caught the light.
Mara tucked the ginger into her pocket. She could not eat it yet. The warmth of the rice had made her want to take the mask off, and she did not trust her hands near its clasps.