Kit slept with his mask on.
Leonie had shifted him from the table to the bench beneath the birthday flags. He had helped, which Mara found almost worse than the injury. She had expected a limp, a hand pressed over the wound, the familiar carefulness of somebody waiting for pain. He had stood, looked down at his legs and said, That's wrong. Then he had walked the three steps to the bench.
Now a blanket covered him. Under its edge the carrier lines entered the sleeve at his side. His mask valve did not move. Mara watched for it until Leonie put a cup into her hand.
"You can look away," she said.
"I'm all right."
"I didn't ask."
The cup held water, with a flexible straw suitable for Mara's feeding port. She drank half before she realized how dry she had been. Leonie took the cup back without comment and refilled it.
Jonah sat on the floor beside Kit, repairing a broken connector on an old tablet. The work lamp threw his shadow up the wall. One thumb kept slipping off the tiny tool; he would mutter, adjust his grip, start again. He had already refused two offers to do it for him.
"Mara," he said. "Could you give me a hand?"
She crouched.
"Not that. With a message. Leonie says your link's good. Ours lets things through when it feels like it. I've sent this three times. I don't know if any of them went."
"To who?"
"My sister. We haven't—well. You don't need all that. I want her to see me."
He opened a video. Jonah, sitting at the same table, trying to arrange his shirt over the neck fitting. In the recording he began, Hello, and stopped. Began again. Hi. I thought I should let you know—
He closed it.
"It's terrible. Can you take another one?"
"What do you want to say?"
"I had it all prepared. It sounded like I was selling her something."
Mara took his tablet. The repaired connector held. Jonah wiped his palms on his pants and tried to sit upright against the bench. Leonie, watching from the sink, moved toward him with a cushion. He shook his head. She stopped.
Mara framed him from the shoulders up.
"Ready?"
"No. Do it."
She touched the record control.
He looked straight at the lens. "I am alive. That's the first thing. They're saying things about the station and I don't know what you hear. So. I'm alive. I'm not in the hospital. I'm sitting in the room where we eat."
He glanced toward Leonie. Then back.
"I was thinking about the boat. That terrible little boat Dad bought. I think you were right about the drain plug. I know I told everybody it was your fault. It wasn't. Anyway, that's not why I'm calling."
He rubbed the heel of his hand against his eye.
"I'd like to talk to you. If you'd like that. Mara's going to send this. She's very reliable."
Mara stopped the recording.
"Don't put that in," she said.
"Why?"
"Pressure on the messenger."
He smiled. "Send it before I change my mind."
She did, through the capsule's newly connected wired link. Hester acknowledged the file with an irritated click and then reported it sent to Sal for forwarding. Mara handed the tablet back. Jonah looked at the little confirmation as though it had physical weight.
"Thanks," he said.
He went back to his connector. He could not improve the repair and evidently needed to keep trying.
Leonie joined Mara by the passage.
"Your father liked him," she said quietly.
"My father liked anybody who'd smuggle him a beer."
"Jonah only did that once."
"He made it count."
Leonie smiled. A real smile, tired at the edges. "Your dad told me you'd bought him pajamas with anchors on them. He said if he'd known he was meant to dress for the occasion he'd have asked for sharks."
Mara leaned against the bulkhead. She had forgotten the pajamas. June had picked them because the anchors looked like little grumpy faces. Her father had worn the pants over his own shorts, refusing the top. They had fought about that before there had been anything important left to fight about.
"I should have stayed that afternoon," she said.
Leonie's smile faded. "You came back."
"After he'd stopped talking."
"He knew."
Mara shook her head. Leonie waited.
"Everybody says that. I don't know how he could have known."
"Because I told him. Over and over. I thought he was sick of hearing it."
The pump purred behind them. Mara swallowed. On the bench Kit shifted in his sleep, blanket pulling across the clear fitting. Jonah reached up and moved the blanket back without looking away from his work.
"Thank you," Mara said.
Leonie touched the sleeve of her coveralls. "Come and look at the part you do understand."
They left Kit with Jonah and Hester's monitor. In the Bore Room Nessa had secured the fallen assembly with straps and the short ram. Benji was cleaning blood from the steps. He stopped when Mara came in, then returned to the work. She stepped carefully around his bucket.
The room was warmer than the Living Drum. Equipment crowded the walls. At its center a tall steel casing rose from floor to ceiling, studded with fasteners, its lower half scarred by the original event. The paired carrier lines entered a smaller clear-fronted unit on the dry side. Behind its inspection glass Mara saw pale tissue folded around a metal lattice.
Leonie showed her the pressure marks: exterior system, the boundary, low-pressure patient circuit. Mara could understand the separation even while the exchange itself remained impossible. Nothing here was an open pipe from the sea into someone's veins.
"The outside chemistry loads this carrier with energy," Leonie said. "Changed tissue spends it, and the return takes it back to be loaded again. That's the model I can make fit the tests."
"And outside?" Mara asked.
Nessa switched the camera.
The exterior cradle stood beside the old bore, a pressure-retaining steel framework around a thick folded mass. Water moved through screened channels in its lower part. Dark seepage rose from the fissure beneath it, met clearer water above. Where the two met, the tissue undulated in slow overlapping sheets.
Mara had thought the patch at the station seam was large. This was a field.
At the edge of the lights it extended beyond the cradle, ridges rising out of silt, fine structures opening toward the moving water. Some parts were almost transparent. Others shone with a dull inner color like rust seen through amber. There was no single front to it, no head, no center that told her which way to meet it.
"That's what the circuit exchanges with," Leonie said.
"Does it need that water?"
"The flow across the fissure, yes. We tried closing an intake. Output fell."
Nessa brought up another view before Mara could ask more. "The rail."
It ran from the service support along the seabed to Refuge Bell. A small dry tram waited in a docking bay beside the Bore Room. Its round door had been covered with a protective cap. Beside it the service bundle lay in large orderly loops: supply and return, protected together, enough to follow the full route without being joined in open water.
"Unused?" Mara asked.
"The refuge hull's commissioned. Tram's tested. We haven't occupied it."
"Why not?"
Nessa looked at Leonie. "The main lift drive's down. We'd have to take the cradle too."
Leonie said, "We thought you should see every option."
Mara studied the rail's first support. The bearing she had seen on the screen sat beneath the station-side lift, allowing a limited angle of movement. A control cable ran to the service pod through an exterior junction box. Its hydraulic return line lay in a steel guard beside it.
"Can I see local control?"
Nessa opened the crawl hatch. The tube beyond was just wide enough for a person on hands and knees. Mara switched to her short working bottle, clipped the feed hose safely at the entrance, and crawled in.
The pod felt like a vehicle waiting for someone to turn a key. One seat. Close-range hydraulic levers behind a protective bar. A window looking directly onto the bearing. Mechanical release handles marked with arrows worn shiny by testing. At her shoulder a capped carrier socket with green and red bands had a small primed loop behind its transparent cover.
"Emergency medical branch," Leonie said from the crawl entrance. "Nessa fitted the line after the failure. She needed to work here."
"You brought the circuit all the way in?"
"Nessa couldn't reach the controls on a short reservoir. I helped prime it."
Mara looked through the window. With the frame this close she could see the station jaw and refuge-side support separately. She moved the control bar out of the way without touching a lever. The layout was sensible. The pod had its own pressure doors and an independent mechanical separation; heavy work from a small recoverable vessel, not an open booth on the seabed.
"Handling lugs?"
Nessa called up their location on Mara's tablet. "Crawler coupling at the top. We've recovered it on the test rig. It mates to the refuge service collar too. Same family of fittings."
Mara nodded. She checked the manual stroke indicator, pictured the hydraulic head taking load, then the release. Work she could understand. For the first time since entering the station she felt her thoughts arrange themselves into something useful.
When she crawled back out, Leonie caught her wrist before she reconnected the capsule feed.
"Thank you for coming," she said.
"We haven't done anything yet."
"You have."
Mara thought of Kit lying under the blanket and did not answer.
At the hatch Benji had finished cleaning the blood. The yellow floor was brighter where he had scrubbed it. The difference would show for days.