The bottle warned her politely.
A small vibration at her wrist. A light on the mask fitting. No change in the sound yet, no shortage her lungs could feel. Equipment had the mercy of giving notice before the body understood.
Mara looked at the capped branch beside her shoulder.
Pale gold still moved through the inspection section. On the refuge feed Jonah held the balance handle, Benji beside him, Leonie watching the branches.
"I'm here," Leonie said over the local link.
Mara did not answer immediately. She unclipped her wrist camera, rested it where the physician could see the branch and freed the clear cuff from its cover. It was a shorter version of the sleeve that had closed Kit's wound. No wound in her arm to receive it. A sealed contact unit waited inside, an ugly little piece of medical invention assembled during nine days by people who had run out of ordinary choices.
"There isn't another way?" she asked.
The question was not for information. She knew that. She asked it anyway.
Leonie's eyes moved toward someone beyond the camera. Nessa stood at the crawler controls. Kit was leaning against the wall. Jonah had not left the balance. Nobody spoke.
"Not in the time," Leonie said.
Mara nodded.
"Sal's package?"
Hester answered through the relay, already farther above. "Ready, but it's a descent. And your old dock's gone."
Ninety minutes from ready launch. Minutes in her bottle. A stable refuge collar for later supplies, a detached pod amid wreckage now. She did not need to ask again. She had wanted the outside world to be large enough to contain one more way.
She put her hand on the inner pocket of her coveralls. Her phone was there. The waterproof case had kept it safe from blood and dust, the ordinary kinds of water she had brought into the room herself. She could send a message. The local link would relay it to the refuge, then to Sal. June could hear her say something chosen in this last bit of time.
Her fingers stayed over the pocket.
She did not know what to say that would not ask June to comfort her. I love you was true. I'm sorry was true. Neither belonged as the last word if she was going to remain alive to say more.
She took out the phone and set it where she could see June's contact picture: her daughter laughing at a beach, hair blown across her mouth, one hand raised to tell Mara to stop taking photographs.
Then Mara rolled back her sleeve.
"Tell me the part I have to do," she said.
Leonie did. Not a speech about transformation. The direction of the cuff, the two branches, the little tab Mara would need to hold until the seal took. Mara checked each before touching it. The contact unit pressed cold against the inside of her forearm.
Her hand shook.
She pulled it away.
"Wait," she said.
"All right."
The bottle's vibration repeated. Her next breath came with a slight resistance at its end.
Mara stared at the skin of her arm. Freckles. A small white scar from a rope burn. The fine dark hairs lying flat with sweat. She had taken this body everywhere she had ever gone. It had been tired, foolish, strong in particular ways, wounded in others. It had carried June on one hip while she made toast with the other hand. It had run along harbor roads before dawn because the day was easier if she had already done something she wanted.
She did not want to give it away.
The thought was childish, exact and beyond argument. She wanted to live in the body that could go home.
Kit came close to the refuge camera.
"Mara."
She looked at him.
"Don't let her hurry you."
Leonie did not object. She stepped out of the camera's center, leaving Kit there, his new patch visible above the shirt he had not wanted them to cut.
Mara put the cuff against her arm again.
"I don't have very long," she said.
"I know."
"I'm scared."
Kit nodded.
She pressed the contact tab.
Something bit.
Not a needle. A ring of small sharp pressures, too close together to count. The cuff tightened around her forearm and warm fluid moved beneath its clear surface. Mara cried out, more in surprise than pain, and nearly pulled away. The seal had taken. She would tear her skin if she fought it now.
She held still.
The first gold line entered the little ring of broken skin. It paused, branched, moved deeper. Her fingers tingled. She could see each pulse reach toward the wrist, turn, travel back under the skin toward the elbow.
"Open the return," Leonie said.
Mara found the control. Her hand would not close around it. She used the heel of her palm and pushed until it seated. A dark line filled the second tube.
The cuff warmed.
Her whole arm began to ache, deep in the bone, then in places she had never known as separate places. The tendon at her elbow. The soft inside of her upper arm. A fine crawling heat beneath the shoulder. She gripped the seat with her free hand and tried to breathe slowly.
The bottle gave her half a breath.
She sucked at the mask. Its valve opened, failed to satisfy, closed. Again. A little more. Her body knew instantly what equipment had tried politely to explain.
"It's empty," she said.
The words came out high and thin.
"The branch is flowing," Leonie said.
"It's not—"
Mara tore at the mask clasp. She knew the pod's atmosphere had no useful oxygen. Her hands did not care. They wanted whatever was over her face off her face. The seal broke. Stale gas touched her mouth. She inhaled it and gained nothing.
For one terrible second her whole life narrowed to a single demand: air.
Not June. Not the refuge. No brave thought. Her chest worked against itself, every muscle hauling at an empty promise. She tried to stand, struck her knees against the control rail and fell back into the seat.
"Mara," Leonie said. "Look at the return."
She could not.
"Mara."
Kit shouted her name. Someone else spoke over him. She could hear them as if through a wall. The edges of her sight darkened. The warm crawling line crossed beneath her collarbone and entered the center of her chest.
She screamed.
It was a short sound, all the gas she had left. Her ribs locked halfway through the next breath. Something tightened behind the sternum, a sensation so intimate and wrong that she dug her nails into her own shirt to reach it.
The cuff held her arm.
Gold moved into the supply. Dark fluid went back. Her heart struck once, hard enough to hurt. Again, irregularly. Then a long quiet space opened where the next beat should have been.
Mara waited for the darkness to close.
It did not.
Her vision returned at the edges. Not all at once. The window, the control guard, the red handle she had pulled. Her phone on the ledge, June's face still bright on its little screen. Her free hand lay against her chest. The fabric beneath it was still.
She was no longer trying to inhale.
The relief was so enormous it frightened her. A need that had filled every second of being alive had gone absent. She waited for it to come back, to demand its place. The cuff pulsed against her forearm. Warmth spread down into her belly, through her legs, into the soles of her feet. A small tear in the skin above her knee drew closed beneath the fabric.
She could not feel the cut on her forehead.
"Mara?" Leonie said.
Mara opened her mouth. Nothing useful came out. She swallowed, gathered a little gas deliberately as she had seen Kit do, and tried again.
"Here."
The word was small. It crossed the link.
At the refuge Benji covered his mouth with his good hand. Jonah bent forward without letting go of the handle. Nessa stayed at the crawler controls, tears running off her chin onto her shirt. Kit looked down. Leonie shut her eyes for one moment, then opened them and asked Mara what she could feel in her fingers.
Mara moved them. All five. The rope-burn scar on her forearm had gone pale beneath a branching gold thread.
"I can move."
"Any pain in the chest?"
"No."
The answer frightened her again. No pain did not mean no damage. She had watched Benji learn that. Her hand went to the center of her shirt, where something unfamiliar rested behind the stillness.
"Don't disconnect," Leonie said.
Mara looked at the two lines. She looked toward the refuge feed, where Kit stood beside his line.
"I know."
Hester's voice arrived through the relay, broken by distance. "Venn."
Mara leaned toward the microphone. "I'm alive."
A long pause. Then Hester said, "I heard."
Mara wanted to thank her for taking Imani up. She wanted to tell her it had been the right thing to do. The words would have sounded like absolution given from a place Hester had not asked her to occupy. She said instead, "Tell Sal five arrived. Then me. Six."
"I'll tell him."
Mara looked through the window. The dark water had not changed. The living field opened at the edge of the crawler light approaching along the rail. She had imagined the first thing taken would be something she could name as a loss: walking on a beach, hearing June play in a room above water, the right to leave.
The first thing she missed was the next breath.
She waited for it in the quiet until the crawler's light reached her window.