Because whatever else it is, and however hopeless it may seem to me as it all weaves itself, scene by scene, into the fabric of my being—
This is the story of how I survived.
How we’ll all survive.
DANAE
We lay still, clutching each other in the muggy heat of my three-by-three meter coffin apartment, waiting to see if the world would end: Naoto and I, our complicated friendship transformed by the pressure into a desperate kind of love for as long as it took the news to come in that doomsday had been called off again. Epak and Norpak were pulling back their subs and drones to their respective corners of the Pacific, settling back into their stalemate. They were standing down their nanoweapon stockpiles—and in that first deep breath, my whole cluttered mind snapped into a focus as clear and sharp as broken glass: for five years now I’d been rotting in exile, here in the sweltering submarine underbelly of Bloom City. Nothing up on dry land—not the strife and desolation, not the Keepers, not even my own guilt—scared me more than the prospect of trying to make it through a sixth.
So we cleaned ourselves up as best we could. Then we went to meet the mercenary who I hoped would get me out of that claustrophobic city, shepherd me across a thousand kilometers of wasteland, and carry what little was left of me home.
“On second thought, maybe I should go alone,” I whispered to Naoto on the elevator up to the lower habitat level. “The favor I called in to arrange this meeting isn’t worth much. There’s a very strong possibility it’s a trap.”
He was still tying back his unkempt black hair. “If it’s a trap, you might need someone to get you out.” He gave me a long look. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”
“I have to be.”
“You don’t look well.”
I rolled up the sleeve of my coveralls and stabbed a single-use Pascalex injector into my arm, and he did the same; even this short ascent would take us from four atmospheres down to three. I answered, “You’ve never seen me well.”
His eyes were bloodshot from more than the pressure change when he met mine, and my skin burned with a fresh wave of guilt: that he’d spent the whole time we’d known each other watching me slowly fall apart; that we’d likely never see each other again after tomorrow; and that I knew, however well he hid it, how much more he wanted from me than I had to give. In some other world, we could have been simply in love. Maybe we could have been one person. In this universe I was too broken for the former and too damned for the latter.
The doors reeled open, and we tugged our hoods up and put our heads down to walk: past the Medusas guarding the elevator with machetes; on into the shoulder-to-shoulder foot traffic chattering to itself about the ceasefire; past one of Naoto’s own murals, wherein waves of blue seawater morphed symbolically into yellow-gold fusion energy; onward into the perpetual aquapolitan dusk, thick with moisture and holographic light, to the booth in the smoke bar my contact had named.
I froze when I saw the man who sat there waiting for us.
“What is it?” Naoto asked, reading my face. “Danae? Do you know him?”
“No, it’s—”
“What?”
I shook my head. Working for Medusa Clan, I’d met any number of people who made a career of violence and death. Most of them, like Duke, put more work into the spectacle of their brutality than the brutality itself: they wore necklaces of human molars, swelled their muscles with carcinogenic gene therapies, tattooed their faces and pierced their bones. Waiting there in the glowing smoke was a man who did everything he could to put up a clean façade, but the violence still shone through it. The scars on his scalp couldn’t all be combed over. The skin graft around his eye and cheek was seamlessly bonded, but it reflected the wrong shade of brown under the harsh bluish lights here. I shuddered with the instinctive knowledge that the sight of him had been other people’s last—but what had stopped me in my tracks, what Naoto struggled to read in my expression, wasn’t fear. It was an eerie certainty that I had seen this man before.
I had. But I would be very far from Bloom City by the time I realized which eyes I had seen him through.
“Seats taken?” I shouted over the din, and the mercenary affected casual disinterest. The video panes all blasted dissonant Medusan anthems and told us the news in five languages at once; this was the closest thing to privacy that could be had in Bloom City. Naoto pulled up a chair at my side, facing backward to watch the crowd.
“You think this truce with Norpak will hold?” the mercenary mused, never making eye contact.
“I do. I hope so. I . . . I’ve been hoping things would calm down enough for me to take a little vacation.”
I tried to keep a straight face. As if Medusa Clan ever let its tech servants leave the city on a whim. As if they wouldn’t break both my legs for talking about it.
“Getting some fresh air?” His real question was clear: Going to the surface, or another aquapolis?
I’d spent enough time in the underworld to learn how to transact in the common language of thinly-veiled code, but until now I’d only played this game with techs and fixers and toecutters of the lowest order, and never for stakes this high. I enunciated carefully, “Yes. Somewhere good and dry.” Inland. “Where I can take my mind off my work. Where my boss won’t be able to reach me.”
The mercenary took a contemplative pull from a hookah
