Even then—

A burly male torso arching out of the darkness, one arm raised, broad hips and thighs dissolved into an ambiguous tail, now that of a fish, now a serpent; light caught on the edges of the scales. Above, a long, narrow skull, turned half away, crowned with a wreath of cedar boughs and rhododendron flowers.

From the ship’s railing—

A face vast as a planet emerges from the storm, wreathed in boiling storm clouds. They are too small for its dread regard, she knows—she has been assured and reassured—and yet—it is not a human face, but her brain, hungry for patterns, keeps assigning it human dimensions, picking eyes, noses, mouths out of its ceaseless evolutions. She shakes her head to clear it, to see the storm and nothing more, and it shakes its head in mimicry.

From the depths—

The lightless shape of an orca cries out wordlessly with a child’s voice, and is answered. Again, and again. Again. Petra shudders and heads below again; some nights are not made for sleeping.

80 floors in under a minute; 13 feet a second.

Petra’s ears pop and she struggles to swallow, dry-mouthed and nervous, even though this is long-familiar. The view, too, is familiar, or should be, but somehow it always catches her off guard. It’s a grey predawn down on the street, but early morning up here; the hallway is bathed in rosy-fingered light, and the terminator sweeping over the valley from the mountains takes her breath away.

Vertigo: she feels the earth dropping away beneath her, curving away from the sun.

The man in the bed is old, with the delicate paper skin they all have, the curled spine. This one is well-fed, comfortingly — yesterday’s was light as a bird, scarely more than a skeleton and memories, disquietingly closer to a wire sculpture than a human. She wheels the bed to the window, and the man smiles up at her, eyes wide and calm, all pupil. They spend a moment looking out at the early morning, crisp and clear before the heat closes in, until their breath settles into a shared rhythm, until her pulse keeps time with the gentle ticking of the monitor.

Later—

Petra pulls the window shut again, and leans her head against the glass. She cranes her head toward the street, listens for an impact that never comes. Where they go, she doesn’t know, but she rides the elevator down alone, as always.

It’s been so long since the last time she was grounded that Petra has almost forgotten the trick of staying upright. The long weary hours held against the treadmill by elastic have left her dense enough, but it never switches off, not nights nor weekends. Everything aches.

She spends most of her waking hours in the apartment pool, just floating in a way that is almost but not entirely unlike being out there; anyway her back aches less. The pool is unheated, but she’s got a wetsuit that keeps her warm enough and gives her more support when she moves. Her hair crisps from the chlorine.

She’s sitting on the bottom, weightless with yearning, when a pair of ducks fly over the fence and land on the water above her. She stays still as long as she can, lets the slight current tug her out from under them down toward the filter. When she can’t hold her breath anymore, she cracks the eggshell of the surface with her head, forces herself to breathe slowly and silently.

The ducks eye her warily.

Cordray’s been captured, which obviously isn’t ideal, just rotten timing and worse luck, wrong place, wrong time, wrong stars at her birth, maybe. She can hardly breathe for the knee in her back; her eyes still sting with the chemical agent they’d sprayed her with. Mild stuff, comparatively, for her tweaked system, but they don’t know that, and shouldn’t, so she lets herself puff up and weep. The crowd is screaming at the soldiers holding her down. What has she stumbled into?

The one with (his?) knee in her back says something, but of course it’s all gabble to Cordray, who was never supposed to have touched down like this, who hasn’t had the training, who hasn’t had the languages drilled into her. Anger comes through clear enough, though, and fear. She writhes a little and weeps harder, usually that works, but not this time. The knee presses down harder to make her go quiet, and the crowd gets louder, more hostile.

Someone in the crowd throws a rock, and the knee in her back flinches, and it’s enough; she rolls loose and dives into the mob. There’s a loud retort and the crowd sways and for a second she doesn’t understand, then a wave of horror sweeps over her as she realizes what’s happening, what’s been happening, what she’s caught in now.