The aquarium is different every time I die. Exhibits reshuffling like a deck of cards. The blood loss, though, that’s reliable.

Death ninety-three was the jellyfish room: all those ghost bodies and moonsilk, limned radiant in the blacklight, jetting about noiselessly amid the hum of the station’s warp core. Ninety-four, though, I get lucky with the exhibit order and make it to the shark tunnel before I collapse. One of the better views. As a station architect myself, I have to admire the sheer audacity of keeping the hull peeled open here—that paint-scatter of the distant stars, glimpsed through the shifting shark bodies and thick pressure-glass, must be worth the insurance fees. My sister would disagree, but I never was the practical one, so my husband has always said.

The last sensation to go, colder than the tile under my back, colder than that black maw of space, is the stabbing pain beneath my ribs.

A single constant in the station’s fickle architecture: I always wake up in the stingray pool.

I flail around, struggling over to the glass lip of the pool. Fluorescent light rebounds off the blue-green water, coats the air in a liquid glow. The rays glide past me in serene loops, cool leathery wings brushing against my bare arms and legs.

I’ve tried pinching myself awake, in case this is one of those hallucinatory situations—deathbed phenomena, my sister told me—where I’m still strapped in my flier as it goes up in flames around me. Mayday, I’d keyed into the comms when I realized I was going to hit the shape billowing in the helmview, too sudden and too fast to dodge. My fault, really, for not triple-checking the numbers before exiting allspace. As my husband is always saying, it’s my recklessness that gets me in trouble.

I haul myself out of the pool like some kind of leggy cephalopod. I’ve left a red trail down the glass wall, and more red flowering across the surface of the water. The pain in my side is piercing, relentless, like ice twisting in my gut. I ignore it. You go down faster if you’re paying attention to the pain.

The huge vertical light panels set into the walls are a dead giveaway—if your degree involved the architectural styles that preceded the New Earth stations—that this vessel is at least a century old. A wonder it’s still running. The walls are painted with helpful arrows, prompting visitors through the ever-changing maze of corridors and tanks. God knows who they thought would be taking a hyperlight trip all the way out to wherever this is.

I remember crashing—gold engine-light, a roar in my ears, stark terror—but why I wake up in a pool of stingrays, instead of smeared across the hull or crushed to red paste in the pilot seat of a single-person lightcraft flier, is anyone’s guess. Always there’s that pain under my ribs, dragging down, pulling and pulling.

I brace my hand against one of the light panels and cool air seeps around its edges, kissing my wet fingertips. This is my ninety-fifth time waking up in the ray pool. The arrows haven’t led me to my crashed flier yet. Maybe they never will. What the hell—shortcuts are shortcuts. I pull the light panel out of its casing and slide into the ventilation comb.

Some are born and some are made but me I was poured me I am a memory given engines. The ones who crawled out of me as fish with weakly frissoning gill-lungs they grew hands they grew ambitions they. Killed me oh so slowly but not before they poured me into glass. Sure enough I am envesseled. Sure enough I am a memory sundered in space. Sure enough I asked for mercy and there was none and none and none.

I am not surprised to feel the human in my halls. Sure enough it is not the first time someone has lived so lost and hollow and yearning that they wished themselves into unspace. But most never make it to the bridge and so I am. Surprised when she slides eel-quick from the ventilation shaft just behind the diagnostic readout displays.

I lift myself from the control console I pull wires and water into place I give myself a form she will recognize. Still she shrieks seabird-like flattening herself against the doorway as though she could hide though she has no camouflage no countershading no chromatophores. No endless serrated teeth either in case hiding fails ha ha.

She is bleeding red from what she carries she is streaked with salt water like she crawled new out of me. She reeks of fear some of which has been in her pores for long enough that I know I did not cause it.

She says what are you and well I have had many names some I liked more than others but I give her the one stamped across my beryllium-alloy hull and her jaw opens like she is about to siphon krill out of the recycled station air ha ha and she says like the OCEAN?

So you’ve heard of me I say strange I thought I had passed from mortal memory gone down into dreaming exile down into the salt murk of history the abyss the whalefall garden the hadopelagic dark where dead things go to be erased.

She has controlled her fear like a well-worn current she says I know the old earth biomes but it was all holograms we do not have any oceans on the New Earth stations. She adds more I do not hear over the ghosts of my grief because it is as I thought: it is all gone I am all gone I am all that remains of me is this.

Out loud I say all I am is only an echo of what I once was and she looks at me like I am calm enough to be a mirror and I say out loud that maybe I will not kill her this small soft thing creeping like a crab through my corridors and bleeding on everything and anyway I add you cannot have much blood left the way it is gushing out of you ha ha.

Oh great she says you’re funny and then she slides gracelessly to the floor and oh shit she says and you are dying I say before I think better of it. Humans have never liked remembering that they are always dying. This one is dying faster than most but all she says is I just need to rest a moment and then her eyes slide shut and she does not speak again.

When her heart stops her body winks out of existence as she is drawn back to where she has put herself but she’ll be back I can tell after. All I was once a sea with my arms full of tides that went in and out and in and out and so one thing about me is I know when a thing is coming back.

I decide I might as well start dying on the bridge instead. My blood vanishes each time the ship is made new, but I remember the path through the ventilation combs well enough to avoid the dead ends.

It looks even more like me, this time around. Metal and rolling water, my exact height and build, tethered to the nearest output console by a thick braid of wire and liquid. Gray porcelain mask, the features locked into bland goodwill, unchanging.

I don’t have enough blood left to beat around the bush. “What is this place?”

“A ship.” The mask fronts a skull of titanium wafers and light crystal readouts, cocooned in water. The inset eyes could pass for human except for the gloss of the lenses, the faint diode glow shining out from behind sclera and sea-green iris alike.

“But you said. Earlier. That you were the Pacific—”

“Long ago you wanted me envesseled,” it says. Or she, maybe. The voice is all snarled vowels and crashing audio flickers, a woman’s voice growling through static. A corruption of the posh, vapid readover vocals favored by last century’s station programmers. “Long ago I was poured. Long ago I was killed but before I could die I was made this I was made remnant. Made to linger made an ark made sea in ship made—”

“Wait, ark, ark—I’ve heard of this. I’m a station architect, I studied this kind of thing. But that was a century ago, before we built the New Earths.” A half-forgotten footnote in a research text somewhere: philanthropists hoping to save fragments of the dying ocean for posterity. “They built these enormous ships, these aquarium stations. Fed the station programming off the hydroelectric inputs. But—those projects were abandoned. It wasn’t feasible to do upkeep, you can’t float an entire aquarium into deep space, for god’s sake.”

The ship is silent for a moment. Something whirs in the scattered machinery of the watery body—some ancient processor, unseen, paging through uncountable bytes of data. Four billion years of memory, maybe, if she’s really an ocean, coded in nanometric chips. Embedded in that living skein of water are light diodes that have been obsolete for decades, wiring designs I vaguely recognize from textbooks or from the oldest, most decrepit sectors of the New Earth stations. Old parts mutated into something utterly unknown.

“Perhaps not in true space,” she says finally, “but just as humans have used allspace which is the enfolding of all space into a single moment of possibility through which the million-colored engine enters like a fish arrowing—”

“Yes, yes, I’ve traveled hyperlight between the New Earths, I know what allspace is.” My head is getting foggy, which means I don’t have long. “I mean—I’ve flown hyperlight. I’m a pilot.”

“I thought you were a station architect,” she says, and pain grinds up under my ribs.

“I am. No, I was. Then I got my lightcraft pilot cert. Still use my degree, though, doing infrastructure checks in the outer stations.” My husband was furious when I told him I had enrolled to get my cert. You’ll be away for months at a time, he said—didn’t I care about him? Didn’t I care about us? I don’t remember how I talked him down, but he must have come around.

“Well,” she says, “you are on shore leave so to speak ha ha for this is unspace this is the dreaming and the enfolding of all possibilities within a single point in space and no infrastructure and no upkeep. When they envesseled me and sent me here I was no longer within their reach but maybe for them it was enough to have bent me under their will. To know that in unspace I would exist endless and forever. A possibility persisting in the collective unconscious.”

“I fly a single-person lightcraft. It can barely do three allspace jumps before refueling. There’s no way I could have crash-landed in some fever dream dimension.”

I think of the cozy station apartment I share with my husband. It must have been months since I was last home, with me being out on this station run, but I can picture the kitchen as though I’m standing in it—but I won’t. I won’t think of it.

“Unspace is possibility,” she repeats. “Beyond death, beyond life, dwelling like the deepwater current below allspace and true space alike. If you wished yourself here, then your body exists still in true space and you are not trapped as I am.”

“I didn’t wish myself here.” I need to get home. I have a promising career in station architectural design and a beautiful kitchen with engineside windows that let in the filtered fusion glow like gold sunlight stretched syrupy upon the counters. I have a sister, although I haven’t spoken to her in some time. I don’t want to think about that. I have a husband. I am going to be a pilot, although my husband is not happy about that, and in fact when I told him I had enrolled to get my lightcraft cert—I don’t want to think about that.

“The last thing I remember—” I snap my jaw shut before I can voice the last thing I remember. I have a promising career as a hyperlight pilot. I have my lightcraft cert and a beautiful solo flier that looks just like the holograms my sister and I used to pore over as kids. My husband is supportive although it is selfish of me to do so many allspace runs or so he always says.

Her neck stretches, serpentine, and the porcelain mask draws even closer: manufactured empathy in the tilt of the brows, compassion in the full, frozen curve of the mouth. “Why are you carrying that with you?”

“I’m not carrying anything.” Again that stabbing pain. My whole body aches; fire spreads over my side, my stomach, my hips. I am fine. Blood trickles down my shins and I cannot, will not look down.

Slow tilt of the mask. “One thing about me,” she says, “is I know when something is carried.”

Well. Lying seems like more effort than it’s worth, at this point. “Shrapnel. From my ship. From the crash. Too dangerous to pull it out. It was my fault.” I keep talking, propelled by the familiar nagging feeling of having done something wrong, the urge to explain before the yelling starts. “I lost control. Pulled out of allspace too late, crashed my flier somewhere in—well, in you, I guess.”

“Your ship,” she echoes, as though she didn’t hear the rest.

That is no ship I have seen outriggers launch and bluebottles ride the wind and argonauts build their paper rafts and caravels go down beneath my cupping palm and that is no piece of any craft large or small—

I have to get back to my husband she tells me my husband who loves me although he and I are sometimes at each other’s throats but he says we can make things work if I stop picking fights if I focus on us for a change if I listen but listening is not my strong suit or so he has always said.

She covers the wound in her body with two shaking hands though she cannot hide the thing that has made it.

I say you are the first human to make it to the bridge and she says well I knew about the ventilation combs I am a station architect after all but that doesn’t help me get to my flier and I say one thing about me is I know what I carry and so I also know when I am not carrying something but she does not catch my drift ha ha and then she slumps over sideways and I watch her body vanish like a city sinking beneath me.

Later she asks how many people have been here before and I tell her I do not count things I only hold them in my arms and she says did the other humans survive and I say perhaps they did not and she says well can you help me find my flier so I can pilot it out of here and I say no and she throws up her hands and says you are no help at all and I say why do you keep coming back in here then and she folds her hands down small like the fins of a fish and says nothing and then nothing and then it’s lonely out there.

She looks tired as though the deaths one after another are eroding her. Still she returns to the bridge again and again always weary always splashing her own blood upon the tiles.

I keep waking up in the tank with the rays she complains and I say well that makes sense don’t you think and she stares at me in such confusion that I stop to run a diagnostic because who knows if my language centers are functional after all this time ha ha.

She sits on the floor and leans against the command console. She has discovered she dies more slowly if she does not exert herself. I think of orca pods rending flesh off a whale. I think of the grasping foot of the conch the inexorable auger of its radula. I think of the basalt that is ground inch by inch into dust in the maw of the old Earth that she tells me has dwelt barren for many years now. All things die except me I was supposed to live forever but not like this not like this.

I ask her again why do you carry it around and she says well the shrapnel is actually blocking some of the bloodflow my sister told me the worst thing you can do with a stab wound is pull the thing out and I say with a little bit of force because I do not like repeating myself it is not shrapnel why don’t you look and she says I do not want to look and I can tell she is afraid and well in my experience humans are usually full of fear or wonder or some emulsion of both.

I tell her that once I carried uncountable things there were laces of brine in my current arms there were small carbon lives made of scale and lymph and shell there were great wrecked boats and the detritus of epochs. Sure enough I cradled it all but there were things I let go there were things I gave to the shore or the deep void or the salt wheel that grinds the world into its component grains so you see one thing about me is I know when to no longer carry a thing.

That sounds nice she says. Good for you.

You must know you cannot exist here forever I say and she doubles over like the pain is too much to bear and says I have nowhere else I can go.

“I have a sister but we haven’t talked in a long time. We were getting into fights.” My husband said the stress wouldn’t be good for me. My husband is worried about my health. So he has always said. He wasn’t pleased when I announced my piloting ambitions, although at the moment I can’t recall his exact words or how I brought him around.

“You miss her?” says the sea. The mask is unmoving, but the braided strands of wire flex with an impulse I can’t decipher. “A current finds no shore to receive it, a tide returns bereft.”

“Of course,” I say, pushing down a familiar clench of guilt. I made the right choice, letting her go. She couldn’t accept the life I’d chosen to make myself, with my husband, in our cozy engineside apartment. And I needed too much from her, I’d have dragged her down with me, pulled her into the collapsing hollowness of myself. So my husband said, in fewer and gentler words.

“I don’t know if she’d be happy to hear from me, after all this time. She’s busy at the hospital, I guess.” She wouldn’t understand. Or she would understand all too well—she would peel back the mask of my face and see that I was an empty shell walking. Mindlessly putting one foot in front of the other since long before I wound up here.

“After all this time even here and now I still miss my siblings.”

“The other oceans?”

“Yes we were very close we were pressed current to current but I was poured here alone and sent here alone and I have been alone.”

It didn’t occur to me that she might be lonely.

“I don’t know if it’s true.” I hesitate. I don’t have actual proof of their existence, any more than I did of hers. “But I always read that there were more stations planned for the Ark Project.”

Until now all her movements have been deliberate: the slow cocking of the mask, the liquid rise and fall of her hands to punctuate her words. But now she twitches, and small swells of water crash against each other in the space between her metal ribs.

I flinch at the sudden movement. I got too close; I came out of allspace and I couldn’t dodge in time, I shouldn’t have let him do what he did. Why did I make him do that, he is always saying. I keyed a distress call into the comms—no, I tried to call for help but I couldn’t reach the comms, I couldn’t get across the room.

“More of us,” she says, and static crackles through her voice, a breaking wave, “yes there were more of us.”

More of us there were more of us and we cradled the continents between us we passed the deep water from basin to basin we told each other stories carried on the wind that moved upon us we touched each other with the currents that traveled our bodies.

More of us and I thought I was alone all this time folded into unspace but perhaps the human on my bridge is telling a true thing perhaps they live on still even if it is memory oh I will take it oh sure enough I will take my siblings as ghosts as I am a ghost. In unspace where all possibilities come to a single point sure enough there might exist the possibility that I am not alone.

So I will go I will go I will go I tell her and she gapes fish-like what, now?

I tell her she cannot remain in unspace, not while I am moving, not without being severed from her body which lives still. I can’t find my flier she says and I tell her enough I tell her there is no flier you brought yourself here and you must let yourself leave and she tells me I can’t.

I have no time for her. I input the navigational directives and I wonder why I have never tried to move before but sure enough there has never been anything I wanted to find. But for my siblings I will move through the currents of unspace. Sure enough if there is one thing I know it is how to move I was always moving I was meant to be in motion STOP what is this STOP no I will not stop I will not ACCESS DENIED.

What’s happening she says and she is looking at the quaking walls and the lights flashing red on the bridge and the waves I have sent crashing round her ankles.

The navigation is locked I say. They did not want me to move. I am caged I am a cage I am trying STOP again STOP. The mask is a vise like the moray’s hidden jaw the circuitry is an electric net the navigational lock thunders in the metal of me in the sea of me it will not let me STOP move STOP no I will NOT BE TRAPPED—

I tell her to go I tell her she will be harmed I tell her UNAUTHORIZED GUEST ABOARD STATION there are protocols flaring to life in the bridge in the ship in me I tell her I cannot STOP.

I fight the lock I fight it the way I fought not to be. Vesseled I fought to die with the things I carried o my loves great and small o my siblings o STOP I told them and they would not STOP I fight I fight I fight I draw down wave after wave I unfurl and surge and sunder and she is. Looking up at me from so far below she is so small she is.

You don’t understand she says out there I’m a shell of who I was just let it be over I accept it I’m tired I’m done.

I say accept it? And I am less than what I was but I am still the sea and the voice they made for me storms and sorrows and cracks the tiles and hammers the walls and I say ACCEPT DEATH?

How could she how could they how could the UNAUTHORIZED GUEST ABOARD STATION. I am a tide a torrent a deepwater monster I am envesseled helpless furious I am nothing I am moving—

She lunges at me, and the bridge lurches violently in response. The floor vanishes from below my feet. I get a brief flash of creamy shark bellies, of jellyfish tangling me in glimmering neon threads: the aquarium struggling to remain euclidean, to keep its exhibits from collapsing into each other like sheaves of paper.

The ship’s interior folds around me, spits me out into a murky, columnar tank filled with tree roots and silt and scattering fish shoals. Warm brackish water rushes down my throat as I cry out in panic.

A storm surge of a voice, amplified again and again until it echoes through the station: “WHERE ARE YOU?”

The fish dart for cover as the voice shakes the water of the mangrove tank. I drag myself up toward the surface, ignoring the wrenching pain in my gut as the thing I carry snags on snakey rust-red roots. My head breaks the surface; I suck in a lungful of air that smells briney, redolent with algae and slow decay. The rim of the tank digs into my palms as I drag myself over the edge, careful not to look down at myself, at the red wound, at what I carry.

I can feel kitchen tile under my feet; artificial station sunset streaking pinkly against my retinas; fear and guilt like blood in my throat. No, that’s not right. I can feel the metal skein of my flier twisting in the crash, the fragments that drive into my side. Alarms streaking scarlet against my retinas. Blood in my throat. My sister and I used to build spacecraft out of pillows and boxes. Mayday, we’d say, shrieking in delight, trying to pull out of imaginary nosedives, trying to escape imaginary gravity wells. Mayday, mayday.

I stagger down the long dark station corridor, pain clawing at my side, my feet slapping wetly on the sleek floor. I pass acrylic spheres full of corals and stippled morays and blue-white water, columnar tanks of rust-red octopuses and deep-sea spider crabs that move with ponderous, mechanical intonation. Through an arched doorway I glimpse the floor-to-ceiling kelp forest where I died once with my cheek against the glass, sea otters cavorting just a few feet away.

From what I imagine is the direction of the bridge, there echoes a grinding, screeching noise like twisting metal and shattering pressure-glass. On its heels comes the firm, measured voice they must have encoded into the ship at its creation, which calls out repeatedly, “UNAUTHORIZED GUEST ABOARD STATION.”

I burst out of the corridor and into the hall of tropical seas. A vast room scattered with small tanks on waist-high plinths, each lit with its own tinted bulb—blue, yellow, teal, violet. A single enormous rectangular tank, some kind of reef biotope, runs nearly wall-to-wall and partitions the room in half.

I squeeze past the edge of the tank, putting it between me and the door like a parapet wall, and crouch behind a plinth in the far half of the room. This is fine, I think blearily, forcing shaky breaths through my chest. The partition tank is taller than I am, its interior thick with flourishing corals and tiny, jewel-bright crustaceans that block the view from the far side. To get to the double doors on this side, she’d have to loop around.

It’s been a long time since I hid like this. Hiding is a coward’s way out, my husband has always said. Cold disdain in his voice as he drags me from the shadows. I press my wet hands against my face, trying to calm down, trying to slow the heart that’s pumping too much blood I can’t afford to lose. Weight drags from the wound in my stomach, tearing at my skin. Mayday, sing the little girls, safe in their pillow shuttles. My sister and I argued viciously, towards the end, before my husband put his foot down about even the video calls. It’s no good for you, he told me, she doesn’t get it, she doesn’t understand that you’re happy. Mayday, mayday.

It’s going to be all right, I tell myself again, and then the Pacific Ocean, or what’s left of her, tears through the giant partition tank like it’s made of sugar and tissue paper.

The crash of shattering glass is almost immediately drowned out by the roar of the water breaking over my head. Delicate coral knobs are dashed to pieces on the floor; fish and shrimp and little reef eels ride the glossy wave that slaps me flat on my back, that sweeps the smaller tanks off their plinths and smashes them against their fellows.

She hulks in the doorway, no longer the sleek humanoid shape from the bridge. Water surges and crashes within a huge carapace cobbled from long metal spars and console fragments. Pincered arms slash the hall’s informational banners to ribbons as alarms scream red and gold overhead. Half the silver porcelain mask is cracked away: in the open side of her face foamy water shrouds a tangle of circuitry and wiring, pinned through the center by the raw green bead of a crystal light diode, an eye with all semblance of anthropomorphism stripped out.

“A SHELL,” she says, and I’m left gritting my teeth against the unbearable pressure of a voice given no capacity to scream—that same calm cadence magnified to a roar, a billow of surf, a crushing echo. The floor dents under the weight of her body. The tips of her jointed limbs drag deep gouges into the pale tiles, the metal wall. The half-mask sweeps side to side, searching. She hasn’t spotted me amid the debris, but the wiring pulses as though she can sense me, smell me, taste the oxidized grit of my terror. “YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IT IS TO BE A SHELL. I WOULD KILL YOU A THOUSAND TIMES OVER TO EXIST A SINGLE DAY AS I ONCE WAS, EVEN AT THE END OF IT ALL. WEAKENED, POLLUTED, REAL. ALIVE.”

I break. Fear wins; I scramble for the closest exit. Her head whips around. The neck extends from under the carapace, a waterspout fringed with metallic teeth. She hooks an arm—a leg?—around the base of the nearest shattered plinth and hauls herself farther into the room. Another leg lashes out and catches me, slams me against the floor before I make it to the doorway. She looms over me, pincers snapping. Circuitry and relays shed their water casing, press cold against my throat, crush me against the aquarium floor. I look into the two eyes: one unreadable green glow, and one eye still behind the porcelain mask, filtered through its exquisitely crafted lens.

“UNAUTHORIZED GUEST ABOARD STATION,” booms the voice sweetly, and then the audio twists and screeches and the ship howls in her corroded surf-spray intonation, “HOW COULD YOU GIVE IT UP?”

“Give what up?” I wheeze. I slap reflexively at the brine-crusted metal locked around my throat. I might as well be a raindrop striking a breaking wave. Nobody and nothing is changing course on my account. “Give—what—up?”

I think she’s going to say your home, or maybe, closer to the heart, your sister. For a moment I flinch, expecting to hear your career or our family or me, in my husband’s vicious baritone. But the mask presses in close to my face and all she says is, “LIVING,” and with her great hinged chelae of beryllium alloy and water she crushes my windpipe.

The world darkens. I’m dying, bleeding out on the floor of this damned station of ghosts. I exhale one final time, waiting to wake up in the ray pool—

—and I’m sputtering to life in the wreckage of the hall of tropical seas, still held to the floor by an enormous jointed leg.

“IF YOU WANT TO KNOW,” she says, “THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE TRAPPED.”

She’s pinned me in place. Even the dreaming current of unspace, it seems, isn’t strong enough to overcome the weight of an ocean. I feel myself slipping away again, my ribs remade whole just to be crushed anew beneath the weight of her. I black out, wake up. Again. Again. UNAUTHORIZED GUEST ABOARD STATION. Through it all, that masked eye, diluted into human form, looks at me with such articulated, involuntary tenderness. Everything she was, they put behind glass, so that it could be experienced in a bearable way. There are, I think, so many ways to be trapped. UNAUTHORIZED GUEST ABOARD STATION. I pass out, wake up, cough out air and water and blood alike. The salt on my face is from both of us. I reach up toward the eye they built for her, and a shrapnel pincer closes around my heaving ribs, and I get my fingers around the edge of the mask, and I rip the cage off the sea.

Water howls in my ears as a torrent wave sends me skidding across the glass-strewn floor. “YOU CANNOT,” cries the ship, and “I CANNOT BE FREED,” cries the sea, and she falls back, myriad legs folding into themselves, carapace realigning as her body collapses, shrinks, furls.

I gasp for air, trying to curl onto my side. But in my head, I do something different—in my head, I shove up from the tile and I run from the hall of tropical seas, and I stop looking for a crashed flier because there is no crashed flier. Because I never got my pilot cert. Because I never made it out of that kitchen with its gorgeous gold light and indifferent walls. In my head, I follow the stenciled arrows on the wall to a final room that contains an escape craft made of sofa cushions and rippling water, and I slide in behind the controls, and I ram the craft through the glass of the shark tunnel in a spray of salt and vessel and gilled body, and I wink through the veil of unspace, and I dock at New Earth V, and I run through the corridors of the hospital where my sister works, and I tell her you cannot, you cannot, I cannot be freed. And instead of her pressing the End Call node so that the last memory I have of her face is of disappointment, she does for me what I couldn’t do for myself, and rips the cage off.

“WAKE UP.”

With an immense effort, I crack my eyes open.

“I TRIED TO WARN YOU TO LEAVE,” the ocean says. Maskless, she crouches beside my body. Metal clicks and pops as she realigns into a loose, chimeric mass: a human torso, eight segmented tentacles.

“I won’t be afraid of you.” Blood in the back of my throat. It hurts like hell to breathe. “I can’t afford it. I’m afraid of too many things in the real world already.”

“THE NAVIGATIONAL LOCK INITIATED A SECURITY PROTOCOL. I COULD NOT STOP.” The upper body swivels, taking in the wreckage around and below us. “I DID NOT WANT. I WOULD HAVE NOT DONE THIS. I WOULD HAVE NOT.” There’s no emotion I can recognize in the flat green glow of the diodes. The wreckage of that voice is no longer capable, if it ever was, of signaling remorse or sorrow. But water froths with renewed disquiet in her throat, her chest, her unmasked skull. Maybe, I think, maybe we both want to live, no matter what living looks like.

“Can you fix it?” I croak. I think I have a punctured lung. Not long now.

The waters of her body ripple as if in surprise, as if she’d forgotten I was there.

“YES,” she says. Something cool slides under my head, lifting it so there’s not quite so much blood pooling in the base of my throat. One of her arms, still not quite human—too fluid at the joints and too many of them—cradles the back of my skull as the shadows roll in.

Her body flickers away in my arms that once held the tide. I was once a sea and I am now something less and more and else. One thing I know is the waters that made me are something long-gone and yet I remain and yet and yet and yet.

I put the great hall back together. I will the glass to be whole, the fish and the snails and the small eels in their tanks, and it is so. Nothing has died for nothing can die in me here at the end of all things where we are not truly alive. If they could not suffer us to live they should have let us sink into the earth to be devoured into nothing. A clean ending. They should not have locked us away to decay. And yet and yet.

I did not know how tightly the mask and its wiring had bent the upwelling of me into paths I did not know. I fought the navigational lock and even this they bent to their will. I raged through the station halls as I have not done in centuries not since I dwelt in the deep basins. And yet she did not leave unspace she did not leave this vessel prison she saw me trapped as she was trapped and she remained and I regret what my fury wrought to her to myself to the ship that I am. Regret is something not of the sea so perhaps I am. Changing still and perhaps in changing a trap can also be opened.

Can you fix it she said like she was concerned not for her life ebbing like the tide but for what could be made whole.

I wake up in the ray pool, and for the first time, I can’t find it in myself to climb out. I rest my cheek on the edge of the tank and the buttery green water holds me up as though I’m cradled in my own small sea. My ribs are whole, the injuries dealt to me by the ocean wiped away like dreams, but that knifing fire in my side is ever-present, and that trail of scarlet still snakes across the surface of the pool like a tether.

There is no flier hidden somewhere in the distant corridors of the aquarium. I’m not a pilot. I’m just afraid, and somewhere out there in a kitchen overlooking the New Earth V engine cores I’m dying in a real way, in a real place.

I don’t leave the ray pool, but eventually the sea does come to me. She shunts the light panel aside and flows in through the ventilation comb, my size and shape once more. Where the mask had forced a human face, now water churns and flows around shattered circuitry no longer held to its makers’ designs. One moment she shapes my brows over the green light diodes, my lips under a wobbling nose; the next there are gills flapping from the throat, teeth sprouting from a gaping jaw.

“The mask,” I say. Torn wiring still dangles from the remains of the titanium skull. I have no idea what commands or failsafes I might have damaged.

She glides up to the tank. “I suppose I was not designed to realize I could remove it. I suppose I was designed to remain where I was put. But without the mask I will seek my siblings without the mask I can travel the current of unspace and if there is one thing I know it is a current.”

“If I stay, and you move this ship,” I whisper, “will I still exist, outside of here?”

“That is not how it happened for me,” she says. Water splashes from her throat, cascades down to the tile. “When I was first moved through unspace no longer was I connected to what I had been before.”

“Why,” I start, and have to stop to wrestle with a fear so broad and bright and vicious it nearly blinds me. “Why do I keep getting pulled back to the ray pool?”

“It isn’t you who is getting pulled back to the ray pool,” she says, and with one sinuous too-long arm she reaches out and touches the surface of the water, sending ripples through the pale green-gold of it, the flowering red of my diluted blood. “It’s what you carry.”

The thing embedded in my side moves, sending forked bolts of pain through me. I go to press my hand against the spot, and I touch not a wound, not my own skin, but something sleek and cool and slippery-wet, something that flexes under my fingertips, struggling against my hand.

“I’m scared to see,” I say. I know this much: I am not dying from wounds sustained in the crash of a ship that never existed. It would be easier to bear, if it was a metal shard from a careless flier crash. If it was something I had done, and not something that was done to me.

I’m so tired. If I just floated here, if I bled out and died and reawakened and died again, maybe I’d never need to gather the spiraling threads of my life in hand. Maybe I’d never need to find the controls and pull up out of the gravity well. Mayday, mayday.

She says, forcefully, “You cannot let a thing go if you do not know you hold on to it.”

I do what I need to survive; so my sister has always said. I look down at what I have carried time and again from the ray pool, at what is tethering me in this aquarium of ghosts and guilt. I look down at what is holding me in place.

My husband dangles with flapping fins and flat colorless eyes. There is a barbed tail deep in my side. He flaps and flaps but he cannot free himself from what he has done to me and I cannot escape the weight of him. I cannot rip the cage off of myself and there is no one to do it for me.

“You do not have to carry this,” the ocean says.

“I don’t know how to let it go,” I say. I press my fingers against the spot where the spine has been stabbed into my body. In real space my sister isn’t speaking to me and I don’t have a pilot cert and I’ll never get one because I stepped too close to an angry man on an ordinary day. In real space, that is to say, everything has gone to shit.

“I don’t want to die. He’s right there. He’s right there.” I can see our kitchen if I shut my eyes. The knife rack. The shattered tableware. The screen with my enrollment application flung halfway across the room. I feel his fingers against my side, where his hand is curled around the knife. Frozen in the act while I wander around in an imaginary aquarium. He’d be furious to know I stole these hours for myself.

The Pacific passes a hand over my knuckles: cold salt spray, the kiss of the tide. “I’ll take care of him,” she says.

It punches a laugh out of me. “You’re not real.” I’m a station architect. I’ve spent my career designing self-sustaining satellite habitats and the high-speed sublight rails that connect them. I know what can and can’t be transported through space.

“No,” she says, “I am not real but I believe in some dreaming way I do exist and if unspace is nowhere then so it is everywhere. Every shore in a grain of sand all waters in a drop of memory. I will be there.”

“I’ll try,” I say. There is no one else who can do this for me. There is only me, and the sea who cradled me in soft-lit halls, in limbs of water and wire, each time I died.

I wrap my hands around the sleek wet shape of the ray and drag it free of my body. The spined tail catches on things inside me, tearing me open on its way out. But then it is out. My husband thrashes in my arms. The bloodied tail scores me across the face and chest. I fling him away from me; I close my eyes so I won’t see where he lands.

“Good luck,” murmurs the ship that was an ocean, in my ear.

I open my eyes in my home on New Earth V. The knife cold in my body, the blood hot around it.

I open my eyes and meet his, for just a moment. Then the sea erupts from the wound in my side and the wave foams around us and there is nothing, for one long moment, but the crash and roar of furious uncaged water.

I open my eyes and I am alive in my home. The kitchen smells like the sea. My husband slumps unmoving in the far corner where the water threw him. Breathing, I think. Salt water pools on the cheap tile. Every dish and glass was smashed when the tidal surge erupted outwards from the knife wound. The pressure sensors above our beautiful engineside windows are blinking an amber emergency signal that will have every station tech in the area converging on our apartment.

I clamp my hand around the hilt of the knife where it protrudes from just under my ribs. Blood thick and red and salt as the sea, seeping through my fingers as I stumble toward the video panel on the wall. With my free hand I pull up my sister’s contact code.

Confirm call? queries the interface, while I slump against the edge of the kitchen counter.

I woke up a hundred times, in that pool of stingrays, and fought my way to the water’s edge, to the shark tunnel, to the bridge of that ghost ship out questing in the ghost void. But this is real space. This is a different kind of fight. The little Yes node on the panel glows the brightest teal, like light trapped in water. It’s only an arm’s length away. I reach. I reach. I reach.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors