She’s barefoot, clad in panties and a baggy T-shirt on which animated hatchet-fish swim endless circuits around her midriff. She breathes a recycled mixture of nitrogen and oxygen and trace gases, distinguishable from real air only by its extreme purity. The rifter floats in darkness, her contours limned by feeble light leaking through the viewport. She wears a second skin that almost qualifies as a life-form in its own right, a miracle of thermo- and osmoregulation, black as an oil slick. She does not breathe. A wall separates the two women, keeps ocean from air, adult from adolescent. They speak through a device fixed to the inside of the teardrop viewport, a fist-sized limpet that turns the fullerene perspex into an acoustic transceiver. “You said you’d come by,” Alyx Rowan says. Passage across the bulkhead leaves her voice a bit tinny. “I made it up to fifth level, I was like holy shit, look at all the bonus points! I wanted to show you around. Scammed an extra headset and everything.”
