A Want Like Ours #4
Marin moved. Binding could hold cloth more safely than joints. She fixed the sailor's coat to the remaining gallery post. Kelm hauled. Venn got the sailor's chest over the edge, then dragged Halvek back from the gap before gravity settled the jurisdictional argument. Halvek stared at her.
"You saved me."
Venn struck the restraint line through a second ring.
"Do not become sentimental."
Pell laughed once from below and then shouted as the sounding wheel kicked backward.
A second sailor caught his shoulder before the spokes broke his arm.
Seraphine crossed toward Oliver. Stopped.
An engineer lay beneath a fallen lamp bracket three feet to her left, not moving.
Oliver was on his knees near the lower gate. Conscious. Breathing. Trying to stand.
Seraphine looked between them. The hesitation lasted less than a second. She went to the engineer. Marin saw. So did Oliver. Neither gave the choice a speech. Marin reached the final Veinstone bank. Its ceramic housing had cracked. Blue light leaked through the seam.
"Pell, clear!"
He looked at the bank and understood.
"One moment!"
"You have half."
He abandoned the sounding wheel. Marin seized the manual disconnect.
It refused. Of course it did. She put both hands on the handle.
Her left palm tore open beneath the bandage.
Pain made the room sharpen. Oliver reached her.
She had not heard him approach. His hand closed over the handle above hers.
"Together?"
The word nearly ruined her.
"Your right hand is injured."
"So is yours."
"Poor argument."
"Time."
He was right. Marin shifted to make room for his left hand.
They pulled. The disconnect moved. One inch.
Another. The bank released. Veinstone discharged into the flooded floor channels.
Oliver's body locked. Marin caught him before he fell.
The world went white. Then black. When sound returned, it was water.
Only water for three breaths. Then Venn ordering a head count.
Kelm demanding his pistol. Pell informing him nobody trusted him with it anymore.
The engineer coughing beneath Seraphine's hands.
Anchor House had stopped humming. Marin lay on one knee with Oliver half against her chest. His forehead pressed to the side of her neck.
He shook hard enough that his teeth clicked once. Her first hand went to his pulse.
His first movement avoided the torn palm she had braced against the floor. Even now.
"Oliver."
"Here."
His voice was wrecked. His. Marin opened Perception only enough to confirm rhythm and respiratory effort.
His heart was fast. Lungs working. No seizure.
No immediate collapse she could name. Then she felt the shadow around them.
Bhodi remained closer than before, with Oliver rather than Anchor House or the dead network. Oliver felt her notice.
"Also here," he whispered.
Marin shut her eyes once, then opened them.
"Can you stand?"
"Probably."
"That is not an answer."
"Yes. Badly."
"Acceptable."
She got under his left arm. The lower gate had jammed open at shoulder width.
Water climbed the sounding room behind them, not violently now, but steadily, claiming the old channels first. The black fracture in the interface wall had gone dark.
Ordinary dark. Marin refused to assign permanence to it.
"Move uphill," Venn ordered.
Nobody argued. They moved. Pell and one sailor took the injured engineer between them after Seraphine stabilized his neck.
Kelm hauled Halvek by the restraint line with all the tenderness of luggage.
Venn counted people at each landing. The last sailor carried the salvaged evidence case because apparently institutions could remain irritating even during escape.
Seraphine came toward Oliver on the first upper landing.
Stopped three feet away. Her hands were bloodied from the engineer, palms open at her sides.
"May I?"
Oliver stared at her. The question hurt him.
Marin watched the hurt travel across his face and remain something he could answer rather than something anyone needed to cure.
He shifted his weight off Marin enough to hold out his left hand.
Seraphine took it. They climbed together without an embrace or absolution.
Behind them the flooded sounding room gave one final metallic crash.
The old quarantine wheel tore free of its axle and disappeared into the trench.
Seawater crossed the interface threshold.
The room that had tried to preserve one condition could no longer keep the coast outside it.
At the upper corridor, Oliver stopped. Marin felt him before she saw why.
His shadow stopped too, then turned a fraction late toward the drowned rooms below.
Another pressure brushed the edge of Marin's awareness: distance, and an absence made suddenly intolerable.
Bhodi tightened around Oliver immediately, the same possessive refusal flaring through the contact before the pressure disappeared.
Oliver's attention sharpened with immediate, exhausted curiosity.
Marin put two fingers against his wrist.
"Later."
He looked at her. The protest formed. He considered his bleeding nose, shaking legs, flooded laboratory, arrested researcher, wounded engineer, mother holding one hand and lover holding the other. The protest died on its own.
"Later," he agreed.
They stepped outside. Night air struck Marin's face. Below them, the sea kept moving.