Tomorrow Factory: Collected Fiction

INNUMERABLE GLIMMERING LIGHTS

At the roof of the world, the Drill churned and churned. Four Warm Currents watched with eyes and mouth, overlaying the engine’s silhouette with quicksilver sketches of sonar. Long, twisting shards of ice bloomed from the metal bit to float back along the carved tunnel. Workers with skin glowing acid yellow, hazard visibility, jetted out to meet the debris and clear it safely to the sides. Others monitored the mesh of machinery that turned the bit, smoothing contact points, spinning cogs. The whole thing was beautiful, efficient, and made Four Warm Currents secrete anticipation in a flavored cloud.

A sudden needle of sonar, pitched high enough to sting, but not so high that it couldn’t be passed off as accidental. Four Warm Currents knew it was Nine Brittle Spines before even tasting the name in the water.

“Does it move faster with you staring at it?” Nine Brittle Spines signed, tentacles languid with humor-not-humor.

“No faster, no slower,” Four Warm Currents replied, forcing two tentacles into a curled smile. “The Drill is as inexorable as our dedication to its task.”

“Dedication is admirable, as said the ocean’s vast cold to one volcano’s spewing heat.” Nine Brittle Spines’s pebbly skin illustrated, flashing red for a brief instant before regaining a dark cobalt hue.

“You are still skeptical.” Four Warm Currents clenched tight to keep distaste from inking the space between them. Nine Brittle Spines was a council member, and not one to risk offending. “But the ice’s composition is changing, as I reported. The bit shears easier with every turn. We’re approaching the other side.”

“So it thins, and so it will thicken again.” Nine Brittle Spines wriggled dismissal. “The other side is a deep dream, Four Warm Currents. Your machine is approaching more ice.”

“The calculations,” Four Warm Currents protested. “The sounding. If you would read the theorems—”

Nine Brittle Spines hooked an interrupting tentacle through the thicket of movement. “No need for your indignation. I have no quarrel with the Drill. It’s a useful sideshow, after all. It keeps the eyes and mouths of the colony fixated while the council slides its decisions past unhindered.”

“If you have no quarrel, then why do you come here?” Four Warm Currents couldn’t suck back the words, or the single droplet of ichor that suddenly wobbled into the water between them. It blossomed there into a ghostly black wreath. Four Warm Currents raked a hasty tentacle through to disperse it, but the councillor was already tasting the chemical, slowly, pensively.

“I have no quarrel, Four Warm Currents, but others do.” Nine Brittle Spines swirled the bitter emission around one tentacle tip, as if it were a pheromone poem or something else to be savored. Four Warm Currents, mortified, could do nothing but turn an apologetic mottled blue, almost too distracted to process what the councillor signed next.

“While the general opinion is that you have gone mad, and that your project is a hilariously inept allocation of time and resources based only on your former contributions, theories do run the full gamut. Some believe the Drill is seeking mineral deposits in the ice. Others believe the Drill will be repurposed as a weapon, to crack through the fortified cities of the vent-dwelling colonies.” Nine Brittle Spines shaped a derisive laugh. “And there is even a small but growing tangent who believe in your theorems. Who believe that you are fast approaching the mythic other side, and that our ocean will seep out of the puncture like the viscera from a torn egg, dooming us all.”

“The weight of the ocean will hold it where it is,” Four Warm Currents signed, a sequence by now rote to the tentacles. “The law of sink and rise is one you’ve surely studied.”

“Once again, my opinion is irrelevant to the matter,” Nine Brittle Spines replied. “I am here because this radical tangent is believed to be targeting your project for sabotage. The council wishes to protect its investment.” Tentacles pinwheeled in a slight hesitation, then: “You yourself may be in danger as well. The council advises you to keep a low profile. Perhaps change your name taste.”

“I am not afraid for my life.” Four Warm Currents signed it firmly and honestly. The project was more important than survival. More important than anything.

“Then fear, perhaps, for your mate’s children.”

Four Warm Currents flashed hot orange shock, bright enough for the foreman to glance over, concerned. “What?”

Nine Brittle Spines held up the tentacle tip that had tasted Four Warm Currents’s anger. “Traces of ingested birth mucus. Elevated hormones. You should demonstrate more self-control, Four Warm Currents. You give away all sorts of secrets.”

The councillor gave a lazy salute, then jetted off into the gloom, joined at a distance by two bodyguards with barbed tentacles. Four Warm Currents watched them vanish down the tunnel, then slowly turned back toward the Drill. The bit churned and churned. Four Warm Currents’s mind churned with it.

When the work cycle closed, the Drill was tugged back down the tunnel and tethered in a hard shell still fresh enough to glisten. A corkscrewing skiff arrived to unload the guard detail, three young bloods with enough hormone-stoked muscle to overlook the still-transparent patches on their skin. They inked their names so loudly Four Warm Currents could taste them before even jetting over.

“There’s been a threat of sorts,” Four Warm Currents signed, secreting a small dark privacy cloud to shade the conversation from workers filing onto the now-empty skiff. “Against the project. Radicals who may attempt sabotage.”

“We know,” signed the guard, whose name was a pungent Two Sinking Corpses. “The councillor told us. That’s why we have these.” Two Sinking Corpses hefted a conical weapon Four Warm Currents dimly recognized as a screamer, built to amplify a sonar burst to lethal strength. Nine Brittle Spines had not exaggerated the seriousness of the situation.

“Pray to the Leviathans you don’t have to use them,” Four Warm Currents signed, then joined the workers embarking on the skiff, tasting familiar names, slinging tentacles over knotted muscles, adding to a multilayered scent joke involving an aging councillor and a frost shark.

Spirits were high. The Drill was cutting smoothly. They were approaching the other side, and though for some that only meant the end of contract and full payment, others had also been infected by Four Warm Currents’s fervor.

“What will we see?” a worker signed. “Souls of the dead? The Leviathans themselves?”

“Nothing outside the physical laws,” Four Warm Currents replied, but then, sensing the disappointment: “But nothing like we have ever seen before. It will be unimaginable. Wondrous. And they’ll soak our names all through the memory sponges, to remember the brave explorers who first broke the ice.”

A mass of tentacles waved in approval of the idea. Four Warm Currents settled back as the skiff began to move and a wave of new debates sprang up.

The City of Bone was roughly spherical, a beautiful lattice of ancient skeleton swathed in sponge and cultivated coral, glowing ethereal blue with bioluminescence. It was older than any councillor, a relic of the dim past before the archives: a Leviathan skeleton dredged from the seafloor with buoyant coral, built up and around until it could float unsupported, tethered in place above the jagged rock bed.

Devotees believed the Leviathans had sacrificed their corporeal forms to leave city husks behind; Four Warm Currents shared the more heretical view that the Leviathans were extinct, and for all their size might have been no more intelligent than the living algae feeders that still hauled their bulk along the seafloor. It was not a theory to divulge in polite discourse. Drilling through the roof of the world was agitator enough on its own.

As the skiff passed the City of Bone’s carved sentinels, workers began to jet off to their respective housing blocks. Four Warm Currents was one of the last to disembark, having been afforded, as one of the council’s foremost engineers, an artful gray-and-purple spire in the city center. Of course, that was before the Drill. Nine Brittle Spines’s desire for a “sideshow” aside, Four Warm Currents felt the daily loss of council approval like the descending cold of a crevice. Relocation was not out of the realm of possibility.

For now, though, the house’s main door shuttered open at a touch, and, more importantly, Four Warm Currents’s mates were inside. Six Bubbling Thermals, sleek and swollen with eggs, drizzling ribbons of birth mucus like a halo, but with eyes still bright and darting. Three Jagged Reefs, lean and long, skin stained from a heavy work cycle in the smelting vents, submitting to a massage. Their taste made Four Warm Currents ache, deep and deeper.

“So our heroic third returns,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed, interrupting the massage and prompting a ruffle of protest.

“Have you ended the world yet?” Three Jagged Reefs added. “Don’t stop, Six. I’m nearly loose enough to slough.”

“Nearly,” Four Warm Currents signed. “I blacked a councillor. Badly.”

Both mates guffawed, though Six Bubbling Thermals’s had a nervous shiver to it.

“From how far?” Three Jagged Reefs demanded. “Could they tell it was yours?”

“From not even a tentacle away,” Four Warm Currents admitted. “We were in conversation.”

Three Jagged Reefs laughed again, the reckless, waving laugh that had made Four Warm Currents fall in love, but their other mate did not.

“Conversation about what?” Six Bubbling Thermals signed.

Four Warm Currents hesitated, tasting around to make sure a strong emotion hadn’t slipped the gland again, but the water was clear and cold and anxiety-free. “Nine Brittle Spines is a skeptic of the worst kind. Intelligent, but refusing to self-educate.”

“Did you not explain the density calculation?” Three Jagged Reefs signed plaintively.

Four Warm Currents moved to reply, then recognized a familiar mocking tilt in Three Jagged Reefs’s tentacles and turned the answer into a crude “floating feces” gesticulation.

“Tell us the mathematics again,” Three Jagged Reefs teased. “Nothing slicks me better for sex, Four. All those beautiful variables.”

Six Bubbling Thermals smiled at the back-and-forth, but was still lightly spackled with mauve worry. The birth mucus spiralling out in all directions made for an easy distraction.

“We need to collect again,” Four Warm Currents signed, gesturing to the trembling ribbons. “Or you’ll bury us in our sleep.”

“And then I’ll finally have the house all to my own,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed, cloying. But the mauve worry dissolved into flushed healthy pink as they all began coiling the mucus and storing it in coral tubing. Four Warm Currents stroked the egg sacs gently as they worked, imagining each one hatching into an altered world.

After they finished with the birth mucus and pricked themselves with a recreational skimmer venom, Three Jagged Reefs made them sample a truly terrible pheromone poem composed at the smelting vents between geysers.

The recitation was quickly cancelled in favor of hallucination-laced sex in which they all slid over and around Six Bubbling Thermals’s swollen mantle, probing and pulping, and afterward the three of them drifted in the artificial current, slowly revolving as they discussed anything and everything:

Colony annexation, the validity of aesthetic tentacle removal, the new eatery that served everything dead and frozen with frescoes carved into the flesh, so-and-so’s scent change, the best birthing tanks, the after-ache they’d had the last time they used skimmer venom. Anything and everything except for the Drill.

Much later, when the other two had slipped into a sleeping harness, Four Warm Currents jetted upward to the top of their gray-and-purple spire, coiling there to look out over the City of Bone. Revelers jetted back and forth in the distance, visible by blots of blue-green excitement and arousal. Some were workers from the Drill, Four Warm Currents knew, celebrating the end of a successful work cycle.

Four Warm Currents’s namesake parent had been a laborer of the same sort. A laborer who came home to cramped quarters and hungry children, but was never too exhausted to spin them a story, tentacles whirling and flourishing like a true bard. Four Warm Currents had been a logical child, always finding gaps in the tall tales of Leviathans and heroes and oceans beyond their own. But still, the stories had sunk in deep. Enough so that Four Warm Currents might be able to sign them to the children growing in Six Bubbling Thermals’s egg sacs.

There was no need for Nine Brittle Spines or the council to know it was those stories that had ignited Four Warm Currents’s curiosity for the roof of the world in the first place. Soon there would be new stories to tell. In seven, maybe eight more work cycles, they would break through.

After such a long percolation, the idea was dizzying. Four Warm Currents didn’t know what awaited on the other side. There were theories, of course. Many theories. Four Warm Currents had studied gas bubbles and knew that whatever substance lay beyond the ice was not water as they knew it, not nearly so heavy. It could very well be deadly. Four Warm Currents would take precautions, but—

The brush of a tentacle tip, a familiar taste. Six Bubbling Thermals had ballooned up to join the stillness. Four Warm Currents extended a welcoming clasp, and the rasp of skin on skin was a comforting one. Calming.

“Someone almost started a riot in the plaza today,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed.

The calm vanished. “Over what? Over the project?”

“Yes.” Six Bubbling Thermals stared out across the city with a long clicking burst, then turned to face Four Warm Currents. “They had artificial panic. In storage globes. Broke them wide open right as the market peaked. It was…” Tentacles wove in and out, searching for a descriptor. “Chaos.”

“Are you all right?” Four Warm Currents signed hard. “You should have told me. You’re birthing.”

Six Bubbling Thermals waved a quick-dying laugh. “I’m still bigger than you are. And I told Three Jagged Reefs. We agreed it would be best not to add to your stress. But I’ve never kept secrets well, have I?”

Another stare, longer this time. Four Warm Currents joined in, scraping sound across the architecture of the city, mapping curves and crevices, spars and spires.

“Before they were dragged off, they dropped one last globe,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed. “It was your name, fresh, mixed with a decay scent. They said you’re a monster, and if nobody stops you, you’ll end the world.”

Four Warm Currents shivered, clenched hard against the noxious fear threatening to tendril into the water. “Fresh?”

“Yes.”

Who had it been? Four Warm Currents thought of the many workers and observers jetting up and down the tunnel, bringing status reports, complaints, updates. Any one of them could have come close enough to coax their chief engineer’s name taste into a concealed globe. With a start, Four Warm Currents realized Six Bubbling Thermals was not gazing pensively over the city, but keeping watch.

“I know you won’t consider halting the project,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed. “But you need to be careful. Promise me that much.”

Four Warm Currents remembered the councillor’s warning and stroked Six Bubbling Thermals’s egg sacs with a trembling tentacle. “I’ll be careful. And when we break through, this will all go away. They’ll see there’s no danger.”

“And when will that be?” The mauve worry was creeping back across Six Bubbling Thermals’s skin.

“Soon,” Four Warm Currents signed. “Seven work cycles.”

They enmeshed their tentacles and curled against each other, bobbing there in silence as the City of Bone’s ghostly blue guide lights began to blink out one by one.

The first attack came three cycles later, after shift. A pair of free-swimmers, with their skins pumped pitch-black and a sonar cloak in tow, managed to bore halfway through the Drill’s protective shell before the guards spotted them and chased them off. The news came by a messenger whom Three Jagged Reefs, unhappily awoken, nearly eviscerated. Bare moments later, Four Warm Currents stroked goodbyes to both mates and took the skiff to the project site, tentacles heavy from sleep but hearts thrumming electric.

Nine Brittle Spines somehow contrived to arrive first.

“Four Warm Currents, it is a pleasure to see you so well rested.” The councillor’s tentacles moved as smoothly and blandly as ever, but Four Warm Currents could see the faintest of trembling at their tips. Mortal after all.

“I came as quickly as I was able,” Four Warm Currents signed, not rising to the barb. “Were either of the perpetrators identified?”

“No.” Nine Brittle Spines gave the word a twist of annoyance. “Assumedly they were two of yours. They knew the thinnest point of the shell and left behind a project-tagged auger.”

One tentacle produced the spiral tool and set it drifting between them. It was a miniature cousin to the behemoth Drill, used to sample ice consistency.

Four Warm Currents inspected the implement. “I’ll speak with inventory, but I imagine it was taken without their knowledge.”

“Do that,” Nine Brittle Spines signed. “In the meanwhile, security will be increased. We’ll have guards at all times from now on. Body searches for workers.”

Four Warm Currents waved a vague agreement, staring up at the burnished armor shell, the hole scored in its underbelly. The workers would not be happy, but they were so close now, too close to let anything derail the project. Four Warm Currents would agree to anything, so long as the Drill was safe.

Tension became a sharp, sooty tang overlaying every conversation, so much so that Four Warm Currents was given council approval for a globe of artificially mixed happiness to waft around the tunnel entrance. It ended being mostly sucked up by the guards, who were happy enough already to swagger around with screamers and combat hooks bristling in their tentacles, interrogating any particularly worry-spackled worker who happened to look their way.

Four Warm Currents complained to the councillor, but was soundly ignored, told only that the guards had been instructed to treat the project site and its crew with the utmost respect. Enthusiasm was now a thing of the past. Workers spoke rarely and with short tempers, and every time the Drill slowed or an error was found in its calibration, the possibility of sabotage hung in the tunnel like a decay scent. Four Warm Currents found a slip in the most recent density calculation that promised to put things back a full work cycle, but still the Drill churned.

At home, they began receiving death threats. Six Bubbling Thermals found the first, a tiny automaton that waved its stiff tentacles in a prerecorded message: “We won’t need a drill to puncture your eyes and every one of your eggs.” Three Jagged Reefs shredded it to pieces. Four Warm Currents gave the pieces to the council’s investigator.

Then, two cycles before breakthrough, black globes of artificial malice were slicked to their spire with adhesive and timed to burst while they slept. Only one went off, but it was enough to necessitate a pore-cleanse for Six Bubbling Thermals and a dedicated surveillance detail for the house.

Three Jagged Reefs fumed and fumed. “After the Drill breaks through, you’ll let me borrow it, won’t you?” The demand was jittery with skimmer venom, and made only once Six Bubbling Thermals, finally returned from the cleansing tanks, was out of sight range. “I’m going to find the shit-eater who blacked Six and stick them on the bit gland first.”

Three Jagged Reefs had been pulled from smelting after an incidence of “hazardously elevated emotions,” in which a copper-worker trilling about the impending end of the world had their tentacle held over a geyser until it turned to pulp. Staying in the house full cycle, under the watchful eyes and mouths of council surveillance, was not an easy transition. Not even stocked with high-quality venom.

“It’ll all be over soon,” Four Warm Current signed, mind half-filled, as was now the norm, with figures from the latest density calculation. One final cycle.

“Tell it to Six,” Three Jagged Reefs signed back, short and clipped, and turned away.

Four Warm Currents swam into the next room, to where their mate was adrift in the sleeping harness. The egg sacs were bulging now, slick with the constant emission of birth mucus, bearing no trace of black ichor stains. The cleansing tanks had reported no permanent damage. Four Warm Currents sent a gentle prod of sonar and elicited a twitch.

“I’m awake,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed, languid. “I’d sleep better with you two around me.”

“They’ll catch the lunatics who planted that globe,” Four Warm Currents signed back.

Six Bubbling Thermals signed nothing for a long moment, then waved a sad laugh. “I don’t think it’s lunatics. Not anymore. A lot of people are saying the same thing, you know.”

“Saying what?”

“You spend all of your time at the Drill, even when you’re here with us.” The accusation was soft, but it stung. “You haven’t been paying attention. The transit currents are full of devotees calling you a blasphemer. Saying you think yourself a Leviathan. Unbounded. The whole city is frightened.”

“Then it’s a city of idiots,” Four Warm Currents signed abruptly.

“I’m frightened. I have no shame admitting it. I’m frightened for our children. For them to have two parents only. One parent only. None. For them to never even hatch. Who knows?” Six Bubbling Thermals raised a shaky smile. “Maybe the idiot is the one who isn’t frightened.”

“But I’m going to give them an altered world, a new world…” Four Warm Currents’s words blurred as Six Bubbling Thermals stilled two waving tentacles.

“I don’t give a floating shit about a new world if it’s one where you take a hook in the back,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed back, slow and clear. “Don’t go to the Drill tomorrow. They’ll send for you when it breaks the ice.”

At first, Four Warm Currents didn’t even comprehend the words. After spending a third of a lifespan planning, building, lobbying, watching, the idea of not being there to witness the final churn, the final crack and squeal of ice giving away, was dizzying. Nauseating.

“If you go, I think you’ll be dead before you come home,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed. “You’re worth more to us alive for one more cycle than as a name taste wafting through the archives for all eternity.”

“I’ve watched it from the very start.” Four Warm Currents tried not to tremble. “Every turn. Every single turn.”

“And without you it moves no faster, no slower,” Six Bubbling Thermals replied. “Isn’t that what you say?”

“I have to be there.”

“You don’t.” Six Bubbling Thermals gave a weary shudder. “Is it a new world for our children, or only for you?”

Four Warm Currents’s tentacles went slack, adrift. The two of them stared at each other in the gloom, until, suddenly, something stirred in the egg sacs. The motion repeated, a faint but mesmerizing ripple. Six Bubbling Thermals gave a slight wriggle of pain.

Four Warm Currents climbed into the harness, turning acid blue in an apology that could not have been properly signed.

“I’ll stay. I’ll stay, I’ll stay.”

They folded against each other and spoke of other things, of the strange currents that had brought them together, the future looming in the birthing tanks. Then they slept, deeply, even when Three Jagged Reefs wobbled in to join them much later, nearly unhooking the harness with chemical-clumsy tentacles.

Four Warm Currents dreamt of ending the world, the Drill shearing through its final stretch of pale ice, and from the gaping wound in the roof of the world, a Leviathan lowering its head, eyes glittering, to swallow the engine and its workers and their blasphemous chief engineer whole, pulling its bulk back into the world it once abandoned, sliding through blackness toward the City of Bone, ready to reclaim its scattered body, to devour all light, to unmake everything that had ever been made.

Four Warm Currents awoke to stinging sonar and the silhouette of a familiar councillor drifting before the sleeping harness, flanked by two long-limbed guards.

“Wake your mates,” Nine Brittle Spines signed, with a taut urgency Four Warm Currents had never seen before. “All three of you have to leave.”

“What’s happening?”

“You’ll see.”

Four Warm Currents rolled, body heavy with sleep, and stroked each mate awake in turn. Three Jagged Reefs refused to rise until Six Bubbling Thermals furiously shook the harness, a flash of the old pre-birthing strength.

“Someone come to murder us?” Three Jagged Reefs asked calmly, once toppled free.

“You wouldn’t feel a thing with all that venom in you,” Four Warm Currents replied, less calmly.

“I barely pricked.”

“As said the Drill to the roof of the world,” Six Bubbling Thermals interjected.

Nine Brittle Spines flashed authoritative indigo, cutting the conversation short. “Your discussions can wait. I have a skiff outside. The guards will gather your things.”

The three of them followed the councillor out of the house, trailing long, sticky strands of Six Bubbling Thermals’s replenished birth mucus. Once they exited the shutter and were no longer filtered, a faint acrid flavor seeped to them through the water. The City of Bone tasted bitter with fear. Anger.

And that wasn’t all.

In the distance, Four Warm Currents could see free-swimmers moving as a mob, jetting back and forth through the city spires, carrying homegrown phosphorescent lamps and scent bombs. Several descended on a council-funded sculpture, smearing the stone with webbed black-and-red rage. Most continued on, heading directly for the city center.

For their housing block, Four Warm Currents realized with a sick jolt.

“The radical tangent has grown,” Nine Brittle Spines signed. “Considerably.”

“So many?” Four Warm Currents was stunned.

“Only thing people love more than a festival is a doomsday,” Three Jagged Reefs signed bitterly.

“Indeed. Your decriers have found support in many places, I’m afraid.” Nine Brittle Spines bent a grimace as they swam toward the waiting skiff, a closed and armored craft marked with an official sigil. “Including the council.”

Four Warm Currents stopped dead in the water. “But the Drill is still under guard.”

“The Drill is currently being converged upon by a mob twice this size,” Nine Brittle Spines signed. “Even without sympathizers in the security ranks, it would be futile to try to protect it. The council’s official position, as of this moment, is that your project has been terminated to save costs.”

Four Warm Currents tried to move and couldn’t; each mate had seized hold of enough tentacles to prevent an incidence of hazardously elevated emotions. Searing orange desperation was spewing into the water around them. Nine Brittle Spines made no remarks about self-control, only flashed, for the briefest instant, a pale blue regret.

“But we’re nearly through,” Four Warm Currents signed, trembling all over. Three Jagged Reefs and Six Bubbling Thermals now slowly slid off, eager for the safety of the skiff. Drifting away when they were needed most.

“Perhaps you are,” Nine Brittle Spines admitted. “Perhaps your theorems are sound. But stability is, at the present moment, more important than discovery.”

“If we go to the Drill.” Four Warm Currents shuddered to a pause. “If we go to the Drill, if we go now, we can stop them. I can explain to them. I can convince them.”

“You know better than that, Four Warm Currents. In fact—”

Whatever Nine Brittle Spines planned to say next was guillotined as Six Bubbling Thermals surged from behind, wrapping the councillor in full grip. In the same instant, Three Jagged Reefs yanked the skiff’s shutter open. Four Warm Currents stared at the writhing councillor, then at each mate in turn.

“Get on with it, Four,” Three Jagged Reefs signed. “Go and try.”

Six Bubbling Thermals was unable to sign, tentacles taut as a vice around Nine Brittle Spines, but the misty red cloud billowing into the water was the fiercest and most pungent love Four Warm Currents could remember tasting.

“Oh, wait.” Three Jagged Reefs glanced between them. “Six wanted to know if you have any necessary names.”

“None,” Four Warm Currents signed shakily. “So long as there are Thermals and Reefs.”

“Well, of course.” Three Jagged Reefs waved a haughty laugh that speared Four Warm Currents’s hearts all over again. The councillor had finally stopped struggling in Six Bubbling Thermals’s embrace and now watched the proceedings with an air of resignation. Four Warm Currents flashed a respectful pale blue, then turned and swam for the skiff.

They were hauling the Drill out of its carapace with hooks and bare tentacles, clouding the water with rage, excitement, amber-streaked triumph. Four Warm Currents abandoned the skiff for the final stretch, sucking back hard, jetting harder. The mob milled around the engine in a frenzy, too caught up to notice one late arrival.

Four Warm Currents screamed, dragging sonar across the crowd, but in the mess of motion and chemicals nobody felt the hard clicks. They’d brought a coring charge, one of the spiky half-spheres designed for blasting through solid rock bed to the nickel veins beneath. Four Warm Currents had shut down a foreman’s lobby for such explosives during a particularly slow stretch of drilling. Too volatile, too much blowback in a confined space. But now it was here, and it was going to shred the Drill to pieces.

Four Warm Currents jetted higher, above the chaos, nearly to the mouth of the tunnel. No eyes followed. Everyone was intent on the Drill and on the coring charge being shuffled toward it, tentacle by tentacle.

Four Warm Currents sucked back, angled, and dove. The free-swimmers towing the coring charge didn’t see the interloper until it was too late, until Four Warm Currents slid two tentacles deep into the detonation triggers and clung hard.

“Get away from me! Get away or I’ll trigger it right here!”

The crowd turned to a fresco of frozen tentacles, momentarily speechless. Then:

“Blasphemer,” signed the closest free-swimmer. “Blasphemer.”

The word caught and rippled across the mob, becoming a synchronized wave of short, chopping motions.

“The Drill is not going to end the world,” Four Warm Currents signed desperately, puffing up over the crowd, hauling the coring charge along. “It’s going to break us into a brand-new one. One we’ll visit at our choosing. The deep ocean will stay deep ocean. The Leviathans will stay skeletons. Our cities will stay safe.”

Something struck like a spar of bone, sending Four Warm Currents reeling. The conical head of a screamer poked out from the crowd, held by a young guard whose skin was no longer inked with the council’s sigil. The name came dimly to memory: Two Sinking Corpses. An unfamiliar taste was clouding into the water. It took a moment for Four Warm Currents to realize it was blood, blue and hot and saline.

“Listen to me!”

The plea was answered by another blast of deadly sound, this one misaimed, clipping a tentacle. Four Warm Currents nearly lost grip on the coring charge. The mob roiled below, waving curses, mottled black and orange with fury. There would be no listening.

“Stay away from me or I’ll trigger it,” Four Warm Currents warned once more, then jetted hard for the mouth of the tunnel. The renewed threat of detonation bought a few still seconds. Then the mob realized where the coring charge was headed, and the sleekest and fastest of them tore away in pursuit.

Four Warm Currents hurled up the dark tunnel, sucking back water in searing cold gulps and flushing faster and harder with each. Familiar grooves in the ice jumped out with a smatter of sonar, etchings warning against unauthorized entry. Four Warm Currents blew past with tentacles straight back, trailing the coring charge directly behind, gambling nobody would risk hitting it with a screamer.

A familiar bend loomed in the dark, one of the myriad small adjustments to course, and beyond it, the service lights, bundles of bioluminescent algae set along the walls, began blooming to life, painting the tunnel an eerie blue-green, casting a long-limbed shadow on the wall. Four Warm Currents chanced a look down and saw three free-swimmers, young and strong and gaining.

“Drop it!” one took the opportunity to sign. “Drop it and you’ll live!”

Four Warm Currents used a tentacle to sign back one of Three Jagged Reefs’s favorite gestures, reflecting that it was a bad idea when the young-blood’s skin flashed with rage and all three of them put on speed. The head start was waning, the coring charge was heavy, the screamer wound was burning.

But Four Warm Currents knew the anatomy of the tunnel better than anyone, better than even the foreman. The three pursuers lost valuable time picking their way through a thicket of free-floating equipment knocked from the wall, then more again deliberating where the tunnel branched, stubby memento of a calculation error.

Four Warm Currents’s hearts were wailing for rest as the final stretch appeared. The coring charge felt like lead. A boiling shadow swooped past, and Four Warm Currents realized they’d fired another screamer, one risk now outweighing the other. The roof of the world, stretched thin like a membrane, marred with the Drill’s final twist, loomed above.

Another blast of sonar, this one closer. Four Warm Currents throttled out a cloak of black ink, hoping to obscure the next shot, too exhausted to try to dodge. Too exhausted to do anything now but churn warm water, drag slowly, too slowly, toward the top.

The screamer’s next burst was half-deflected by the coring charge, but still managed to make every single tentacle spasm. Four Warm Currents felt the cargo slipping and tried desperately to regain purchase on its slick metal. So close, now, so close to the end of the world. Roof of the world. Either.

Thoughts blurred and collided in Four Warm Currents’s bruised brain. More blood was pumping out, bright blue, foul-tasting. Four Warm Currents tried to hold onto the exact taste of Six Bubbling Thermals’s love.

One tentacle stopped working. Four Warm Currents compensated with the others, shifting weight as another lance of sound missed narrowly to the side. The ice was almost within reach now, cold, scarred, layered with frost.

With one final, tendon-snapping surge, Four Warm Currents heaved the coring charge upward, slapping the detonation trigger as it went. The spiked device crunched into the ice and clung. Four Warm Currents tasted something new mixing into the blood, reaching amber tendrils through the leaking blue.

Triumph.

“Get out,” Four Warm Currents signed, clumsily, slowly. “It’s too late now.”

The pursuers stared for a moment, adrift, then turned and shot back down the tunnel, howling a sonar warning to the others coming behind. Four Warm Currents’s tentacles were going numb. Every body part ached or seared or felt like it was splitting apart. There would be no high-speed exit down the tunnel. Maybe no exit at all.

As the coring charge signed out its detonation sequence with mechanical tendrils, Four Warm Currents swam, slowly, to the side wall. A deep crevice ran along the length. Maybe deep enough.

Four Warm Currents squeezed, twisted, contorted, tucking inside the shelter bit by bit. It was an excruciating fit. Even a child would have preferred a wider fissure. Four Warm Currents’s eyes squeezed shut and saw Six Bubbling Thermals smiling, saw the egg sacs glossy and bright.

The coring charge went off like a volcano erupting. Such devices were designed, in theory, to deliver all but a small fraction of the explosive yield forward. The tiny fraction of blowback was still enough to shatter cracks through the tunnel walls and send a sonic boom rippling down its depth, an expanding globe of boiling water that scalded Four Warm Currents’s exposed skin.

The tentacle that hadn’t managed to fit inside was turned to mush in an instant, spewing denatured flesh and blood in a hot cloud. All of Four Warm Currents’s senses sang with the explosion, tasting the fierce chemicals, feeling the heat, seeing with sonar the flayed ice crumbling all around.

Then, at last, it was over. Four Warm Currents slithered out of the crack, sloughing skin on its edges, and drifted slowly upward. It was a maelstrom of shredded ice and swirling gases, bubbles twisting in furious wreaths.

Four Warm Currents floated up through the vortex, numb to the stinging debris and swathes of scalding water. The roof of the world was gone, leaving a jagged dark hole in the ice, a void that had been a dream and a nightmare for cycles and cycles. Four Warm Currents rose to it, entranced.

One trembling tentacle reached upward and across the rubicon. The sensation was indescribable. Four Warm Currents pulled the tentacle back, stared with bleary eyes, and found it still intact. The other side was scorching cold, a thousand tingling pinpricks, a gauze of gas like nothing below. Nothing Four Warm Currents had ever dreamed or imagined.

The chief engineer bobbed and bled, then finally gathered the strength for one last push, breaking the surface of the water completely. The feel of gas on skin was gasping, shivering. Four Warm Currents craned slowly backward, turning to face the void, and looked up.

Another ocean, far deeper and vaster than theirs, but not empty. Not dark. Not at all. Maybe it was a beautiful hallucination, brought about by the creeping failure of sense organs. Maybe it wasn’t.

Four Warm Currents watched the new world with eyes and mouth, secreting final messages down into the water, love for Six Bubbling Thermals, for Three Jagged Reefs, for the children who would sign softly but laugh wildly, and then, as numbing darkness began to seep across blurring eyes, under peeling skin, a sole suggestion for a necessary name.