Dreamfish

“Ilya, do you ever dream about the Leviathans?”

by Anemone

Ilya is falling. The water flows over his skin, warm and saline and full of little fish smaller than his eyes can see. His body, so sensitive to cold he must cover it with neoprene even at the equator, is entirely naked, yet he feels no chill and no shame. He isnʼt even wearing goggles or a noseclip, he doesnʼt know why his lungs arenʼt full of water. He falls fetal, head below his waist, and in the distance, he sees the long slants of sunlight flashing between schools of fish — little minnowettes like golden arrowheads, and larger sheerwyrms that look like rainbows, and flying needlefish that frighten sailors. There are jellies too, millions of them, clouds of them making way as he sinks towards them. As if he were plummeting into a crowd on a city street on a rainy day, into a sea of umbrellas. As he falls past them, he sees their trailing tentacles and the kitefish tangled up in them, their bodies twitching against the stinging cells. A few neoremorae keep pace with him for a while, but they think better of clinging to his skin. In fact, all the creatures he sees are making way for him, as if he were a prince in an old storybook, from the days when there were still princes, from the days when people told stories about kings.

He can feel the weight of the water compressing the air inside his lungs. He is heavier than the water around him now, falling past the twenty-meter line of no return, yet somehow he isnʼt frightened. As the gas in his lungs compresses and the water around him darkens, a murmur wells in his mind, the voices from below rising in his head until suddenly, in the hadal blackness star-flecked with luminescent firesharks, he hears the voices of the Leviathans.

Ilya, they say. Dear Ilya. So fragile. Like all your people.

Ilya, do you know our child? The child from another world.

Ilya — 

Will you keep them safe?

Their voices fade. For a moment, as he opens his eyes, he remembers Earth-that-was, the voice of his aunt, the taste of tea mixed with blackcurrant jam, the crackle of wood in a stove. Then his eyes adjust to Persephoneʼs long twilight, and he remembers that his aunt grew old and died in what felt like days to him while the Mirǔ carried him and his mother and a million other people to Persephone at almost the speed of light. He can’t remember his aunt’s voice anymore than he can remember the Leviathansʼ. He can’t remember his mother’s, either.

Itʼs early, according to his clock, but outside, the sun is setting. Tonight, it touches the water after seventeen Earth-days: the first kiss, the fisherfolk call it. Only three more days before night. He stares out the window of his room for a long time at the great pink spots of Demeter up above and the globe-spanning green of Persephoneʼs ocean below, and then the clock next to the door of his room chimes. He buttons up his vest — he’s very fussy about his uniform. In fact, he’s the only student who still wears one — and sets off to get his breakfast.

---

Today is an important day: they’re going to visit San’s Reef. He and the other members of the diving team have been preparing for more than a month; they’ve planned the trip as a surprise for the new student, Aki Heikkilä. For once, Ilya feels proud of himself; he helped the Diving Instructor, Xie, arrange everything. He put so much effort into it, even though he and Aki aren’t particularly close. They’re in the same study group, they’re both on the diving team, but the truth is, they’ve barely spoken to each other since Aki arrived.

Aki came to school on the seaplane that delivers letters and packages. Everyone wanted to meet them — thereʼs less than a hundred students at the school, so the students are always desperate to meet someone new — but, for reasons Ilya couldnʼt quite understand, the teachers only wanted a small group to greet Aki. Xie told Ilya that Aki was sensitive to crowds and loud noises, which Ilya did understand, but what he didnʼt understand was why were the teachers so worried about them? They were just another new student from offworld. No one worried this much when he came here five years ago, to this tiny school on top of a derelict deuterium siphon in the middle of the sea. He remembers how odd Aki looked stepping out of the plane, tall and gangly with massive, unblinking eyes, looking simultaneously older and younger than the students — most of them eleven or twelve, Ilya’s age — who were allowed to greet them.

In the refectory, Ilya sits down at the table in the northeast corner, where he always sits and eats kasha and fish soup for breakfast. He can hear the other students chattering around him — mainly in Tok, Persephone’s common creole, but in other languages, too. He remembers how Aki introduced themself after they got off the plane — they spoke Tok so fluently it made him jealous. Ilya’s spoken almost nothing else for five years, and he still worries that he isn’t fluent, even though no one’s allowed to bully him for that, not here.

He always sits alone. He used to feel lonely, but now he hopes other people won’t sit with him, and today, as yesterday, no one does. He finishes his breakfast and goes to wait for the other divers in the garden.

The school rests on top of the old siphon like a layer of barnacles. A rough semicircle of stone and concrete towers, all sloped and with domed roofs to cast off rain and keep it from being blown away, sheltering a central garden of guavas and lemons and casuarinas between them and the solar arrays on the north side of the siphon. The trees, like all Persephoneʼs trees, are from Earth-that-was. Outside, thereʼs nothing: just the little floating harbor where the seaplanes and packet-clippers come in, and the distant white slivers of lighthouses and wind turbines, and the bluegreen sea.

The siphon keeps them alive. It canʼt collect deuterium anymore — the Leviathans saw to that — but the wind and solar arrays nearby keep it running well enough to desalinate the water, between that and the rain-collectors, theyʼve never run low. Theyʼre lucky to have it at all, considering what it was designed for. The Leviathans are generous: the world below the ocean’s surface belongs to them, and humans live on the little land above it as their guests.

Ilya’s the first person here, the way he usually is. Heʼs thinking about whether or not to play the piano that stands inside the garden peristyle or take a walk under the trees, when he sees Xie coming and — oh no — Koa, the biology teacher, is with her. He presses himself against one of the peristyle pillars and prays that they havenʼt seen him. Theyʼre getting closer, and he can hear their voices:

“You’re having second thoughts?” says Koa, in Tok.

“I don’t know,” says Xie. “Aki’s doctor said it was safe as long as their meds are working. But — maybe I’m biased. Maybe I want this too much. I can’t stand the way Maryam talks about them — the anomaly — as if they were some kind of science experiment gone wrong. As if we can’t take our eyes off them for more than a second, or the world will end.”

“What if you take them in a nautilus?”

“They’re claustrophobic, remember. We can’t put them in a submarine.”

“Yes, itʼs just — youʼre taking them to a reef. What if they get engulfed by fish? What if something stings them, and they lash out — ”

“Iʼm not locking them inside a metal coffin, Koa! Iʼm not doing that to them again.”

Ilya wants to run away, he would rather be anywhere else, but he canʼt resist peeking out from the shadows. Theyʼre standing under one of the casuarinas. Xie’s arms are crossed over her chest. Her body is all right angles under her dark clothes, broad shoulders, bony wrists, and sharp collarbones. She looks so small next to Koa, who is tall and fat and always smiling, whose hair falls to her waist, and whose arms, brawny and covered in zigzagging tattoos, are always visible. She touches Xieʼs face, and Ilya wonders if Xie is crying. Heʼs afraid that sheʼs crying. It would be wrong to see that. Theyʼre speaking quietly, but he hears snatches of their words:

“What if the child is like Aki?” says Xie.

“Then weʼll give them what they need. We wonʼt lock them up.”

“What we? I shouldn’t have — ”

He shouldnʼt be able to hear them from this far away, but he doesnʼt wonder about that until later. He hears a little more, then nothing.

“You shouldnʼt want this,” says Xie. “You shouldnʼt want a child who’s like that. Itʼs wrong.”

“No one is born wrong, Xie.”

Ilya is confused — who are they talking about? But mostly, he’s just terrified they’ll see him. Eventually, he works up the nerve to creep away, back into the hallway, to wait for the other divers. He hopes Ezinma won’t show up for a while, so of course, she’s the first person he sees, skipping down the hall in shiny sandals and a red dress, grinning at him. Ilya doesn’t like her — she used to chase him around when they were seven, and now she always wants to play cello with him when he wants to play the piano by himself.

“Suno bona!” she says — hello, in Tok. Ilya forces himself to smile, nod, and follow her outside. Koa is still there, but a few of the other divers have arrived. Bernard, the oldest, is talking to his friend Rebecca in signed Tok, and Xochitl is playing cat’s cradle under one of the trees — Ilya’s glad she’s there, it means Ezinma will go talk to her and leave him alone. He sits down on a bench while the others talk and play games. He imagines trying to talk to one of them — just asking to practice sign with Bernard, who is kind and funny — but the thought of trying to talk to someone he doesn’t already know makes him feel ill.

Aki arrives last, running even though they’re only two minutes late. Ilya still can’t get over how strange they look, with their freckles, massive eyes, and long white hair. They’re as tall as Xie, taller than any of the other students, and Ilya wonders if they’re ever self-conscious about it. He would be. He remembers how humiliating it was years ago when he went on a field trip to Fairview, Persephone’s capital, and saw other people’s faces changing when he tried to speak Tok, giving him looks that said: Oh, I thought you were one of us. But Aki doesn’t look like they’re afraid of what other people think. They look excited, the way Ezinma always does, but more open. They look like they want to talk to everybody.

“All right,” says Xie. “Everyone’s ready? Good. Todayʼs a very important day. Today, weʼre going to go diving at San’s Reef. And — ”

She smiles, eyes pausing ever so briefly on Aki.

“Iʼm not sure all of you know why weʼre going diving today,” she says. “Can anybody tell us?”

Harriet practically jumps out of her shoes. “The dreamfish are hatching today!” she squeals.

Harriet’s the youngest diver. She wears shoes with floral stickers on them and never ties the laces, and for this reason — and also because of how loud she is — Ilya can’t stand her. He imagines how dirty those laces get, with her stepping on them constantly — gross.

“Yes,” says Xie. “Today, the dreamfish are going to hatch. Does anyone have any questions?”

Aki raises their hand. “What are dreamfish?” they say.

Xie glances at Koa — her smile falters — then back at the students. As is common at the school, she encourages the students to participate: “Can anyone answer Akiʼs question?”

Harriet is about to leap up again, but Xie nods to Ezinma, who speaks instead.

“Theyʼre a really important part of the reefʼs ecosystem,” says Ezinma. “They eat the algae and lilymats that grow on the sea’s surface. If they didnʼt, the algae would suck up all the oxygen and block out all the sunlight, and the reef would die, and all the other fish would die too.”

“Yes,” says Xie. “Dreamfish almost died out in this area, because when the siphons were built, they lowered the oxygen in the water, and the noise they made scared the fish away. Now that the siphons have been turned off, theyʼre starting to come back. Koa and her students have been helping the doctors at the San Reef Lighthouse prepare the dreamfish eggs for two months, and now theyʼve been planted on the reef, and since theyʼre lab-cultured, we know exactly when theyʼre going to hatch.”

“But why are they called dreamfish?” says Aki.

None of the students volunteer to answer, so Koa does.

“Because they’re poisonous,” she says. “Itʼs how they keep themselves from being eaten since they live close to the surface, where predators can see them. But the poison isnʼt fatal to humans. It just makes you see things that arenʼt there. Thatʼs why theyʼre called dreamfish.”

Aki looks frightened. Xie laughs: “Donʼt worry, weʼll watch them from a distance, you won’t get poisoned.”

“Are you coming with us, Koa?” says Rebecca, the oldest diver.

“No,” says Koa. “I’m afraid I’m busy today. Goodbye, everybody — safe travels!”

She glances at Xie — who struggles to meet her eyes — and turns away. Xie claps her hands: “All right, the seaplaneʼs waiting for us.

Ilya walks alongside Xie at the back of the group while the others go ahead. They walk down the steps that lead to the siphon’s floating harbor. It’s a long, long staircase, brightly lit with blue-green lamps, the low ceiling covered by a thicket of steel pipes. Xie calls after Aki and Harriet, warning them not to run down the stairs. Ilya watches her.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says. “Why do you ask?”

“You seemed a little nervous before when Koa was with us.”

“Koa and I just disagree about certain things, that’s all,” says Xie. She hesitates, then continues: “Listen, Ilya, you’re a responsible student, so I’m going to ask a favor of you. If something happens and I need to help someone else, please keep an eye on Aki. Can you do that?”

Ilya nods. He isn’t sure why Xie wants him to watch Aki, but he trusts her. She’s the closest thing he has to family now; he likes helping her.

They reach the bottom of the stairs. A door opens onto a wooden platform shaped like a hand, its five long fingers stretched over the surface of the sea. The red and white seaplane is floating at the end of the nearest finger; its pilot sits outside with her back against a coil of rope, drinking coffee. She stands up as they approach and calls their names for them to board: “Adichie, Ezinma — Donovan, Harriet — Fernandez, Xochitl — ”

Ilya keeps his distance from the others; some of them have never been on a plane before and look nervous. Finally the pilot calls him, last on the list — “Sagong, Ilya” — and he steps inside and sits across from Aki, who is craning their neck to look out the window. The planeʼs electric engine whirs.

“Isnʼt this cool?” says Aki. They sound so happy and cheerful that itʼs hard to understand why everyone is constantly worried about them.

“What is?” says Ilya.

“Flying.”

---

Itʼs a cloudless day, which is rare on Persephone. The plane casts a blackbird shadow on the water below, the only darkness on its surface. There are no birds on Persephone, no bats, no flying bugs except the honeybees humans keep for pollination. The few islands that dot its surface were barren when humans came here, except for burrowing crabs and glassworms and a few spiny, flowerless plants. The silence of Persephone above water is profound, the silence of a world unformed. Below the water, though, there is life, so much of it it would have shamed the oceans of the Earth-that-was even before they boiled and died in the carbonic smog. Ilya remembers what Koa taught him and the others when he was only six and had just come to the school: the Leviathans say this world has been alive for five billion years, since before Demeter drifted close to the sun, since the time when the surface of the ocean was frozen hard, and the fish below swam in darkness.

Ilya is suddenly distracted by a gagging sound: it’s Aki, vomiting into an air sickness bag. He glimpses the inside of the bag: yellow bile, nothing solid. It occurs to him that Aki might not have eaten before they left; it doesnʼt occur to him to mention this to Xie.

“I thought you liked flying,” he says, from across the aisle.

“I do. But Iʼm so dizzy. The food on this world is terrible, you know — I don’t think I’ve had one good meal here. And they make me take so many pills, itʼs not fair! Do you have to take pills?”

“No,” says Ilya, and then, not knowing why, he says, “I get injections.”

“Ouch! What for? What kind of illness do you have?”

Ilya frowns. The word that Aki uses, illness, isnʼt common in Tok. In Tok the word for illness and the word for parasite are the same word — gotomban — an illness is, by definition, something separate from you. But Ilyaʼs desire to be Ilya is obviously his own, isnʼt it? He can drive himself crazy thinking about these things. Sometimes, heʼs angry, because he feels wrong, and the nurse says, no one is born wrong. Well, she doesnʼt have to take meds, does she?

“I donʼt have a parasite,” says Ilya. “I think youʼre misusing that word.”

“Well, why do you get shots then?”

“Because I want to look like the other boys,” Ilya snaps, and Aki doesnʼt speak to him for a long time. Xie gets up to give the group a sign language drill to make sure theyʼll be able to communicate underwater; Bernard, whoʼs been using sign longer than the rest of them, helps her. After theyʼre done, Bernard sits down in the seat in front of Ilya.

“This is cool,” says Aki. “Why is your sign language so good?”

“My parents are Deaf,” says Bernard.

“Oh,” says Aki. They glance between Bernard and Ilya. “Okay — when I say illness, what does that mean?”

“Something thatʼs not a part of you”, says Ilya. “Like the parasite worms you catch if you eat rotten fish.”

“I see,” says Aki. “In my dictionary, it said it meant something else.”

Aki takes a Cetian-to-Tok dictionary out of their backpack and flips through it.

“In Cetian, you would say takto,” they say. “But that word can mean anything. It could mean worms, or cancer, or a fever. Anything that — how do you say it? I know — anything that impairs normal functioning.”

Saying this in Tok is complicated — it requires several words that aren’t used very often, and Ilya is kind of impressed. He’s disturbed, too. He looks at Bernard, too confused to speak; Bernard is more direct.

“What’s normal?” he says. “My mom’s Deaf. Not hearing is normal for her!”

Aki looks shocked, even hurt. Ilya steps in before Bernard starts shouting: “You’re misusing that word: normal. You think it just means that one thing is like other things — maybe that’s what it means in Cetian. But in Tok, it means when you try to make one thing like other things. When you make someone who’s left-handed use their right hand, for example — or when you don’t let Deaf people use sign.”

“Oh no! That’s not what I meant . . . maybe in Cetian when we say something’s normal, we mean however a person is most of the time. So, I’m always left-handed, but I don’t always have a fever. Having a fever isn’t normal.”

“People used to say that about being Deaf,” Bernard grumbles. “Or left-handed. Maryam was teaching us about that.”

Maryam is the history teacher. She was paralyzed from the waist down during a protest on one of the police ships; she has chronic pain, and Ilya finds this frightening, even though he knows it’s bad to feel that way about her, to wince internally when he sees her, as if she weren’t a person, but a warning of what happens when people question authority. He isn’t the only student who’s afraid of her. Her lessons are long and hard, and they make the past seem like a very gloomy place to have been born.

The trouble is, Ilya would like to think he’s normal — that’s why he’s so familiar with that word. He’d like to think he isn’t sick. But whatever it is that separates him from other people, he can’t remember it not being there — cannot remember a time before he felt the way he did in the quarantine wing on Mirǔ, after the flu killed his mother and left him so weak that he had to speak to the doctors through a translucent plastic tent. Which means that that barrier — that wall of plastic, or maybe glass, that stands between him and everyone else — that is his normal, it’s part of him. And when he wishes it wasn’t there, what he’s really wishing is that he didn’t exist.

And sometimes he feels like he shouldn’t exist, like just for him to exist is wrong, somehow. He once overheard a teacher talking about him — a disorder of empathy, they said — and when he looked up that word, empathy, in a dictionary, he felt afraid. He began to worry that his feelings — his desire to be friends with Bernard, or his fear of upsetting Xie — were less real than the feelings of the other children, that they were somehow false and fake, a poor imitation of human feelings and desires he had constructed in his solitude, on the other side of the wall.

Rebecca suddenly breaks in. She’s been listening to the three of them talk, and she’s lost her patience. She turns around and kneels on her seat so that she can face them over the backrest:

“We donʼt punish people for how theyʼre born here,” she says. “Thatʼs what the first landers decided, after the Leviathans made them turn off the siphons. We would take care of everybody, and we wouldnʼt take more than we needed for that.”

Aki looks at their hands.

“It’s not like that,” they mumble. “We don’t punish people for how they were born, either. Our world’s a good place. Much nicer than this one.”

“What’s so nice about it?” says Bernard.

“Oh, don’t get them started — ” Rebecca groans.

“The food’s better,” says Aki. “We have so much of it — we eat three times a day, not two. And one of our days last twenty hours, not five hundred — you don’t have to cover up your windows when you go to bed. And it doesn’t rain all the time, either. In the summer, it stays sunny and dry out for months!”

No one says anything. Eventually Aki looks at their hands, and Rebecca sits down, and Ilya turns back to the window.

The lighthouse appears below, a short limestone tower perched on a scrap of basalt. The plane splashes down in the water and draws up to a concrete pier, where the scientists are waiting for them. The water below is already teeming with fish; the pilot takes off her boots and puts her feet in the water, so they can nibble away her calluses.

Aki is confused by the scientists because they say they expect them all to wear white coats. This gets a big laugh from Ezinma and the other girls, and Aki looks embarrassed and stands on the edge of the group. The scientists give them a quick lecture on what they should and shouldnʼt do — donʼt touch this species, or this one, or that one — and they go to put on their wetsuits. Ilya waits to use one of the private changing rooms, like he always does. He puts on a full bodysuit that covers everything but his hands and head in black neoprene patterned with yellow triangles. Covers more than most of the other children do, more even than Xie, who keeps her arms bare when she swims, to give herself a greater range of motion.

They climb into a skiff and motor away from the lighthouse, sunlight flaring pink and yellow off its lenses. The scientist piloting the boat cuts the engine.

“Here should be all right,“ he says. “You can swim the rest of the way, itʼs not far to where we put the eggs.”

Xie instructs them to put on their gillmasks and stabilizer belts. The maskʼs silver comb slips into Ilyaʼs mouth, the pressure on his tongue making him feel slightly nauseous, but only for a moment. He watches Aki struggle with their mask for a moment; Aki doesnʼt like how the suits feel, so they’re wearing one that leaves their arms and legs exposed. Itʼs red and white, like the seaplane’s hull — more brightly colored than the others, as if they were trying to set themself apart. Xie climbs out of the boat, and the divers swim after her. She turns to face them.

“Everyone ready? Masks and belts fastened?”

The divers sign: Yes.

“On three,” Xie says. “1–2 — ”

She rolls over and spreads her arms, pulling herself downward, and Ilya doesnʼt wait for anyone else to follow first. He feels a chill pass over him as his head sinks into the sea.

---

At first thereʼs nothing. Only little champagne bubbles of carbon dioxide streaming out from the filtercones of the mask on Ilyaʼs face. He glances to the side and sees the others swimming downward; bodies made visible by the shimmering patterns on their suits and the streams of bubbles rising from their masks. All except for Xie, whose mask releases nothing; she can hold her breath underwater for five minutes. She’s already below them, looking up, making sure theyʼre all there. Behind her, the reef emerges, first dark, then lit up like a flower bed with millions of growing things. First are the parasol corals, their pink limbs spread out like sheets of candy with minnowettes and tiger jellies sheltering beneath them, then the stained glass antlers of sword corals and the multicolored polyhedra of Persephoneʼs endemic sponges. Ilya remembers, for a moment, how afraid he was when he first came here; the fear seems bizarre to him now. How could he ever have been afraid of this place? An eel peeks out at him from the crevice between two anemones; their narrow snout and beady eyes look very cute to him, but he knows the eel will bite his hand if he approaches. He touches his collar; the suit, which was so tight and uncomfortable the first time he wore it, feels like a second skin now. He adjusts his stabilizer, falling towards the top of a parasol. A thicket of fancoral and seafern is growing on top of it, as if it were a little island thrust up above the reef’s foundation. The corals can grow to enormous sizes on Persephone, whose gravity is much weaker than that of Earth-that-was. He floats just above the tips of the seaferns, suspended from himself, not thinking, not trapped in his own skull, only seeing the fish that surround him.

He looks at the others. He sees Harriet, who is afraid of deep water, holding Ezinmaʼs hand, and Bernard floating in a column of jellyfish, and Xie, floating above a luminescent beacon atop one of the parasols, signing to him to come close to the group. Then he realizes sheʼs actually signing to Aki, who is further away from the others than even he is, floating almost immobile above a thicket of organpipe sponges. They swim back towards the group alongside Ilya, their face a jumble of emotion behind the silver mask.

So much life, they sign to Ilya, fingerspelling the words they canʼt sign.

Everyone good? Xie signs. Masks working? No ear problems?

They swim together towards the next beacon, steadily descending through the canopy of parasols. In their shade there are vast beds of shellfish, like silver coins scattered in a fountain, and black, glassy rock cobwebbed with redbrown bacteria. Ilya swims after the others, following them down a path that winds between towering jade fancorals and red seaflowers that flutter at them like a million wiggling tongues. Some of the other children have put their hands in the seaflowers; Xochitl is laughing, the cones of her mask bubbling like two cauldrons. Aki hesitates, then plunges their hands into the flowers. Their mask begins to bubble frantically, too. They withdraw one for a moment in order to wave at Ilya, but Ilya shakes his head and fingerspells: I’m ticklish.

The first time Ilya touched them, he almost had a seizure. It’s been more than a year now, but he doesn’t want to risk it. He can still get overstimulated here, even if stimulation is the point, even if the goal is to break down the wall that stands in between him and the rest of the world, the wall that makes him feel like he never left the quarantine wing on the Mirǔ.

On they swim, past sheerwyrm nests and tethered urchins that float in the water like spiny balloons, past a dead shark swarming with iridescent blue crabs, down a narrow ravine where they watch neoremorae sucker themselves to the bellies of sea-elephants, until they finally reach the last marker, a little stripe of glowing paint at the top of steep cliffside. The rocks below are terraced with corals like wood ears, thinning out as they slope towards the center of the caldera from which the reef emerged. The dreamfish are down there; eggs cached out of sight where no watervipers will find them.

How long? Bernard signs to Xie.

Xie checks her watch. Soon, she signs. Donʼt wander far.

Ilya watches the terraces. There are fish with long tongues down there, like the tongues of anteaters, flickering into the anemones to catch the minowettes that hide under their tentacles. The fish swim so fast their bodies blur in the water — not fast enough, though. As one flits towards the rock face, a sheerwyrm, face orange-flecked with sea lice, lunges out, catches the fish at the middle, and drags it into its den, leaving only a wisp of black blood in the water.

The fish of Persephone, Ilya has read, resemble fish from Earth-that-was, only they grow bigger in the low gravity and with more eyes. Their eyes are arranged in rings around their mouths, so that their faces look like flowers blooming as they bare their many slender teeth. Rebecca was telling him about that; she was in suspended animation for her voyage to Persephone, so her memories of Earth-that-was are still clear in her mind. But that seems to make her more reluctant to talk about it, not less — Ezinma will talk forever about her memories of London, but it would be easier to pull one of Rebecca’s teeth out than make her talk about Tauranga.

The three of them are the only ones who can remember Earth-that-was at all. The others were born here, or on other worlds, or inside the gargantuan sprawl of the refugee ships. He turns to look at Aki — their body half hidden by the limbs of fandancer corals — and wonders what their world is like, if it’s actually as nice as they say, with continents where fields of wheat and rice grow as wide as the horizon. If people there never worry what will happen when the food runs out.

Xie pulls the cord of a water-whistle to get their attention. The sound is like someone crying on the other side of a thick wall.

Itʼs starting, she signs.

Ilya swims towards the cliffside, waving for Aki to follow him. As they approach, he sees Ezinma fiddling with an underwater camera. She smiles at him through the gillmask; it makes for a weird smile. Doesn’t she ever leave anyone alone? he wonders.

A silver body flashes in one of the long striations of the coral surface below. Ilya thinks he might have imagined them, but then he sees them again, and realizes what they are. Heʼs seen a video of this before, but heʼs never watched them hatch in person. They draw water into their eggs at first, no one is quite sure why, but first they swell, shining like mother-of-pearl, and then they rupture. Something rises from the egg sac, glassy skin wrapped around the little red and blue beads of newborn organs, but as they rise into the sunlight, their skin thickens, grows opaque and silver, and then begins to change. They are born with the ability to change color in the light, and they are using it to talk. There are dozens of them now, bodies growing from the size of tadpoles to human hands in just moments, inflated with air to frighten predators as they float towards the surface. Bits of egg case trail from their dorsal and anal fins like strings of tinsel. Ilya watches them rising, the colors of the school flickering from yellow to pink to a bright green-gold as signals pass between the fish. Some of them display two colors at once, one on their left and one on their right, to send messages in different directions. They have followed a different evolutionary path than most of Persephoneʼs creatures; unlike the other fish, who have eyes in a ring around their mouths, the dreamfish have a little bony crest between their eyes, obstructing their view from the front; for their whole lives they will see everything to the left and the right of themselves, but nothing at the center.

Ilya glances at Aki; they look back at him and wiggle their fingers, at a loss for anything to sign. Finally, they fingerspell, laughing into their gillmask: They’re so pretty.

Ilya laughs, the sound of the bubbles registering faintly in his mind.

I know, he signs. Their ribbons are so pretty.

He fingerspells the word ribbons, pointing to the egg-case strands that trail after the rising dreamfish. Aki nods. I wonder what they feel like, they sign.

Above them, the fish are beginning to spread out below, nibbling the algae mats that mottle the surface of the water. A few of the largest ones swim down, to escort the more recently hatched. They are eating the long ribbons that hang from the fins and spines of the newborns; while Ilya watches them do this he begins to feel very sad, and he isnʼt sure why. He is suddenly knocked off balance by something: Ezinma has just bumped into him while trying to take pictures with her camera.

Stop that, he signs. Go somewhere else!

She waves him off with her free hand.

You’re no fun, she fingerspells, which isnʼt entirely unfair. She wouldnʼt be the first person to tell him that — or even the twentieth — but still, he almost wants to grab the camera and chuck it down the water column. Instead, he throws a handful of sand at her, clouding the lens. She recoils and shakes her fist at him, signing so quickly that the movements blur into meaningless, vengeful gesticulation. He barely notices the expression on her face change behind the mask. She grabs his shoulder, suddenly panicking.

Aki! she fingerspells, pointing past him.

Ilya turns, but Aki isnʼt there anymore. They’re swimming past the edge of the upper terraces, out into the open water, towards the dreamfish. They reach out and catch a strand of egg case in their fingers, like a length of silver hair. They look back at Ilya and Ezinma, and Ilya thinks he can see them smiling through the mask.

Look, Aki signs.

Xie is blowing her whistle, waving for Aki to come back, but they barely seem to hear her. They wave to Ilya.

Come here, they sign. Theyʼre so pretty — 

But before they can finish the sign, a sheerwyrm flashes out from below them so fast its body blurs in the water. Ilya isn’t sure if the wyrm has hit Aki or not, Aki jerks aside so violently he canʼt tell. The wyrm swims past Aki, body glowing like a tongue of flame, and seizes one of the dreamfish in their mouth. The dreamfish bursts like a balloon, black blood staining the water, and the sheerwyrm — immune to poison, like all their kind — disappears, darting away with the body. Aki twists and kicks away from the bloody water, legs thrashing, hands fumbling with their mask — they seem to have breathed blood into it — Ilya almost wants to scream at them: Donʼt take it off — donʼt take it off — 

Xie is already swimming towards them. Ezinma has grabbed Ilyaʼs hand and is trying to pull him towards the rest of the group — 

The murmur Ilya heard in his dream is coming back — 

He sees Aki’s eyes changing through the visor of their mask. They were green a moment ago, but now they’re red, so red like fire, and then black, black without whites, so dark Ilya canʼt tell where theyʼre looking anymore. They thrash away from Xie’s hands, and when she tries to grab them they seize her mask in both their hands, steam erupting from between their fingers. He tries to swim towards them. He wants to shout at Aki to let go of her, except he can’t shout; the comb of the gillmask is in his mouth, and all he can think about is how this is all his fault. Aki was right next to me and I did nothing. It’s very dark — when did it get so dark? — but then the light comes back, the water is breathing, breathing in the light above, it’s so much brighter than it was before, and below him white spots have opened on the fan-dancers, they are watching him with a million eyes, like the tails of the peacocks he has only ever seen in picture books. He closes his eyes and their eyes come with him, following him as he walks down a lattice of intertwining triangles made out of stained glass. He wonders how he got to this place. It’s dry now, very dry and warm, except that there’s this awful damp thing clinging to his face — don’t take it off — 

Ilya opens his eyes. His head hurts like it’s being crushed in a hydraulic press. The corals around him are a blur of color. He thinks it’s just the tentacles sprouting from their polyps, but then he realizes that they are shifting more violently. It’s like he’s watching them grow and die in only seconds. He can see the tallest parasol corals, the ancient ones that carry thickets of seafern on their canopies, growing old and young in turn, some of them shrinking back to the first clusters of polyps they grew from, and others bleaching and withering until they topple slowly through the water. Silt rises in a cloud as one of them falls, and in the cloud, he sees Ezinma floating, vomit leaking out of her mask. The pain in his head is getting worse, but he forces himself to swim towards her, to grab the emergency cord on her stabilizer belt, and pull as hard as he can. The floater built into the belt unfolds like a parachute, dragging her towards the surface so fast he can barely see her face behind her goggles, but it’s another face he’s seeing, a small, pale face framed with short black hair — is that me? No, it’s all of us, kicking a football down a narrow cobbled street — then Ezinma grabs his wrist, pulling his body through the limbs of a fan dancer, bony spines slashing and tearing the neoprene suit. His arm slips free of her hand, and he falls down onto a soft, green surface that he doesnʼt recognize, it looks like seaweed but itʼs stiff and dry, the others are playing a game on it, they are hitting balls that look like colorful pearls through little wickets using wooden clubs, they havenʼt got masks on anymore and when he sees that he feels for his own — donʼt take it off — one of the others is saying, Aki? Aki, did you fall? and he thinks no, thatʼs not my name, I donʼt remember this where — 

Xie grabs his arm. Her face is badly burned, as if her mask started melting while it was still on her face, but sheʼs taken it off, and sheʼs holding her breath. She signs at him, ordering him to use his floater, but when he pulls the cord it doesnʼt work. He looks around. He canʼt see Aki, the patterns are too complicated — 

Go now, Xie signs. I will get Aki — 

Something pulses in the water, as if an earthquake had shaken the coral, and Xie grabs her head as if someone had kicked it. Ilya jerks away from her, and before she can grab him again, a shadow falls over them, and one of the parasol corals crashes through the water, engulfing him in a cloud of silt. He swings around in the dark, trying to find Xie, but he can’t see her anymore. Above him, he sees the other students rising — they’ve managed to pull their cords — Ilya doesn’t understand how they’ve gotten so far from the reef; he can’t see the bottom anymore — but Aki is still down here, red swimsuit shining like fire, a few dreamfish flickering beside them, their mask is falling through the water below them, there’s no air coming out of their mouth — 

He swims down, legs burning. He can feel a cramp coming on but he forces himself to keep going. The pain in his head is getting worse. He can’t tell if it’s the pressure or something else. Did the dreamfish poison him, somehow? Did he not notice? Then he remembers Ezinma, vomit leaking from her mask, and he understands: This is Aki’s dream. Not mine.

How could they do that?

He feels something pulling him back, and turns to see Xie swimming after him, her fingers tight around his ankle. The air is suddenly dry, and he can feel arms around his body, strong arms carved with zigzag tattoos barely visible in the morning light, he can hear himself saying: promise you’ll never call me their father — 

Xie recoils, hands clutching her head. He can see blood running out of her nose but he can’t grab her belt. She isn’t wearing it anymore; she’s out of his reach now and too far above him. He turns down, towards Aki, and swims into the dark, towards the red swimsuit.

But itʼs not the red swimsuit. Itʼs a door. Ilya opens it and heʼs dry again, under a blue sky, in a field of yellow grass. A bridge rises in front of him. The bridge is so tall he canʼt even see the top of it, only the flashing lights of omnibuses and bullet trains passing along the top. It stretches from one side of the valley to the other, half a mile above terraced vineyards and yellow grainfields, a landscape Ilya never saw on Earth-that-was, a landscape that canʼt exist on Persephone. But here he is, sitting on a picnic blanket with bread and cheese and cider, methodically tearing a military school uniform to pieces.

“I’m never going back,” he hears himself say. “Never, never.”

But the voice is Aki’s voice, not his. He tries to open his mouth, and the pain of opening his mouth hurts worse than anything ever.

“Aki?” he says, still staring out of Aki’s eyes. “Are you there?”

Aki blinks: “Ilya?”

Ilya stares out the window at a small, unfamiliar creature with a very sharp orange nose and wings that look like theyʼre made of black paper, pecking at the branches of a tree. The window wonʼt open, no matter how hard he tries to lift it. On the other side of the room is a window that shows something different: a starry sky. He can open this one, but it just leads to another room, one with walls of glass that look out on the stars, like a greenhouse floating in outer space. A little computer on the wall speaks to him: What would you like to do today, little one?

Can I go home? he says, with Aki’s voice

You are home, it says.

He feels like crying, suddenly, more from exhaustion than anything else. He reaches for his face — donʼt take it off — and feels the glass that separates his fingers from his eyes. Another wall. He can’t see himself reflected in the glass, though — he’s relieved, it would be too upsetting to see himself right now. Just having a body is too much. How old was he when he first started feeling that way, when he looked at himself while he sat on a toilet in a private bathroom somewhere in the school and felt like existing, just being in the world, was enough to make him sick?

He’s outside Aki again, both of them floating together in the dark. Half of Aki’s suit is burned off their skin, and there are electrodes wired to their head and plastic tubes snaking out of their mouth and nose and veins. Ilya is suddenly enraged. He swims towards Aki and rips the tubes away from their face, he isnʼt sure if theyʼll be able to breathe, but he wants to see them, behind the din of shadowy figures talking to each other and the bleeping of invisible machines. Is this a hospital? He canʼt tell. He fumbles off his own mask — he can hold his own breath long enough to trigger his floater, even if the ripcord isnʼt working — and fits it onto Akiʼs face. Akiʼs eyes open, and Ilya hears Akiʼs voice; even though he shouldnʼt be able to — 

I want to go home! they scream. Ilya’s head throbs with pain.

You can’t, he says. This is home now.

Aki stares at him. He is standing inside the centrifuge of the Mirǔ, watching a woman inside a translucent quarantine bag slid along a silver ramp into a crematorium, and a man is speaking to him and he is shaking his head, saying That’s not my name in a language he can barely remember how to speak — 

You’re like me? Aki says.

Ilya doesn’t respond. It hurts so much he can barely keep his mouth closed and his eyes open. Aki sounds like they’re crying.

You’ll see, they say. I’ll rip your deadname out of their computers — I’ll make everyone forget — 

A murmur like whalesong echoes in the water. It fills Ilya’s mind, and the pain begins to ebb. He hears Aki as if from far away, not speaking to him — Stop it! Stop it! I donʼt want to be here! I want to go home — 

A voice sounds in Ilyaʼs head: Forgive them.

For a moment, he sees something vast, something so large their body blocks out the sun, floating in the school of dreamfish, a spiral of long tentacles and luminescent glands, and then he is rising out of the water. He and Aki and Xie and all the other divers who didnʼt reach the surface, all of them held in the Leviathanʼs arms, and the man from the lighthouse is staring up at them, his empty coffee cup rolling around the bottom of the boat at his feet.

---

Aki is breathing, their eyes are open, but they donʼt move or speak as they sail back to the lighthouse, where an air-ambulance from Fairview Hospital is waiting to fly them away.

---

They give Ilya and everybody else a day off after the accident — Ilya doesnʼt know what else to call it — but the day after that he receives a note from Xie, telling him that the teachers have called a committee meeting to discuss what happened and they want to speak with him. The thought of doing this makes him feel sick, but he forces himself to get dressed, eat a bowl of muesli, and go to the nurseʼs office for his injection. While he waits for her to get his shot ready, Ezinma comes in and sits down next to him. Heʼs not surprised to see her — she also takes puberty blockers — but sheʼs a late sleeper, so she usually comes in after heʼs gone. Sheʼs been crying. He feels compassion towards her — if heʼs even capable of that, he just knows he doesnʼt want her to be sad — but at the same time, he wants to be away from her, from the too-much-ness of her emotions, her laughter, her general enthusiasm towards other people.

“I was scared you would drown,” she says.

Ilya doesnʼt respond.

“This is my fault,” she says. “I was bothering you. If I hadnʼt, you could have stopped Aki.”

“Itʼs not your fault,” Ilya says. He knows from talking to the therapist at the school that youʼre supposed to say that to people when they blame themselves for things that obviously arenʼt their fault, but he feels like he’s being insincere, like he’s just reading a script. He decides to tell Ezinma this, not knowing why — he suddenly feels a strong desire to be as honest with her as possible.

“I donʼt feel like a human being,” he says. “Everyone says that everyone is born good as they are, thatʼs how it is on Persephone. This world is kinder than Earth-that-was. But I donʼt feel like a person. I feel like a machine that reads out the words you type into it — like a typewriter that talks. Thatʼs how I feel. Sometimes I think Iʼm the only person on Persephone whoʼs like that. I know Iʼm not, but itʼs so hard to think — that Iʼm not broken somehow when talking to people is so easy for everybody else. And I wish I was like everyone else. I wish I was normal. But I canʼt even look you in the eye. I hate when you stare at me, it makes me feel like youʼre trying to use a magnifying glass to set me on fire.”

“I donʼt think youʼre broken,” says Ezinma. “I think youʼre really smart. And I wonʼt stare at you anymore. Iʼm sorry I did . . . I like you.”

She looks away suddenly, and even Ilya can understand why sheʼs embarrassed. The nurse comes to give them their injections, and they part ways without saying goodbye.

A few hours later, the committee summons Ilya. They wait for him in one of the lowest rooms of the siphon, a long fluorescent-lit room where the teachers sit with their backs to a wall of windows, all nineteen of them — except Koa is missing. Through the windows behind them, Ilya can see the last bloody sliver of sun peeking out from the ocean. Maryam is sitting at the center. She wears a headscarf, but Ilya can still see the edges of her scars, creeping out from under the chiffon-like little white fingers pulling at her cheek and her forehead. The left lens of her glasses is blacked out; there’s a scar under there, too. She holds a small silver-and-glass vape that she uses to take some kind of painkiller; she exhales a cloud of green-white mist as Ilya comes into the room. He wishes he could get used to Maryam, but now he feels even more ashamed to see her. If this world is only as kind as it is because you fought for it, he thinks, what if the people you were fighting come back?

“How are you today, Ilya?” says Maryam. Her voice is like the crackle of waves breaking on a shingle beach.

“Iʼm okay,” says Ilya. “Just a little tired.”

“You feel recovered, after what happened at the reef?”

“I think so. Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Yes.”

“Is Aki going to be okay? Whatʼs happened to them?”

“Aki is fine,” says Maryam. “They’re still at the hospital, under observation, but they’re safe. That’s why I called this meeting: to discuss whether Aki should return here, or return to Tau Ceti.”

“No,“ says Ilya. “I mean — itʼs not their fault. It was an accident — ”

“We understand, Ilya. But there are other things we need to consider.”

“Itʼs not fair — ”

“Ilya,” says Xie, and Ilya stops talking. Maryam looks from one to the other. One of the other professors, a mathematician with thin gray hair, says: “We just want you to tell us what happened, Ilya. Thatʼs all. We want to hear your version of events before we make our decision.”

“I barely remember what happened,” says Ilya. “It all got so muddled — like I woke up and forgot the dreams I just had — ”

He struggles, halting, to explain what happened, from when Aki breathed in the dreamfishʼs poison to when the Leviathan lifted their bodies out of the water.

“It was like I was dreaming their dreams,” he says. “Like, when he breathed in the poison, I was poisoned, too. But, it wasn’t just them. It was like I could remember being everyone. I remember seeing things Ezinma saw in London and things Xie saw here at school. I donʼt understand. How could that happen?”

“Ilya, do you ever dream about the Leviathans?” says Maryam.

“Yes. Doesn’t everybody?”

“Most people do. Do you remember those dreams?”

“A little, sometimes.”

“Do you remember them speaking to you?”

“Sometimes. But, they can’t actually speak human languages.”

“They can. That’s how they communicate with us. They talk to us in our dreams. It’s not well known; the government likes to keep it that way, but it is. Sometimes, they tell us what they’re going to do in their dreams, and when we wake up, those things are done. They are already done. We remember doing them: turning off the siphons disarming our own missiles. That’s their power. Their dreams alter reality.”

Ilya doesn’t say anything.

“Aki has a problem — the anomaly, the Cetians call it. Their mind works the same way. Their dreams change things. That’s why they’re heavily medicated, to keep them from dreaming. I don’t know why they’re like this — the Cetian government probably does, but they won’t tell us anything — they just sent Aki here because they hoped the Leviathans would act as a failsafe, in case Aki’s medication ever stopped working. The Leviathans can control their power, but Aki can’t.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” says Ilya. He looks around him at the other teachers as if he expects them to stand up and call Maryam a lunatic. Finally, back at her. He looks at her one-seeing eye and realizes she isn’t lying. “How?” he says, finally.

“I can’t explain it,” says Maryam. “But it’s true, all the same. Now, Ilya, I need you to be completely honest with me. Did you and Aki communicate in the dream?”

“Yes,” says Ilya. “In Tok! Which I thought was strange because we were underwater.”

“And you remember being underwater,” Maryam. “You knew the dream was a dream.”

“I mean, sometimes I thought it was real,” says Ilya. “But when I touched my face, I could hear myself say, donʼt take it off.”

“And did Aki say they wanted to do anything in their dreams? Anything specific?”

Ilya is quiet for a long time. He can remember something, but the contours of what that something is elude him: “Iʼm not sure.”

“Did they say they wanted to change your memories? Your memories from before you took the name Ilya, for instance?”

“I — maybe?”

“Ilya — Iʼm sorry, I understand if this is a difficult question, but it’s relevant to this discussion — what name did your mother give you when you were born?”

Ilya stares at her for a long time. It clicks, finally. His memory coalesces around the shape of the thing that isnʼt there anymore.

“I donʼt remember,” he says.
“Neither do I,” says Maryam. “Neither does anyone else.”

No one speaks. Eventually, Ilya says, “How could they do that?”

“We donʼt know.”

“But — my records on Mirǔ — ”

“Also changed.”

“Itʼs in space!”

“They changed all the same.” says Maryam. “It’s not the first time this has happened, no one can remember Aki’s deadname either. You didn’t ask them to do that, did you?”

“No,” says Ilya. “I knew, though. I knew something had changed. I knew it wasn’t just a dream.”

“Do you think thatʼs why you were able to reach them?” says Maryam. “Why were you able to calm them down?”

“I didnʼt calm them — ”

“They almost killed Xie. You saw her burns, I think. She says once you reached them, she stopped hallucinating. And if that hadnʼt happened, she wouldnʼt have been able to reach the other divers and help them use their floaters. It could have been much worse if you hadn’t been there.”

Ilya thinks for a long time. “I donʼt feel like I ever understand other people,“ he says. “I always feel like thereʼs some sort of wall between us when we talk to each other.”

“Maybe that barrier is useful,” says Maryam. “Maybe itʼs the reason Akiʼs memories didnʼt overwhelm you.”

“Maybe,“ says Ilya. “Even when I was in them — I felt far away. Like I was a voice in their head. Or like I was watching a movie.”

“Weʼre glad you told us that. Is there anything else you think we should know?”

“No. Iʼll tell you if I remember something.”

“Very well. You may go.”

Ilya waits for Xie in the antechamber outside the committee room. When the doors open, he can barely keep himself from jumping upright. The teachers file past him until, eventually, only Maryam and Xie are left. The two teachers look at each other, and Maryam makes a quick handsign that Ilya doesnʼt recognize. Then she wheels her chair past them into the elevator.

“Well?” says Ilya. “What’s going to happen?”

“They can stay,” says Xie. “Weʼre changing their medication, and weʼre going to keep a closer eye on them, but they can stay.”

Ilya doesnʼt understand why he cares so much now. He worries that he doesnʼt care enough. Sometimes he thinks whenever he tries to care about someone else, he cares poorly — that other peoplesʼ love and compassion are somehow more authentic than his own. Still, he feels almost like crying. He looks at his shoes. “No more diving?” he says.

“Yes,” says Xie. “No more diving for Aki.”

She pauses. “There’s — something else we need to talk about.”

“Whatʼs that?”

“One of the conditions for Aki staying is we need someone to watch them. It doesnʼt have to be the same person all the time, and we have to give them a little privacy, but they need other people to keep an eye on them in case they have trouble with their medication or they have another episode. And — we want you to be one of those people.”

Ilya stares.

“Why?”

“Because you can calm them down. You donʼt get overwhelmed by them the way other people do.”

“What if itʼs dangerous?”

“It is dangerous,” says Xie. “We didnʼt want to ask you. I didnʼt want to ask you. But, we havenʼt found anyone else whoʼs like that. Youʼre old enough to make a choice like this, now. And Aki trusts you. Thatʼs important.”

“How do you know they trust me?”

“They told the nurses at the hospital that you make them feel safe.”

“Why would I do that? I donʼt — I donʼt know how to empathize.”

He frowns at Xie. “Thatʼs what you mean, isnʼt it? When you and the other teachers talk about the way my brain works? You mean that I canʼt understand what other people feel.”

“No,“ says Xie. “Thatʼs not what I mean. I mean that youʼre quiet, and youʼre calm, and for a lot of people thatʼs comforting. Ilya, if Aki got hurt, would you care?”

Ilya is starting to cry, and hates himself for it. “Yes, of course — ”

“Then thatʼs empathy. Youʼre not broken just because you sometimes find other people confusing.”

She kneels down and lets Ilya hug her. “Thereʼs nothing wrong with either of you.”

After a long time, Ilya steps away. “Why wasnʼt Koa at the meeting?” he says.

Xie doesnʼt answer, and before he can stop himself, Ilya says: “I — overheard you — before we went diving — ”

Xie sighs.

“Koa felt it would be wrong. One of the things that the committee had to discuss was — to what extent I was responsible for what happened, and what should be done about that — and Koa didnʼt feel that she could be unbiased about that.”

“Because — youʼre partners?”

“Yes.”

Ilya looks at Xie for a long time. His curiosity gets the better of him: “Is that what you’re scared of? That if you have a child, they’ll be like Aki?”

Xie doesn’t answer. Later, remembering the look on her face, he decided she didn’t need to.

---

He figures that it will be at least a day before Aki comes back from Fairview — itʼs a long flight, theyʼll probably return early tomorrow morning. But heʼs wrong. He gets up a few hours after he goes to bed to use the bathroom and finds them in the hallway, sitting on the sill of a tall window, staring out at the sunset. Theyʼre dressed in loose, comfortable clothes: a flared silk skirt and an oversized sweater, a long scarf draped around their neck. They glance at him, then go back to looking out the window. Ilya remembers what Maryam told him and wonders if he’s awake or dreaming.

“You’re supposed to have someone with you,” says Ilya before he can stop himself. Aki smiles.

“I pretended to be asleep,” they say. “I snuck out after the nurse left.”

“Do you want me to leave?” says Ilya.

“No,” says Aki. They turn back to the window. “I hate this world,” they say. “Itʼs pretty, but I hate it.”

“Why do you hate it?”

“Itʼs all water . . . you canʼt ever get away from it. Even on the big islands, youʼre still so close to the sea. It rains all the time. The air is damp. Nothing ever feels dry.”

“Youʼll get used to it,” says Ilya.

“Do you like it here?”

“Iʼve never lived anywhere else,” says Ilya. “Just a centrifuge on one of the refugee ships. The air was so dry, it made my nose bleed. I was glad to come here. I was glad to see the sun.”

“I guess I am too,” says Aki. “The first time . . . my medication stopped working . . . they put me in VR — it was like being inside a computer. There was no one to talk to. It was lonely.”

“I know what thatʼs like,” says Ilya.

“Sit with me,” says Aki, and when Ilya does, Aki puts their head on his shoulder.

“Is this okay?” they ask.

“Yes,” says Ilya.

“Theyʼre going to expel me, arenʼt they?”

“No. Didnʼt they tell you?”

“They did. But I still donʼt believe it . . . I donʼt want to go back to the computer.”

“You wonʼt. We wonʼt let them put you back there.”

“You promise?”

“Yes,” says Ilya, though he’s not sure what he’s promising.

“Okay,” says Aki. “Can I stay in your room tonight?”

“You can,” says Ilya.

Aki smiles and lets the weight of their body — they weigh almost nothing — rest against Ilya. The boyʼs body is stronger than theirs, and the linen vest he wears is dry and cool. They put their arms around his shoulder and turn their head to the right so that they can see past him, out the window. The last sliver of the sun is gone. The sky is red and empty, and Demeterʼs giant storms have vanished, replaced with the pale light of stars and the occasional green flicker of a refugee shipʼs decaying orbit. The sea is like black glass below, and beneath its surface, Aki dreams of fish, millions of them, bodies fluid and mutable, swimming through the silent dark.