Chapter 16 - Now You've Been Here

They came back.

Of course they came back. The water and the amber and the drip-clock of the conduit and Jazmine floating with her hair spread out around her in the water: it would have been genuinely strange not to come back. They came back three nights after the first time, the same route, the latch sequence that Nathaniel had gotten into his photographic memory on the first attempt and Eric had memorized through a different process that involved counting steps and marking junctions by sound. Different shoes. She met them at the same hatch.

The second night was different. Same reservoir, same amber, same warm water, same drip. Different in the quality of it. The first time had been a gift, something she opened carefully and watched them receive, testing whether they knew what they were holding. The second time, she walked in and down the ladder and into the water like she was coming home, because she was, and they followed because they had been invited back.

He noticed this distinction. He was proud of himself for noticing it, which meant he probably didn't fully understand it yet, but he was working on it.

---

He was at the center of the pool, his back against the reservoir wall, the stone warm from five centuries of drive heat radiating through it, the water at his chest, the amber glow cycling above. He had his head tipped back and was looking at the seam lines in the dome. Eric was at the gantry end of the reservoir, his arms out along the surface, floating in the shallower section where his feet touched. Jazmine was somewhere between them.

Then she was in front of him.

She surfaced close, all at once, and her hand went to the back of his neck.

No preamble. She had said this, almost, in her own language: the water is her ground, she doesn't need to set the scene. She pulled him in and kissed him and the water moved around them and the amber above pulsed slowly in its long cycle and he kissed her back the way she had taught him to kiss by example: present, unhurried, nothing watching from a useful distance.

She tasted like the water. Mineral and warm.

He lifted her. It was easier than it should have been, the water taking most of her weight, and she wrapped her legs around his waist with the ease of someone who had already calculated that this would work, who had known it would work before he tried it. He found the wall behind them, the warm stone, and pressed her back against it.

Her breasts were against his chest. Full and heavy, the best he'd seen in his life on this ship, and he knew it, and the knowing sat in him like a recurrent fact. He got a hand between them, the weight of one breast in his palm, her nipple hardening under his thumb. She made a sound she had not made in her quarters.

No thin walls here. No neighbor's wall unit providing cover. Nobody above them, nobody beside them, nobody for several decks in any direction. The sound was open and honest and it went up into the dome and came back smaller, an echo of itself.

She reached down between them and found his cock and positioned him, her callused fingers firm and deliberate against his skin.

He pushed into her.

The water made the angle slow and deliberate, buoyancy taking her weight, and she was slick and tight and warm in a contrast that landed like—he didn't have a sentence for it. He pushed in until he was fully inside and then stopped. She exhaled once through her nose, the long controlled breath of someone setting something down, her hips shifting until she had the angle locked.

Her hands went to his shoulders. He held her against the wall and stayed there.

Above him, on the gantry, he heard Eric.

Not a sound, exactly. A weight shift, the gantry's slight flex. He was aware of Eric up there the way he was aware of the drip from the conduit: present, precise, marking time.

The flex of the gantry again. Then a footstep on the ladder.

He held her against the wall and listened to Eric descend. The splash of the water taking him in. A waded approach, the water around them pushing slightly outward as Eric entered the pool at the center depth.

Jazmine turned her head toward the sound. She hadn't opened her eyes.

Her hand came off Nathaniel's shoulder and reached back, into the water, without looking. Eric was there. He felt the moment she made contact — felt it in the shift of her body weight, her cunt tightening around him with the motion. He heard Eric's sharp intake.

Eric moved in close at her back. Nathaniel felt him arrive through the water displacement, through her body between them. Eric's hands ran over her from behind, palms up her sides, both hands covering her breasts from behind, squeezing, and she arched against his chest with the pressure of it, her hips rolling against Nathaniel. Eric's mouth was on her shoulder.

She made a sound and then said, low: "Both."

Eric's hand came between them, between Jazmine's back and Nathaniel's stomach, working at the angle, and Nathaniel felt his fingers brush his own skin as he positioned his cock at her other opening. He felt the moment Eric pressed in — felt it through Jazmine's whole body pulling tight, the clench of her around Nathaniel's cock intensifying as she took them both.

They were not quiet. That was the new thing. In her quarters they had been managing silence the whole time, Jazmine's discipline extraordinary, the neighbor an ongoing constraint. Not here. Here the drive hum moved through every wall and through the water itself and there was nobody and nothing to manage.

She was loud. The sound she made when they were both fully inside her was the real sound, the unmanaged version, deep and open and comprehensive, and it went up into the dome and came back to him and he felt it in his chest and then he stopped being able to run any kind of analysis on anything.

He wasn't quiet either. That was also new.

First time, in her quarters: he'd been managing himself, the whole architecture of it performed somewhere behind his eyes even as his body went elsewhere, some part of his brain still narrating from the useful distance. Down here that part of him had nowhere to go. The drive hum in the water and the sound of her in the dome and the full warm pressure of being inside her while Eric was inside her and their bodies locked together, three people in chest-deep water against a warm stone wall, and all of him locked to the moment.

He was entirely, usefully, completely present.

She set the pace. Her hips rolled back against Eric and forward against him, slow and deliberate, the water making every motion take its time, and both of them followed her. Eric's forehead dropped to the back of her neck, his hands finding her hips, and Nathaniel felt the rhythm of Eric's thrusts through her body, a second pulse underneath hers, and kept his own movement to what she was asking for.

Her hands found his face. She pulled him down and kissed him while they moved, her mouth open and urgent, biting at his lower lip. The wire ends in her braids caught the amber light. He registered this for no useful reason and then stopped registering things.

She came first.

The clench of her around his cock was unmistakable: rhythmic and hard, her thighs tightening against his waist, her whole body contracting inward. She gripped his arm and Eric's hand simultaneously and made a sound that went straight up into the dome and came back different, bigger. The second wave hit before the first was finished, shorter and sharper, her hips still rolling through it, and Eric's grip tightened on her hips and held her steady while she rode it out.

Eric next. His forehead against the back of her neck, his hands going still. He shuddered once, his cock pulsing inside her where Nathaniel could feel it through the thin wall between them, and the sound he made was not suppressed and not performed. It came out rough and unguarded and brief and was, Nathaniel thought from somewhere very far away, the best thing he'd heard in recent memory.

Then Nathaniel: the slow finish, nothing rushed, the amber cycling above and the drip marking time and the water warm and complete around them and her warm and complete against him, her tits against his chest and her hands loose on his shoulders now. He held it as long as he could because he was not ready for it to be over, and then he came inside her, and he held still, and he stayed exactly where he was.

---

He didn't know how much time passed.

The three of them drifted apart in the warm water, still close but no longer one system, individual again, the pull of aftermath. His limbs were heavy in the good way, the way that meant he'd been somewhere. His chest felt open. The amber glow moved.

Jazmine was on her back. Her hair spread out around her in the water: the braids and the wire ends floating, the elaborate personal architecture of it now part of the pool's surface. She was looking at the dome ceiling. Her breathing was even.

Eric had found the shallower section again, the part where he could put his feet down without fully standing. He was half-floating, half-standing, his arms out on the surface, his eyes closed. His face in this state was the face under the face, all the polish gone, nothing deployed. The flush across his cheekbones was deep, visible even in the amber. Nathaniel had seen it before. It always landed the same way.

Nathaniel floated.

The drip from the conduit above marked seconds. The amber pulsed in its long slow cycle. The drive hum moved through the water and through him and through the stone walls and through everything, the ship's continuous note, unchanged for five hundred years or however many years it had actually been, the number that you learned in the upper-deck history curriculum and never felt in your body until this moment.

He felt it now. Five centuries of this hum. He was inside the thing that had made everything he'd ever had available to him, the hull and the drive and the water reclamation and the hydroponics and the ventilation system running smooth chemical calm through Deck 2. All of it the same machine. All of it carrying people all the way down.

He hadn't been thinking about this. But he thought about it now, floating on his back in the belly of the ship in water that tasted like the drive.

Jazmine spoke to the ceiling.

"This is my favorite place on the ship," she said. The echo caught it, gave it back smaller. "Now you've been here."

He looked at the dome. He thought about the first time she'd said come back, after the market, lying in her quarters looking at the ceiling with the amber light on her face. You can come back. That's not a given, where I live.

This was a different version of the same thing. More of it.

He didn't say anything. The water moved in the small current their breathing made, the slow drift of it, and the amber above pulsed once and returned.

Eric opened his eyes. He looked at the dome the same way he looked at structural schematics, with the appreciation of someone who understood what made something not fall.

"This whole room should be on the schematics," Eric said.

"Then it wouldn't be mine," Jazmine said.

A pause.

"Fair," Eric said.

She floated. The drip came down and marked the surface and spread in a ring and disappeared. Nathaniel found the center depth again, the low point in the floor, and stood chest-deep in the drive-warm water and looked at the rivets in the dome ceiling, the original construction, five hundred years of somebody's handwork holding the whole thing together.

He thought: I need to learn the route well enough to get here without her.

He thought: I am not going to be the person who says that.

He floated on his back again and closed his eyes and let the ship's hum move through the water and through him, the same note it had been making since before his great-great-grandparents were born, the same note it would be making when whatever came after him was looking at the ceiling and trying to understand what it meant to be this far from anywhere.

Jazmine's hand drifted and found his in the water.

Not intentional: the current, the drift. But she didn't move it away.

He didn't move it away.

The amber moved. The drip marked time. The ship carried them all forward in the dark between stars, indifferent and continuous, keeping everyone alive.