As much as she could be, raised as a woman of faith and therefore modest in thought, speech and dress, Leah Svirsky was nonetheless proud of her station in life.
“A woman’s duties are in home, hearth and healing,” so they said, and as a Nurse First Class at the Savior’s Crown Hospice she took to her role with considerable skill and great devotion — often to the exclusion of all else.
Her friends would tease her for still, among them, remaining unwed.
“Why don’t you come to the parish social? You can meet my cousin Tom. He was wounded down Colorado, you know. He’s a nice guy, very respectful,” Stephanie had said, clutching a squirming infant against her bosom. “Come on. At this rate you’ll be a nun before David here reaches my knees.”
And Leah smiled and thought, Why not?, and she met Tom, and he took her out one evening not long after. Over dinner Tom’s face grew red with drink and he insisted on a walk around the grounds. He groped her and felt her and when she screamed he called her a liar and worse.
Not long after he was back at the front. She stopped going to the socials, and rarely heard from her old friends, preoccupied with their children and husbands. The other nurses walked by with faint disdain curling at the corners of their mouths. She was passed over for a promotion at the hospice, and so she quit her job, left her home and became a nun after all. A combat nurse at the Rocky Mountain front, stationed near what before the Tribs was a town called Nederland. Long reduced to tumbled stone and lumber. The medivac arrived daily, ever to replenish the beds she cleared of rent flesh and twisted limbs. And at night she would gasp, awakening from dreams of gory bedsheets.
It was a balmy winter morning. A Tuesday. Moving from the shower to her dorm, dressing slowly, exhausted but strangely lucid. In her starched blacks-and-whites she stepped down the stairs, robes whispering, hair still loose about her shoulders, wimple dangling freely in her hand.
The 3V was on in the lounge — did it ever get turned off? — and a larger crowd than usual had gathered. Transfixed.
“– averaging 68 degrees across the Central and Mountain states through late December. And again, our top story today concerns a nanobot outbreak that could threaten the entire Southwest. Lori Gold Hampton has the story live from Colorado Springs.”
“Thanks Tony. Well, to recap what’s been a tumultuous morning, Environment Bureau diagnostic teams have confirmed RNVs in New Mexico. And according to spokesman Riviera Dominguez, the outbreak is spreading.”
“Our field units have identified early-stage spore production by colonies in 37 different subdistricts. Low humidity and high desert winds are contributing to a rapidly expanding zone of impact, leading to a projected Category One infestation of Robust Necrotizing Variants within the next 10 to 14 days.”
“First Jurist McLellan has declared a state of emergency in response to the crisis. Guardsman have been deployed around the center of the infestation in Santa Fe, under orders to prevent any entry or exit for the duration. Speaking with reporters at the Grand Courthouse Rotunda this morning, the First Jurist said that a nuclear strike would be required to deal with the outbreak.”
“The suffering inflicted by RNVs in Spokane was both horrific and instructive, and demands urgent action today in Santa Fe. At 5:45 this morning, after a sleepless night of prayer and beseeching, I authorized radiological deterrence against the RNV outbreak there. There is no easy weighing of the losses and the gains, and the briefings I’ve received from the good men at the Emergency Management Office and Environment Bureau have, if anything, made my decision all the more painful. Our souls are tested by the Tribulations as much as our strength of arms, but my heart swells with the hope and love of Jesus Christ, who will gather all his children into his arms, if they are just, if they are righteous, if they are worthy.”
“And Tony, we do have an unconfirmed Guardsman report that the payload was delivered at 8:27 a.m., just a little more than half an hour ago.”
“Thanks Lori. And it’s a somber moment for us all here at KRST-TV News. Joining us now to lead our prayer for those New Mexicans who have been taken is the Reverend Alexander Applebee–”
Leah hovered behind the ratty green couch in the ladies’ recreation lounge and did not pray. She gnawed at her thumbnail, stared over the bowed heads of her sisters, listened to their low and breathless recitals, keeping loose time with the monotone invocations of the reverend.
Afterwards the rest of the nurses set out for their duties, gossiping idly, the besmirching mushroom cloud like a spent, receding thunderhead. But Leah stayed behind, flipped through the channels, hungry for news. Anything about the bomb. How big? Any casualties? What about the radiation, after all?
But it was only cooking programs, infomercials and soap operas. Passionate falls from grace and equally passionate returns. The closest she got was on “Talking Virtue with Pastor Bob Dawkins,” in which the peremptory Pentecostal was having at his bleeding-heart Methodist sidekick:
“I just think it’s difficult, Bob, it’s difficult to justify the use of nuclear weapons. It’s a terrorist weapon. There have been a few times where I’ll concede that a bomb was the Godly choice. Riyadh, Cheyenne, sure. I get that. But I just am not sure this time.”
“Even after what happened in Spokane, Rob?”
“Even after that. Bob, there’s plenty of research that indicates RNVs were not the real problem in Spokane, that it was just an Ebola resurgence that could have been contained with ordinary quarantine procedures.”
“Rob, I’m shocked to hear you say that. We’ve all seen the footage. I can’t believe an intelligent guy like you would … listen, weaponized nanobots are a real problem, they’re unpredictable and far more difficult to, to, remediate than radiation. And you know Santa Fe has been drought-stricken for decades. Abandoned by the Lord and left behind.”
“There are ferals, Bob, they’re human beings inside, and every bit as–”
“They’re squatters and they’ve made their choices, for goodness’ sake. At this stage in the March to Rapture I think only a hellbound fool, Rob, now let me finish, only a hell bound fool wouldn’t know the right from the wrong. And remember that we’ve been using non-polluting warheads for the past five years–”
“Bob, there’s no such thing as a non-polluting warhead, it’s a misnomer. I was a science teacher before answering the call to ministry–”
“You were a social sciences teacher, Rob. Might as well be godless.”
“Now that’s totally uncalled for, I — ”
“I’m kidding, of course, OK? Now listen to what I know. Listen. These are the facts. From the uh, University of Minnesota, in St. Paul. Good folks up there. They’ve been tracking it, studying it for the last five years, and their findings confirm that nonpolluting warheads release 60 to 85 percent less radiation. It’s documented, and the readings off Santa Fe will confirm. I’ll take that over the little crawling horrors any day. If you can’t accept the facts, take it on faith.”
“Amen to that, Bob, faith is really all we have. And I was going to say–”
Leah could testify about the nanobots. She was right there when the medivac touched down. Anonymous in her big white quarantine suit, the wounds festering before her eyes. She and the other nurses did the amputations right there on the landing pad, and disabled the bots — or tried to — with spitting electrical brands that set the poor boys rigid, eyes bulged-out, teeth grinding. Survivors spent up to six months in an isolation ward a couple miles south for further treatment, in case any ‘bots remained dormant in the scar tissue.
In Leah’s opinion, the terminals had it easiest. And were the easiest to spot. Infections on the abdomen or more than halfway up a limb were usually impossible to root out, had by that point most likely insinuated into the bloodstream. The patient’s best hope against an hour or two of agonizing internal organ collapse was a morphine overdose, a subdermal expressway to heaven as the medivac spiraled even further above, up from the landing pad, clearing the way as last rites boomed through military-issue ear implants.
The remains — dog tags and combat gear included — were incinerated on the spot, lest the ‘bots encyst and put out spores. Even the ashes were considered hazmat, were sealed up in quarantine boxes, shipped to Indianapolis and launched sunward in daisy chains of single-use, solar-intercept dumpsters.
“Now Bob, I’ve got a letter here from two of our viewers, Linda and Thomas Hagwood down in Oklahoma City, they’re asking a question that’s been coming up a lot recently with the drought and all — whether it really is ungodly to pray for rain.”
“The fact is, Rob, and it’s a reasonable question, but the fact is that attempting to influence nature is a pagan practice. As good Christians, we need to be aware that our well-meaning prayers can nevertheless offend the Lord our God. Always better to pray for deliverance, and leave its disposition up to the Almighty–”
Leah tried to turn off the 3V, but realized the remote control only had buttons for volume (which could never be muted, only diminished) or changing channels. The power cord, too, ended in a plug that was actually bolted into the wall.
She left the babbling voices and flickering lights alone in the empty room, paused in the lavatory to splash water on her face, walked briskly through the swinging double doors and onto the hospital floor.
The morning was blessedly calm, nothing but sutures and suction and hypodermics, and one glassy-faced young boy peppered with irradiated shrapnel. It had penetrated all through his lower body, reduced his manhood to a pulpy rag, shredded a few yards of lower intestine, and finally cut a swath through teeming clusters of lower-spine nerve tissue.
Leah freshened up the IV, and prepped the patient with a chatty, barrel-shaped nurse named Martina.
“Radiation is so much easier than those awful robots, don’t you think?” the woman said, waddling around the gurney in her lead-lined apron. They strapped the boy down and slid him into the telesurgery box. A half-dozen robotic arms swarmed over him, prising and picking at the buried, burning fragments.
“Way easier,” Leah agreed.
“Even the quarantine gear. I just feel more like a person than I do in those darn moon suits.”
“I’m feeling less like a person every day,” Leah said. “I feel like I’m fucking remote controlled.”
Martina blushed at the profanity, then smirked. “Well that ain’t so bad. That means all you have to do is follow orders, and someone else takes the blame. Walla! Clear conscience.”
Indeed: By late morning her disaffection had settled into a cool sense of separation. Everything around her — the war, the patients, the other nurses, the doctors in their control suite, never to be seen down in the morass of blood and flesh — seemed to her as if viewed through a picture frame. Historical abstractions on yellowing paper that curled at the edges, of interest only to scholars and fanatics, the battles nameless and long-ago won or lost.
Lunchtime. An hour all her own. She passed through the commissary only to pick up a sandwich and apple in a brown paper bag. It swung in her hand as she stepped between buildings, across the brief gravel interface to the rec center.
There were three concrete steps, another pair of double doors, and at last a heavy silence, marred only by the dim buzz of the overhead fluorescent lights. Leah found her way past the low orange-plaid couches, the coffee tables scattered with tracts and lifestyle magazines, past the bowling alley and the billiards hall, and at last to the east wing conference room, normally reserved for evening prayer and lectures.
She walked down the corridor, her steps muted against the dull brown carpet. The door ahead was ajar, and as she approached she began to hear sounds, strange sounds, low voices, and something else.
She peered in cautiously and there was Dr. Bredford, and on her knees before him was Mary Lou Douglass, a nurse from the burn ward.
Her hands were bound behind her back — with her own panties, Leah realized later — and the doctor’s trousers were at his ankles.
Leah stood shocked for a moment and Dr. Bredford looked up and saw her, and he grinned, a wicked, unrepentant sinner’s smile that pierced through Leah’s heart and sent her staggering back, into the corridor and away, away, as far as she could go, which wasn’t very far at all.
Back to the emergency room. Back to the radiation, the nanobots, the quarantine suits, and this time there were no barriers, no abstraction, no benumbing lethargy, no remote control. She was awash in it. Drowning.
She saw Mary Lou at dinner in the cafeteria. The other nurse was gaunt, and made a point of sitting at a table on the other side of the room. Leah picked at her food, yearned vaguely for a drink of alcohol, and instead retreated to vespers, and then to her bedroom.
She tossed and turned all night long, submerging into a half-sleep plagued by the faces of the wounded, by dreams of mushroom clouds and gaping ‘bot infections, by surges of desire that twisted into bitter fantasies of rape and ungodly copulation.
The next day Dr. Bredford asked her to his office, and closed the door behind him.
“You’re a wreck, Miss Svirsky. You haven’t been sleeping,” he said.
Leah stood silently, but the tension was a scream wound down tight into the muscles of her face.
“You saw something very special yesterday. Sometimes the Lord gives us gifts, and we can only be grateful. Mary Lou helps me, and I help her. We give each other gifts. She had difficulty sleeping too, you know. But not anymore.”
He opened his desk drawer and took out a small bottle and a syringe.
“I want you to have this,” he said, “It will help you sleep, just like Mary Lou. And then maybe you can help me.”
Leah stared at the kit in his hand, and as she did his face suddenly split into that wide, leering grin. She shook her head woodenly, backed away, reached for the doorknob.
“You’ll be back,” he said. He toyed with the bottle between two fingers. “And begging.”
He grinned again, and she left the building and reported directly to the Base Commander, told him everything that transpired, speaking slowly and carefully. The man sat impassively through her recital, then dismissed her, and two days later she was put on the medivac and transferred to the Bethlehem’s Treasure Hospital for Children in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
The medivac was old, battered gunmetal and the a-grav units hummed unmercifully, smothering any conversation that aspired to more than cursory greetings and pre-flight prayer. The only other passengers were a security guard, two noncomittal orderlies and several patients in wheelchairs — a soldier bald from chemotheraphy, a pregnant woman, and a large man in a coma.
Leah plied one of the orderlies and managed to ascertain that the plane had been playing hopscotch across the West: Ashland, Truckee, Flagstaff, Nederland, the last stop before the Great Plains opened up beneath them, vast, arid, a sucking void of straw-gray landscape, briefly stippled and striated with the eroding concrete and asphalt of some long-vanished Golden Age.
And it was many hours, the sun finally extinguished at their backs, before tiny lights glowed at the horizon, scattered Eastern enclaves interlacing tenuous fingers of commerce along the shores of a wide, desolate ocean.
“Come a long way,” one of the pilots was saying to an orderly, leaning against the cockpit doorjamb. “Used to be the lights didn’t start till Pittsburgh.”
Her transfer orders sat in her lap in a large manila envelope. She imagined them full of underlined words and doubled-up exclamation points — or perhaps not like that at all. These were doctors and officers, after all. The words would be dry. Dispassionate. Medically precise.
“Though pious, dedicated, and a talented caregiver,” they would read, “the subject is excitable, and perhaps less resilient in the face of daily frontline medical needs. We recommend … ”
It was by main feat of will that she did not tear the envelope open midflight. Her treacherous mind assailed her the entire way across, painted pictures, filled in the blanks, inflated her shortcomings into dreadful morality plays detailing breaches of trust and well-earned reprimands.
Her career was over. She’d seen and said too much. Bridgeport was only a stopping point on the way to Worcester, where she’d be sent for her cure in the big stone nunnery at the edge of town. If she’d only kept her mouth shut!
Upon disembarking from the plane she and all the passengers were greeted by stone-faced Guardsmen, who sorted through their papers — her heart leapt and rattled its cage as she handed the envelope over — and silently guided them to the shuttle waiting area.
But no one ever mentioned Mary Lou Douglass, or Dr. Bredford, or the morphine, or really spoke about Nederland at all. In Bridgeport it was nothing but scripture and discipline, vespers and mass and lights-out promptly at 10 p.m.
Bethlehem’s Treasure was a home for orphans, mostly children liberated from the godless. Leah supervised intake, assessing each child’s condition and piety, and assigning them to appropriate dorm rooms. She gave herself nightly to prayer, and sleep began to visit her again, quiet and blessedly dreamless.
One day Leah witnessed a liberation firsthand, in the faraway hills of western Massachusetts. It was a girl’s school, full of banned books and devilish ritual. The soldiers swarmed through the compound, and there were screams and easily more than a dozen gunshots.
Most of the students had been evacuated, but there was still one missing. A little girl, Commander Marchand had said.
“She’s young, about five years old.” He showed her a little floating holo. Straight brown hair, a serious expression. “Her parents are propagandists. Pamphlets, radio, websites. That sort of thing. Not a promising start, would you say?” Gazing now at Leah. “What do you think, Miss Svirsky? Where would she be hiding?”
They scoured the sprawling mansion, and eventually found the young thing hiding under a couch in the second floor library.
She took the girl downstairs and out to the front lawn, where she was tagged with an RFID subdermal and herded into one of the dozen long black vans.
All the children were bawling, and Leah gagged on the abrupt stench of kerosene and smoke.
Later, she spoke to Marchand.
“Couldn’t you have waited? They’re too young, they don’t understand.”
“They’re never to young to understand, Miss Svirsky,” he said, frowning.
A month or so later Leah was told that the child — the one she pulled from under the couch — was being transferred to Elysia, the hospital planetoid out past Mars. Leah was to be her escort.
No one would tell her why, and the next day she took the child by the hand, and together they boarded the train to the Judiciary Spaceport. They were accompanied by a group of soldiers, ostensibly to protect the train from terrorists. Leah had a feeling they were watching her as well.
The train ride was very long, and when they finally arrived at the spaceport there was limitless paperwork and interminable lines, but at last they boarded the orbital platform, and Leah was suddenly dazzled by the fact: She was leaving the Earth.
Their seats were right at the edge of the platform, in a comfortable private lounge for female passengers. She took her hat off and sat back, luxuriating in the deep, plush cushions.
There was an announcement to make sure seat belts were fastened, followed by a brief and intense shift of inertia as the a-grav plates activated, and the whole launch platform was hurtling away from the Earth. Buildings and roads became doll-sized, then a gridwork, the rough-angled mountains merging brusquely into the desert plain.
Suddenly the platform was rushing up through clouds, all cottony slopes and cliffs and canyons. And then the clouds were far below and she noticed a peculiar curve to the horizon. She was gripped by vertigo and quickly leaned back.
The little girl was next to her, asleep, clutching that ragged wool blanket. She’d hardly stirred the whole trip out. Leah had carried her along the queue and through all the security checkpoints, tucked the ragged gray blanket around the child’s shoulders, stroked her hair, a lustrous brown. Outside stratocumulus whipped past as the sky faded to a dusky blue-black.
Hard bright stars began to show through at the horizon, and the vault of the sky opened up to something vast and roofless. Below, darkness swept across the face of the Earth, a hard demarcation of light and shadow.
“Brethren, we’ve completed our ascent, and now in orbit,” came a soft, smiling voice from hidden speakers. “We’ll be docking with Gideon Station in approximately three hours. You can see her just to starboard, towards Earth’s night side, as a broad cluster of flashing lights. In the meantime, the captain has turned off the ‘fasten seatbelts’ sign, so please feel free to move about freely on the platform. For those of you Dayward, we recommend the starboard lounge and promenade for optimal viewing of our docking with Gideon. Welcome aboard, and God speed.”
Time vanished into the slow procession of the globe below, glimmering lights amid the continents of shadow. And the stars beyond in a broad arc, a crown for the sweet cradle of Eden. Now infected with radiation. Nanobots. Unbearable drought and heat. How could it have come to this? Mary Lou Douglass, on her knees. It could have been me. Would I have? They’re pissing dogs!
Her eyes flooded with tears, she gasped, she squeezed her hands closed. It lasted less than a minute. She blew her nose heavily into her handkerchief, wiped her eyes, rested her head against the window. Circlets of condensation flared on the glass against her nostrils, a distant chill against her cheek. There, in the distance, Gideon was resolving as a lumpen assembly of twinkling arcs, planes, angles and semispheres.
She thought about all the sinners there, waiting, a nest of snakes and scorpions in the bosom of heaven. Poison.
Exhaustion swept in like a curtain of fog and darkness; it wasn’t until after they had docked, slotted into the Gideon L5 Station like a memchip in a datapallete, before she stirred again, dragged up to consciousness by a dry and sticky mouth, and the driving urge to void.
She struggled upright; her arm was heavy, numb.
The girl was awake, sitting upright and looking directly at her, and at her side was an elderly nun in reading glasses, a small devotional book in her lap. The nun was looking at Leah over the top of her glasses. Behind her, through the observation window, the West Hemispheric Transit Hangar was a cavernous interior opening to naked space, bejeweled with floodlights and encrusted with cables, pneumotubes, ducts, circuitry, servo-mechanisms, access panels and directional indicators, transversed with shuttles and chains of barges carrying gear, machinery and canisters.
It took a few moments for her eyes to make shapes out of the spectacle of geometry, light and color, but eventually she realized that there was a convoy of some sort being outfitted — transport ships, like huge gray tin cans.
The whole placed swarmed with activity, the menfolk everywhere, like ants, like hovering yellowjackets, shifting boxes and cannisters, blue-white sparks erupting from forests of equipment.
She imagined the boisterous voices, laughing, shouting through their space-suit comlinks. Up above Leah heard only her long breath and the deep thrum of some distant turbine. Pins and needles pricked at her elbow and fingers.
The nun shifted in her seat, adjusted her glasses, smiled like a grandmother.
“I’m Mother Abigail,” she said.
“Sister Leah, ma’am, and this is Kathleen.”
“Katie, isn’t it?”
She smiled at the girl, and Katie looked at Leah with big eyes.
“Yes,” the girl said.
“Katie was just asking me where you’re taking her.”
Leah stared at the old woman, and felt more acutely than ever the lack of ground beneath her.
“I don’t know. Elysia, they said.”
“Elysia,” the nun said, and pursed her lips. Then: “Katie, isn’t it time for ice cream?”
The child nodded.
“There has to be a commissary around here somewhere.”
“And a ladies’ room,” Leah said brightly.
They found the cafeteria — complete with a small daycare playpen — just a few hundred yards down the promenade. They got chocolate mint soycream, Katie’s with sprinkles. There were kids in the playpen, swinging on a knotty rope, sliding down a red plastic slide, throwing crayons, romping about in a cascade of building blocks, toy trucks and stuffed animals.
Katie stared and a gap-toothed grin spread across her face. She turned and gazed imploringly at the two women.
“Go on,” said Mother Abigail.
The girl stampeded off, and the proctor looked up with a tired expression.
“That’s the first time I’ve seen her smile,” Leah said.
“And it will be the last,” the nun replied, her voice acid, “if you take her to Elysia.”
Leah raised the spoon to her lips, felt the cold sweet cream melting along her tongue.
“I don’t think I have a choice, Mother,” she said. “Where is it?”
“Out past Mars, on the fringes of the asteroid belt. They say it used to be a huge planet called Lucifer, destroyed at the beginning of things. Now it’s just a ring of fragments. Comets, and the asteroid mines. Elysia is one of the bigger chunks. An entire planetoid. And do you know what they do there?”
“Everyone knows. It’s a medical station for the miners and all.” She envisioned
“You’d be lucky if it was. It’s a prison, dear, the worst kind. There have been 3Vs, smuggled out. And there’s an entirely separate complex for women and children.”
“But why are they sending Kathleen?” Leah blurted.
“It’s not just the girl they’re sending. You’re going there too.”
Leah stared at the older woman, the moment opening wide and slow around her. Every form limned in a hot-gold burnish. The promenade lights reflected in the window, the bustle and industry of the hangar like some hive under glass.
“What did you do, girl?” Abigal whispered, gazing resolutely out over the enormous space. “Probably talked too much, didn’t you? Impious. Disrespectful. They’ve got work for your kind.”
Leah stared, and amid the cool, sleek interior of the orbital platform her mind was suddenly crowded with the lurid faces of the strange, sinning men who had brought her here. Bredford, with his wicked smile; Marchand, jaws a-clenching; and the base commander in Colorado. Not impassive, she realized, but contemptuous.
And all the liberated children, with their sunken cheeks and hollow eyes.
Mother Abigail turned and looked placidly at her. “We’re told to trust in our Lord, and that he will see us through all harms, all troubles, every night. But we still have to act, and we still have to make our choices. He trusts us to. When the time comes, we’ll know what’s right and wrong.”
Her eyes were like a pale blue sky, a rumor of diffuse clouds in the distant upper reaches. Leah blinked, and noticed that the old woman was gripping her hand.
“He’s the dim star on the horizon, growing brighter every day,” Mother Abigail said. “His is a line thrown down in the wildest oceans.”
She reached into the folds of her habit, withdrew a slim black hymnal and pressed it into Leah’s hands.
“This is some of my favorite devotional verse, a real rip-snorting Jonah,” she said then, and winked. “I do love the old poetic Scriptures. They bring me great comfort. Let me know, there’s more if you want.”
That night, the child breathing by her side, Leah opened the hymnal.
… was stamped in stark black letters in the center of the page. The paper was thick, luxuriant, and Leah turned the leaf and commenced to read.
“Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters — four yarns — is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God…”
Leah read the pages over and over again, brief as they were, she read them all night, and most especially she read the final six damning words, set off from the rest, on the final page of the little black hymnal — a pamphlet, really. “From Moby Dick, by Herman Melville,” the letters spelled out, and time and again she ran her eyes over the arrangement of symbols and typography, wondering at the quickness of her breath and the beat of her heart.
At last she closed the book, and looked out the window, across the hangar at the vista of the great orb beyond, all a swirl of arcing clouds and unbounded sea, and down she tumbled into blue-green fathoms.
Next: The Separation — Chapter Three
copyright (c) by Josh Wilson