Nell accepted the position at the atmospheric monitoring station on Maund because the work was good. This was mostly true. The station was short-handed and the housing was free and Maund had rain, which she had read about and never seen. She did not examine the other reasons. There was a transit between her and the job, and she had never been through the Shallows, and she thought it was better not to stack the two things together in her head before she had to.
The ship was a cargo vessel called Maund-SC-5D11, small, four crew and two passengers, six days door to door. The other passenger was an older man named Osk who was going to Maund to live near his daughter. Osk had made the transit twice and did not seem to think about it at all.
The senior crew member, a woman named Hale, gave the passengers their briefing in the galley with the flat patience of someone reciting a recipe. She said the transit would take six days. She said the air on the ship ran dry and they should drink more water than felt natural. She said they should eat regularly and sleep when tired and not look out the portholes. A crew member named Esh laughed at this, once, and Hale looked at him, and Esh stopped.
Nell asked where the head was, because she had not seen it on her walk-through.
Hale said it was aft of the galley, past the cargo hatch. She said the cover on its porthole had warped off its hinge at the last overhaul and they had not cut a new one. She said this without embarrassment, the way you report a missing tile.
“Two minutes,” Hale said. “That’s what the crew calls it. The two-minute room. The window is the reason. It’s not a joke. It’s a schedule.”
The cover on the porthole in Nell’s cabin worked fine. It closed with a click and stayed closed. She checked it twice the first night and then made herself stop checking, because she had understood something on the first day, from the way Hale had said the word porthole: the looking was the dangerous part. Everything else was schedule.
She did not think about the head. She thought about not thinking about the head, which was its own kind of thinking about it.
The first day she used the two-minute room three times and thought nothing of it. She kept her eyes on her knees. The room was clean and cold and smelled of the same recycled air as everything else, and the porthole sat at the edge of her vision, a circle of dark she did not look at, and nothing happened, and she washed her hands and went back to her cabin.
The first night she slept badly. Not because of the Shallows — because she had drunk water all day, as instructed, and woke in the dark needing the room. She sat up in her bunk and did the arithmetic: how much sleep she could keep if she went now, how much if she went later. Later kept more. She lay back down, and later came, and she went, and it was fine. She kept her eyes on her knees. Nothing happened.
The second day, Osk slept through most of the afternoon in the galley chair. Nell asked him how he managed it. Osk said you’re only in the Shallows when you’re awake to be in it. Nobody asked him what he meant by that. He ate an orange and read a book with the cover torn off.
That was the day she began drinking less. Nobody noticed, or nobody said. The crew put a carafe on the galley table at every meal and took away what was left, and Nell’s was left more each time. She told herself the dry air was over-advertised. She poured half of one glass into the recycler chute when Esh’s back was turned, felt stupid, stopped doing it, and then did it once more.
She woke on the third night at the hour when the ship was quietest, which was no hour, because the ship made the same sounds always, but her body knew the difference. She was full. She had been full for a while, in the deep uncounting way of sleep. She stood in the cold corridor with her arms crossed and walked aft, past the cargo hatch, into the two-minute room, and closed the door, and put her eyes on her knees.
Nothing happened.
She waited. Her body, urgent in the corridor, went quiet in the room the way an animal goes quiet when it is looked at. She had felt this before, in public restrooms on the orbital — the small pause before the body consents to be a body. It always passed. In a minute, it passed.
In the two-minute room it did not pass.
She understood, sitting there, that she could not go, and she understood why at the same moment. The circle of dark at the edge of her vision was not dark. It was the Shallows, pressed up against the glass the way a face presses against a window, and it did not blink because it had no face, and her body could not be told otherwise. Her body had made its own decision about witnesses. It had decided this was the one room on the ship where she was bare, that the window had been left uncovered on purpose, by the ship, by the Shallows, by the arrangement, and that everything she was about to do would be done in front of it.
She knew the shape of the thought. She had read the same pamphlet as everyone. Vague unease, paranoia, the feeling of being watched — symptoms, the pamphlet said, stronger in people who spent more time thinking about the Shallows. She was sitting in the symptom. Knowing it was a symptom did not drain it. It pooled.
She stayed three minutes, which was over the schedule. Nothing happened. She washed her hands and went back to her cabin and lay down full, and did not sleep for a long time, and when she slept, she slept to get away from the arithmetic, which by then was being done in her body and not her head.
She woke because she was warm.
There is a moment, waking, when the warmth is only warmth, before the mind files it. Nell was twenty-six and had never once woken to that warmth, and so the moment lasted its full length — two or three seconds, the length of a breath — when it was only warmth, and it was almost kind, and then she understood where she was and what it was and the moment was over and the rest of her was not.
The body has a moment after that, too, when it is still deciding. Some of it was still held, clamped down hard in sleep-tight muscles, and she could have stood up and finished in the two-minute room, bare in front of nothing, eyes on her knees, paying whatever that cost. Or she was past it. She lay still and did the arithmetic one more time, the corridor, the cold, the window, the schedule, and the warmth that was already done, already spent, already hers, and the arithmetic came out the way it was going to come out, and she unclenched, and let the rest finish, lying flat, looking at the ceiling of her cabin.
It took a while. She did not help it and she did not stop it. It was not relief. It was warm, and then it was cooling, and then it was cold, and then it was only a fact, a wet fact in the shape of her, and the Shallows was on the other side of the wall and had done nothing.
Nothing. Nothing had watched her do it. Nothing had leaned in. Nothing happened. That’s what happens.
She got up. The bunk liner was saturated and the mattress beneath was not; the ship built its mattresses for crews and crews sleep hard. She stood in the middle of her cabin, wet and cold and fully awake, and she looked at the porthole, the one with the good cover, the one she had checked twice the first night and made herself stop checking.
She crossed the cabin and opened it.
The Shallows was there. It was what the briefing had said and what Osk had implied and what she had known since the first day: an absence where stars should have been. Not darkness — a quality of not-thereness, like a cleared room. She stood in front of it, bare, soaked, finished. She tried desperately to think of a time she had been more broken down than this, and could not.
She felt the weight of her paranoia collapse. She had known it had eyes — she could feel the shape of them etched into the back of her retinas — and the eyes were not directed at her. All of the water she had poured out, the time spent standing with crossed legs, the three minutes over the schedule, flashed back into her mind. She stepped toward the porthole, and the shame pooled in her abdomen and spilled down her legs with the rest.
She stood there until the cold overpowered the shame, and wrenched her eyes away, and closed the cover, because that was the next thing.
She stripped the bunk and wadded the liner into the smallest wad it would make, which was not very small. The ship recycled its water; she had read the diagram on the recycler chute on the first day, out of boredom, the way you read anything on your first day. The chute was in the corridor by the cargo hatch. It was zero four hundred by the ship’s clock. No one would see.
Esh saw.
He was coming forward from the cargo bay with a clipboard, and he saw her standing at the chute in her coat over her sleeping clothes with the wad in her arms, and her whole body got ready for the question. Esh looked at the wad, and at her, and there was no question coming. He pointed with the clipboard.
“Chute sticks,” he said. “You have to double-tap the plate.”
She double-tapped the plate. The chute took the wad.
She thanked him. He was already walking. He did not tell her it happened to everyone, or that the crew had seen everything once, or any of the sentences that would have required her to be seen. He told her about the plate, and let the rest of it be nothing, and she was so grateful for the clipboard that she almost said so, and didn’t.
She went back to her cabin. She did not cry. The two facts were unrelated.
The fourth and fifth days she drank the water.
The ship emerged on schedule on the sixth day. The stars came back one at a time at first and then all together. Hale’s voice over the intercom, calm, flat: “Exit confirmed. Welcome to Maund orbital.”
Nell sat up in her bunk. She had slept through the last night in a fresh liner, dry, dreaming of nothing she could remember, and she had not looked at the porthole again, and she did not now.
The shuttle down took forty minutes. The clouds were real and thick. Through them she saw rain for the first time, which was falling water, which was ordinary, and which she watched with her face near the glass until her breath fogged it, and she wiped it with her sleeve, and watched more.
At the port a woman was waiting for Osk. She had his way of standing. He let her take his bag.
Her position at the station began the following week. The air on Maund was humid. She drank as much water as she wanted, every day, for no reason at all.