Chapter 2: Pip's Version of Events

The processing unit weighed four kilograms and had been repaired eleven times. Pip knew this because she had done nine of those repairs herself, and the other two were visible in the casing as mismatched solder lines where someone with less patience than her had worked in a hurry. She kept it anyway. The acoustics on the original membrane were irreplaceable — a pre-Inundation polymer composite that the manufacturers had apparently stopped producing forty years before the Inundation itself, with the specific foresight of people who understood nothing about consequences.

She sat with it in her lap in the transit bunk on the slow-ferry back to Meridian's upper residential tier, headset on, the raw file queued up from the beginning.

The first thing she heard was water.