We saw her staggering down the promenade, gills flaring as she sucked for the gods’ aether that no longer fueled her breathing. By her gasping breaths we knew the god had moved on, swimming the invisible aether to another, leaving her gasping in the void as she fell back into the strained, recycled, and slightly fishy-smelling air of the space station.

Collapsing to her knees, she stared confusedly at the curved walls, the sloping floor, the elaborate scaffolding.

We pushed at each other in our tangle, first one stepping out and then retreating, then another creeping two paces before recoiling back to the rest. Finally all together we gathered our courage and crept forward.

The sheen of the god faded from her skin. Slowly the watery badge of the Aquaponics Guild grew visible on her brow, the tattoo that had marked her place in society before the god plunged into her flesh and made her glow.

We knew her from before. Once she had been our cousin, from the sunward side of our tangle, born on Bright Spar where we sometimes took a holiday when there was time away from the vats and tanks.

She had spawned with some of us, schooled with others, but had vanished one day long enough ago that our lives had grown out of the school tank and into the busy world of the station. We had all long since taken the badge of the Aquaponics Guild, become apprentice, then technician. The god had taken her in the first year of guild training.

Blinking, she caught sight of us. Her gaze tracked us first with the slow eddy of a god’s wheeling vision but afterward her pupils stilled and hardened and her mouth opened.

“Usa?” She fastened on my form as on a spaceline attached to an airlock, like she was dragging herself back to air.

I eased cautiously out from the tangle, everyone quiet around me now. We move in a mob around the gods. That way they do not notice us as individuals, which never ends well. It is hard for their ceaselessly whirling eyes to fix on a single entity within a churning multitude. But she was no longer the god. She was my cousin, the girl I had grown up with and eaten sauce with and skated the long round of the outer skin with at the Orb Festival.

“It is me,” I said softly, hoping the god had fallen far and far away from her so as not to hear my words.

“What time is it?” she asked. “Why are we here?”

She glanced at the chronometer meant to be embedded in her skin but of course hers had burnt out the instant the god had flooded into her. I raised the back of my hand to her in the old greeting, a sharing of time and location. She rubbed her eyes and squinted, still taking the measure of her body.

“Shouldn’t we all be in class? Aren’t we missing the Tubes and Feeding lecture?”

Some of us tittered, and then others of us kicked them, for it was dangerous to laugh where the gods might hear and believe us to be mocking them. And anyway it wasn’t fair to her, it was even cruel to her, who could not have known how our lives had flowed on while hers had ceased progressing, caught in the god’s eternal stasis. She had fallen back into the ordinary way of air and time and she didn’t yet realize she had ever fallen out.

“It’s different today,” I said, seeing that by their fearful silence the rest had elected me to speak on our behalf. “Let’s go get a cup of tea. Can you walk?”

She got her feet under her—not so easy as she clearly expected—and said, “I feel as if I fainted.”

“Yes, yes, you did,” I said, grabbing for this familiar, comforting metaphor. “Take my arm.”

She grasped my elbow gratefully. This close I saw the celestial gills closing, shutting down, fading away. She scratched her neck and shoulders as if they itched.

“It smells so strange,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

“Just come with us,” I said as calmly as I could.

She nodded slowly, accepting my words and our remembered kinship, and the tangle gathered around her, breathing out air so she could inhale us and become part of us once again.