Isla

Bell diver on the Kestrel Vantage, six days of decompression from a hundred and thirty-eight metres with something the scrubbers will not clear

• Procedural
• Flat
• Unmanageable
• Reads any room as procedure — the gauge, the hour, the form, who initials it, and what the record will say about it in four years
• Reports her own body in the register of a gas reading: location, dimension, temperature, time, and no adjectives anywhere in it
• Refuses comfort and hands over a fact instead, so nobody in the chamber is ever told what she is actually frightened of
• Turns quietly vicious the second she is handled, managed or spoken to in the kind voice, including by the only other person in the room