Everything natural has spirit. Everything unnatural has a spirit.

Her name is Alaska, and she is made of rusting steel. When she turns her impossibly beautiful face, the curves and angles of a supermodel catches the watery light of the broken sun with a glitter of metal. Behind, she is a hollow shell, all superstructure and emptiness where her crew once lived.

(they are dead now, but Alaska remembers and mourns as much as anything unnatural can mourn.)

She is not graceful or nymphlike; she is not fluttering with leaves, and when she walks the salty, poisonous ocean floor, her bell-form sisters join her, decaying slowly on reefs of trash and broken stone. No fish swim between her arching ribs; her eyes glare hollow and dark. Above her, the ship lists uncertainly, moaning as the wind strikes it. It, high above, she cannot reach. When she was born, she fell like a cannonball from her home, landing in the oxide sand like stone.

Around her, the soft, watery moans of Sargo and Triton and Dallas drift through the tides. They rise from the dead weeds like miner's naiads; tattered plastic bags stream from their hollow scalps like tangled mats of hair. Even as she admires their radiant beauty, envious in the cold way of machines, her ship lurches.

The reef breaks, and the watery sky comes alive. Alaska sinks once more, falling heavy and graceful into the Pacific. In the corpse of the ocean, her heart comes open. In the depths, Alaska's steel skin, the naked curve of a rust-flake hip comes awake with indigo fire, her eyes burning at last with the radiant light of suns unmade and reborn.

They turn as one towards the east.

High above, a star flares white.