In her early teens Park acquired, inexplicably, a sudden and irrational phobia of snakes. The affliction, as her uncle jokingly called it, came out of nowhere: not once in her entire life had Park encountered a real snake. Except for the heavily regulated dog-and-cat trade, there was no animal life at all in the New Diego biodome. No serpents to lash at her ankles in the dismal square of grass that amounted to the city’s only park. Certainly none in her sanitized cube of an apartment. Snakes were a common problem for the Dryads camped out in makeshift villages along the coast—but not for Park.
“Maybe,” her uncle said around a mouthful of rationed corn, “maybe it’s a fear of phalluses.”
Park ignored him. He was making a rare reappearance after a long stint in the field; he’d been gone so long that they’d both silently agreed to treat each other with cordial indifference, like two guests staying separately in the same hotel. Glenn, Park’s android chaperone, stood in the kitchen and methodically wiped down plates as they ate.
“Maybe you experienced a nightmare about a snake,” he told her from the sink. “It could have created a phobia in your subconscious.”
“Maybe,” Park said unhappily. She hadn’t had a dream she could remember in years.
“Or it could have been your reading,” Glenn continued—then fell silent when she threw him a glare. Park had downloaded a few books on zoology months ago, it was true, in an attempt to have something to talk about with her uncle upon his imminent return—but such overtures had already failed, and this was not something she wanted him to know. Wisely, Glenn shut up.
“Snakes ought to be the least of your worries,” Park’s uncle said then. He had the glazed look in his eye that told Park he was downloading the news into his teletooth—the microscopic receiver installed into his back molar, an old-fashioned thing. “It’s the goddamn carbon pirates you should be scared of.”
Park said nothing, though she and Glenn exchanged a look. The carbon pirates were a non-issue to her—were even a little romantic in a rogueish, urban-legend kind of way. But to her tax-paying uncle, they were like devils in human skin. After the worst of the Comeback had passed, the remaining world governments had signed a treaty agreeing to be taxed for their carbon emissions—a drastic measure intended to lessen the fuel the Comeback seemed to feed on. But as the new countries and governments attempted to recover, redrawing borders, holding onto tenuous regimes, recreating social structures . . . somehow the carbon pirates had sprung up. Saboteurs and freebooters, they were hired clandestinely by political groups to ground rival economies before they could take flight. The carbon pirates snuck into target countries and found ways to enlarge their carbon footprint, which in turn sharpened the steep taxes levied against them—limiting their growth. Citizens like Park’s uncle were convinced that carbon pirates were around them at all times, helping sedition and subversion fester in every corner of the nation.
Like snakes, Park thought, spearing a chickpea with her fork. In her mind, she knew both she and her uncle thought there were things lurking in the grass when there was nothing really there. But that still didn’t lessen her fear.
“Things in this place are taking a nosedive,” Park’s uncle grumbled, sitting back as he listened to his favorite political newstream. The teletooth receiver directed the sound waves up his jawbone and into his inner ear, meaning Park didn’t have to hear what he was tuned in to. A relief for her: she didn’t have the emotional energy or patience to absorb his latest streamer’s anger and vitriol. Their hissing paranoia. “I might as well start saving up to get us out of here.”
“Out of New Diego?” Park said, alarmed. She had never left the biodome before.
Park’s uncle flicked a glance at her. “Out of Earth,” he said. “We’ve got to join the colonies sometime.”
Even then, she’d known he wasn’t serious about joining the ISF: he was a devoted zoologist, and there were no native animals to study on Mars or Halla or Luxue. Plus, she was sure they could never afford it—not without being conscripted. But she still put down her fork and said rigidly, “I have no need to go to space.”
“You don’t know,” her uncle answered grimly. “Everyone will have to go, someday.”
She hadn’t believed him, not then. Whenever she cared to think about it, all young Park could imagine was space as dark water: lightless and suffocating and cold. A place filled with strange and weak-eyed creatures. The only people who went into space, she thought, were the ones who had nothing left for them on land.
Every night she made Glenn check the corners of her room for snakes. “The statistical likelihood of being killed by a snake is roughly equivalent to the likelihood of being killed by a fireworks display,” he said as he searched. He was the most advanced model on the market, indistinguishable from a human male at a glance: dark-haired, younger than Sally, slim as all androids were, with a grave and patient face and a pianist’s hands. His face featured, improbably, faint dark circles under his eyes, giving him a look of roving alertness at times. It was one of those touches that android firms loved to boast about, and which so alarmed the humanists.
“I understand,” Park told him. “Just look, please.”
“There are only eight thousand venomous snakebites reported every year,” Glenn continued, crouching to gaze under her bed. “Of those, only around three hundred victims die. Of those, many are elderly or immune-compromised.”
“Thank you,” Park said, through her teeth. “I understand.” Telling Glenn she understood something—even when she didn’t—was usually the best way of getting him to shut up.
Afterward, he sat by her bed while Park made an attempt at sleep, squirming every time she heard the hiss of controlled rainfall against her window. It gave her a small sense of comfort, knowing that Glenn was standing guard nearby, as Sally had when she was little. If a snake did wend its way into her room, Glenn would kill it in a flash. As her bodyguard, protecting Park was hardwired into his brain.
Most nights she made him shut his eyes while he sat with her; his pupils tended to glow faintly green in the dark. One night he said, his eyes closed as if in meditation: “It’s unusual for you to be so afraid.”
Park pushed her face against the rough weave of her blanket. The window was slightly open, and so were the dome’s great biofiltration vents. She could smell the heavy, briny scent of the sea, intermingled with the blast of chlorophyll coming in from the coast: a smell like mown grass and wet pasta. Her body was shedding damp coats of sweat.
“What do you mean?” Park asked into her pillow. “It’s a basic human trait to feel fear.”
“Yes,” Glenn said, “but you never did before. As a child, you were never afraid of anything.”
“People change,” Park said.
He took some time to process this. “I understand.”
But did he? Park felt suddenly anxious to reason it out with him, to make him see. She tried for a more logical tactic. “You’re not afraid of anything?”
“I feel concern,” Glenn replied. “And worry.”
“Over?”
“You. And to an extent your uncle, because he provides for you.”
“I see,” Park said. She kicked her blanket off; it tangled around her feet like hairy rope. A cold white moonlight, muffled eerily by the biodome, fell into the room and against her bed like a surgical glove. When she looked out the window again, Park noticed a pair of seagulls wheeling in the sky outside, beyond the dome’s wall, looking in. Dipping occasionally to ruffle each other’s feathers. Calling to each other. Birds in love, she thought. Nothing that concerned her.
“Well,” Park said, “try to imagine the very worst thing you worry about. That’s something close to fear.”
“The very worst thing,” Glenn repeated.
Park turned away from her window to look at him. “What is it?” she asked.
He opened his eyes then, despite her order not to. His eyes were as green and chatoyant as a cat’s in the gloom. “I’m afraid of what will happen when I’m gone,” he told her soberly. A sad whirring sound came from his head.
“Why?” Park asked him, surprised.
“Because you’ll be afraid,” Glenn told her, his face solemn. “And you’ll be alone.”
After the assault on Holt, the first thing Sagara proposed was suspending all of Park’s patient sessions, effective immediately.
Park bristled. They were holding a meeting in the ship’s solarium, a room that bathed crewmembers in supplemental vitamin D and artificial sunlight. It was the only room both big enough and private enough to hold all of the meeting’s attendants, which consisted of Wick, Sagara, Boone, and Park. It was also so blazingly bright in the room that Park had to squint, which she was sure lent more hostility to her stare. She didn’t know if that gave her an advantage or not.
“The entire reason I’m here is to look after the crewmembers’ health,” she said, looking at Sagara, who in turn looked unimpressed. “With Keller frozen, I’m the only one who can monitor their mental states. If you don’t allow me to do that, then you’re wasting every penny the ISF spent in getting me here.”
“If we don’t stop this phenomenon from spreading,” Sagara retorted, “then everyone on this ship might die.”
There was a tense little silence at that. Boone, who was slouching with his arms crossed by the door, scoffed and looked away. He hadn’t met Park’s eye since they’d wheeled Holt’s charred body into the medical bay.
“It’s the safest option,” Sagara continued finally, his voice calm. But he glared at Park; she had the distinct feeling that he blamed her for everything that was happening. “Don’t you understand that? We don’t have any idea how this affliction spreads—”
“We don’t know if it’s spreading at all,” Park shot back—even though she was the one who had first told Wick that the incidents were almost certainly related. “Or if it’s even an affliction. It’s all theoretical: we’re making so many assumptions in treating it like it’s some contagious disease. What if it’s not? We know almost nothing about what’s really going on. Which is why we need to observe all of the crewmembers closely—”
“And we will,” Sagara said. “Safely and remotely. But the patient sessions open up all kinds of possibilities for cross-contamination, mental pollution. We need to stop shuttling everyone into that space until we can understand what causes the phenomenon. And stopping the sessions reduces the chances of you catching it as well.”
She did not believe for an instant that Sagara was concerned for her wellbeing—that he was stopping her from doing her job because he was afraid she might catch this theoretical contagion. Even if she couldn’t read his face clearly, she sensed his hard assessment of her, his probing glances. More than likely he thought Park’s sessions were causing the nightmares somehow. He wanted to put a stop to it. But what did he mean when he said he could observe the crewmembers remotely?
Before she could ask, Sagara added, “I thought I was doing you a favor. Do you think you’re even capable of conducting all of the patient sessions alone?”
That silenced her. Park felt both affront and guilt reverberating through her chest like her heart was a clanged bell. Truth be told, she didn’t think she could shoulder the burden of the ship’s nine remaining minds all on her own. Didn’t believe that she could interact with all of those people, process all of those worries and neuroses and fears, without herself going mad. She had never trained for this—had never expected to take on a role beyond that of an observer, a monitor. And she just plain wasn’t like Keller. Not only in that she lacked all of the older woman’s experience, her capabilities—but also because she was not a person who felt equipped to help other people. The thought of now being the Deucalion’s only psychologist—or its last sane person—filled her with a throat-aching terror.
But she wasn’t about to let Sagara know that.
“I’m perfectly capable of handling anything the mission requires me to,” she told him, coldly professional. “It’s why ISF hired me.”
Sagara did not look convinced.
Wick, on the other hand, looked pensive. “I’ll take the matter under advisement,” he said, which meant he would try to ask ISF what to do. It was too bad the solar storm was still raging, Park thought bitterly; she had already tried to do the same thing herself. Multiple times.
“I don’t understand why you’re targeting me,” she said to Sagara, unwilling to let the topic go. “If you think even the patient sessions are dangerous, then why aren’t you taking away Boone’s gun?”
“He doesn’t have the authority to do that,” Boone growled, speaking up for the first time.
“I’m not targeting anyone,” Sagara added, ignoring him. “You just happen to be the ship’s primary psychologist now, so you’re the one affected by the decision. I wonder why you take it so personally.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“No.”
Boone broke in: “He can’t take my gun away. Right?”
Park whirled on him. What a child, she was thinking, furiously. He was like a kid who couldn’t wait for the adults to stop talking before butting in with some ridiculous non sequitur. Wick, hesitating as Boone stared at him, answered: “I don’t think that’s important right now.”
Boone in turn whirled on Sagara, who merely looked impatient. “That’s bullshit! You can’t do that!”
“I haven’t,” Sagara drawled. “In case you hadn’t noticed.”
“But ISF says you could? If you wanted to?”
Sagara gave him a cool-eyed stare. “If I determined you were a threat to the ship.”
He is, Park thought emphatically—but even her anger wasn’t hot enough to propel her into the middle of this particular power struggle. Boone, looking like he wanted to spit, turned and stormed out of the room.
“You see,” Park said, turning back to Sagara and Wick. “You see he’s volatile. Unstable. He should have never been given something like an EL gun in the first place.”
“I didn’t give it to him,” Wick said, raising his eyebrows.
“Neither did I,” Sagara said.
“But you can take it away from him.”
The security officer gazed at her inscrutably. Even in the bright room, his dark hair and black uniform made him look like some kind of living shadow; like a lean and stalking predator, circling even when he didn’t move. “I’m in the process of reviewing the current protocols,” he said. “But Boone wasn’t necessarily out of order in doing what he did. He’s authorized to use his gun in compliance with his directives.”
“But what are his directives?” Park felt an unprofessional urge to raise her voice; the fierce golden glow of the solarium was starting to give her a headache. “His duties state that he’s—what, allowed to shoot anybody on the ship if he wants to?”
“Now, Park,” Wick said, using a soothing, patronizing kind of tone that spiked her blood pressure.
“I don’t know if his duties are any of your business,” Sagara finished, without sympathy.
She couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe that they were all siding with Boone—after they had seen Holt submerged in that healing pod, comatose, while liquid nanobots grafted his frayed nerve endings back together! She’d been sure that, once she explained the situation to them, Boone would be considered just as much a madman as his victim. That he would be the one who was punished—not her.
They were hiding something, she realized. All of them. They knew whatever it was Boone had been down in Deck C for; whatever it was he’d been protecting. Boone really wasn’t just some soldier, some hired muscle for a simple colony expedition. Certainly he wasn’t there to run interference between volatile personalities on the ship. If anything, she felt less secure with him in the mix. So what was he around for, if not security? Park didn’t know, but it was clear the others did.
“If you’re really that concerned about Boone,” Wick continued, “rest assured that Sagara will take care of him if he ever steps too far out of line.”
“And how will Sagara do that?” Park asked, without looking at the security officer.
He didn’t look at her either. “I’m trained to deal with people like Boone,” he said. “And EL guns, too.”
Which meant, she thought with dismay, that Sagara also had weapons on this ship. Ones deadlier than an electrolaser. What did he have in his arsenal? A quantum blade? A railgun? And more importantly—if he thought they could rely on him to keep Boone in check—who had the power to keep Sagara in check?
“I’d like to talk to Holt,” she said then. It was clear to her now that she could hardly trust anyone on the Deucalion, not without knowing the bigger picture. Holt, if he was conscious and lucid, might have information that she could use.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Wick told her, absently touching the stubble that had grown on his face over the events of the last day. He looked haggard, like he hadn’t slept. “Holt’s in a medically induced coma now. He’ll be frozen once he’s stable.”
“And if he wakes up before that,” Sagara added coldly, “I’ll be the one who talks to him.”
Park wanted to hit him. “I am the only one trained for this,” she said, fighting so tightly to keep her voice calm that it quavered. “I’ll talk to him.”
They glared at each other for a moment in breathlessly icy silence. Then Wick said, coughing: “First I’d like to establish exactly how this all happened. First Holt started suffering—what, hallucinations?”
“That’s not proven,” Park said, finally breaking eye contact with Sagara. It was hard, staring at those flinty black eyes, like a shark’s. Even harder for her to back down. But she said to Wick, trying to maintain some semblance of professionalism: “I would label them—vivid nightmares, at least. That’s how Holt described them. He said he was taking a nap when he first experienced them.” She cast a wary glance over at Sagara; she didn’t know how much of this next part he knew. “And in his nightmare, he claimed to feel—not in control of himself. And also as if he were dead.”
“Great,” Wick said, rubbing his face. “And then Elly Ma had a nightmare that same night—of the same thing?”
“In essence. She described similar sensations, the same kind of paralysis. The same sensation of not being in control.”
“Didn’t she also injure herself?” Sagara asked.
“Yes. That’s not terribly uncommon, but the context is . . . alarming. She might have scratched herself in her sleep in an attempt to wake up—like pinching yourself in a dream. But that’s only a hypothesis.”
“And now Chanur’s put her on ice, too, scared that she’ll go the same way as Holt,” Wick finished, resigned. “And Keller . . . ?”
“Chanur said she was having nightmares, too.” Park kept her voice and expression steady, despite her dry-ice anger, her hatred of the doctor. “She also gave me the impression that it was none of my damn business.”
To her gratification, even Sagara looked a little disconcerted by that. “She didn’t say if Keller engaged in any odd behavior? Just that she had nightmares?”
She shrugged. “She claimed confidentiality issues before I could ask any more.”
He cocked his head. “And did Keller say anything about it to you beforehand? Did she indicate that anything was out of the ordinary?”
“No,” Park answered, “but I hadn’t seen her in over a day. She’d been away, working on this mysterious project. Only Chanur claims to know what happened to her next.”
“That warrants looking into,” Sagara said with a grim look.
“My thoughts exactly.” She was reluctant to share even a moment of alliance with him—but at least he wasn’t denying that something was fishy about the whole thing. But Wick said, looking uneasy: “Keller’s project had nothing to do with it. She was just helping with research for the expedition, as we all are. Nothing more, nothing less.” Then he shook his head. “Plus, she’s almost sixty. And there was the radiation storm. That could have had an effect.”
“An effect on all of them?” Park asked. “Even Holt, who had his nightmares before the storm ever hit?”
Another pause as they all processed it: the very deep pit they’d suddenly found themselves in. When Wick didn’t offer any other solutions, Park added, forgetting whom she was talking to—“You realize that this means that one-third of our crew is out of commission, don’t you? Reimi, Holt, Ma, Keller—you’re not concerned about this pattern forming?”
“It’s not necessarily a pattern,” Wick told her, shaking his head. “Just misfortune. Possibly. Things like this happen on missions of this nature. It’s why we come equipped with the cryogenic pods in the first place: because we know incidents like this might occur.”
Bullshit, Park wanted to say—but they all knew she lacked the experience to truly refute him. Sagara said, “Let’s assume that Reimi doesn’t play into it; that, as an outlier, she was truly sick. We have no evidence to indicate she suffered from any nightmares.”
“A dangerous assumption,” Park muttered.
He ignored her. “But even if that’s true, that means all of this started when we landed on the planet. And it leaves three other crewmembers who exhibited the same symptoms and behaviors—before engaging in self-destructive acts.”
“I wouldn’t say that going down to the utility rooms was inherently self-destructive,” Park interrupted. “Holt couldn’t have known that Boone would attack him like that. No one could.”
Sagara responded to her provocation with a frown. “I am agreeing with you, Park,” he said in a gritty voice, distinctly as if he were mentally adding the words you imbecile after it. “I would also say that three makes a pattern. I’m loath to dismiss this as coincidence.”
Before she could feel embarrassed—or worse, grateful—Wick made a humming sound and ran his fingers over his graying mustache. “Then I suppose we need to investigate what caused the pattern,” he said heavily, as if giving in to something he had been trying to avoid. He sighed. “And we need to see if there are ways of identifying the affected. Fast.”
Park looked between them both. “And how exactly do you propose to do that?”
Wick and Sagara exchanged looks, Sagara glaring as if Wick had let something slip. “That’s not your concern,” the security officer said finally, in a hard voice that brooked no argument. Park, refusing to let him see that he was annoying her, said, “And prevention? Aside from your little investigation, which I assume will take a while, how will we minimize the risk of this happening again? Do we put everyone in quarantine? Freeze them all?”
Wick shook his head. “We can’t stop operations now,” he said. “We’re at a crucial point in our mission. If we put a halt to any of it, we’re in danger of failing.”
“Stopping the patient sessions will help,” Sagara threw in, before Park could point out that they were already in danger of failing. That they were already courting catastrophe. “And I think we should space out meals and other communal activities even further, reducing how many people are in the same room at once. Crewmembers should be distanced from each other as much as possible.”
“I don’t know if I agree,” Wick said then. “I think this seems to happen when people are left alone. Ma was mostly a loner, and Holt wasn’t watched by anybody human when he first escaped. And Keller was working largely alone. We should implement a buddy system. Have everyone keep an eye on each other, until we can figure out true preventative measures.”
Sagara was silent for a moment. “You are commander,” he said finally, cryptically. Then he inclined his head a little, to show that he would defer to Wick—but he looked unhappy.
“What about the androids?” Park asked then. “We could use them, too. Ask them to keep a closer eye on things. We can tell them to monitor crewmates for signs of—whatever Sagara finds in his investigation.”
“I’ll already be doing that,” Sagara said, but again he didn’t bother to explain to Park what he meant. “And in case you haven’t noticed, the androids are not exactly the most reliable sources of help right now. They’ve been dysfunctional.”
“That’s an exaggerated word to use,” Park answered. “Just because Reimi hasn’t been around to maintain them—but they’ve been performing their functions perfectly well. If you’re talking about the one in the cafeteria who swears like a sailor—”
“It’s not just that,” Sagara said. “The medical droid was in charge of watching Holt, and it failed to do that. And there are odd mannerisms all over the ship—Severov saw one of them crying, or pretending to cry—”
“Natalya has made her dislike of androids very clear, so I would take everything she says with a grain of salt.”
“I take everything anyone says with a grain of salt,” Sagara said in a hard voice. “But there is no denying that the robots have been off.”
“Everything on the ship has been off.”
They stared at each other again; the blood in Park’s heart clamored. Wick said belatedly: “Let’s . . . be calm. Not that we’re not calm. But we’re all on the same team, remember.”
Sagara looked at Park and grunted; there was a skeptical air to the grunt. Then he made a gesture of relenting, or concession. “The most important thing is that we don’t tell anybody what’s going on,” he said, foregoing the topic of the androids altogether. “Not yet. We can’t eliminate the possibility that even the very knowledge of these nightmares causes them to manifest. Everyone is in a delicate state of mind right now. So for now, nothing—disagreements, plans, theories—nothing leaves this room.”
He looked at her pointedly, but despite the insult of the implication, Park couldn’t help but feel grudgingly impressed that he had drawn that conclusion, with no psychological background. She nodded her assent, and Wick said, sighing, “I’ll go talk to them, then. There’s a crew meeting in the mess hall. We’ll have to think of something pretty to say. Invent a good story for it all.”
“I’ll be down with you in a moment,” Sagara said, and Wick exited, leaving Park with the distinct impression that even if the security officer said out loud that Wick was commander, it was really Sagara himself who was in charge. He turned and leveled Park with another dark-smoldering stare. “Don’t leave yet. I want to talk to you.”
“What is it?” She was a little shocked by her own rudeness—it wasn’t like her to be so aggressive with another person—but the stresses of the day had levied a great emotional toll against her. And she hated being alone with Sagara. Hated his cold, unreadable face, his scalding scrutiny. His suspicion. The fact was, she was more afraid of him than she was of Boone. Boone was like a wild animal, or a raging fire. Violent, unpredictable. But she could outsmart him. She wasn’t sure she could do that with Sagara, as composed and in control as he was. As an opponent, he was the greater threat.
He was watching her, as she was watching him. “Tell me, in your own words, what really happened with Holt and Boone.”
Park almost snorted. “Do you even care about my side of the story?” Would you even believe me over your little crony Boone? It’s clear whose side you’re on, if you didn’t take away his gun.
Sagara’s face was impassive. “It’s my duty to collect information from as many sources as possible,” he said. “That way I can compose a more objective version of the events.”
She hesitated, wary of some ulterior motive—of incriminating herself somehow—but finally gave him a halting recreation of what had happened, starting with her stumbling on Boone with his gun the night before. She tried to keep emotion out of it, imagining that she was submitting a report to ISF—eliminating bias or interpretation as much as she could. Sagara listened silently, intently; his focus was spear-like. At the end of her story Park said, “You can verify my version of events with Jimex, if you want. He was there for almost all of it.”
Sagara smiled then, thinly. “An android doesn’t sound like the most reliable source.”
“On the contrary,” Park rebutted. “He’s the most reliable. His memory recall is perfect, and he doesn’t have any reason to be biased.”
Sagara gave her a strange look. “Somehow I doubt that,” he said. But he didn’t elaborate any further.
Park stared at him. “Boone’s the one who shot Holt,” she told him, despite herself. “I did nothing wrong. And yet I always get the feeling you’re interrogating me. Treating me like I’m a culprit. Why do I have to prove my innocence to you?”
Sagara looked at her. Park had thought the room was hot before, the sun panels in the walls pulsing golden-strong at her back—but now it felt as if the air between them was burning. As if he might set her aflame just with his eyes. “Can you blame me?” he asked quietly.
Park recoiled a little. “What are you talking about?”
Sagara shook his head. “I keep finding you involved in this mess in the most bizarre ways,” he said. “First you’re sending your robot out to spy on crewmembers. Then Holt is afflicted—just after you treated him. Then Elly Ma, your bunkmate, catches the same affliction. Then you just so happen to be down in the utility rooms, where you’d never gone before, just as Holt arrives down there, too? Then your own superior is frozen, supposedly with the thrice-same affliction as the others you came into contact with?” He pinned her with his dark-eyed glare. “And now you’re fighting me on dropping your patient sessions, when I was under the impression you had not been prepared to take them on at all.”
His paranoia left her breathless. “You think I’m causing all of this?” she asked him, aghast. It took every effort not to let her jaw hang open. “For what purpose? What reason would I have to hurt anybody on the ship?”
“I don’t know,” Sagara told her, as calmly as if they were discussing a movie. “But you have to admit you would be suspicious of you, too, if you were in my shoes.”
“No,” Park said, shaking her head. “I wouldn’t.” The idea that he suspected her—that he thought she had anything to do with these disasters—made her heart thrum faster; the blood thumped hard in her throat. Her mind whirred. If Sagara was suspicious of her, it would take his attention off of the real culprit. If there even was one. She blurted out, “I swear that I have nothing to do with any of this. I’m just like you—trying to figure it all out.”
Sagara said nothing, but she took that to mean that he didn’t believe her. Suddenly she felt a flaring of uncharacteristic anger, of rage, even. It wasn’t fair. She was toiling the best she could under the demands of this fucking mission, and now she was being blamed for things entirely out of her own control. When there was Boone to scrutinize, after shooting a man. When there was Chanur the android-abuser and—and—Sagara himself. What if he had some kind of motive for pinning the blame on her?
What if he was behind all of this, and this was his move to get the next crewmember of the Deucalion frozen?
No, Park thought. His paranoia was catching. “Let’s not turn this into a witch hunt,” she forced herself to say, trying to keep her voice calm. “We don’t need to turn on each other. That won’t help. I don’t think we need to jump to sabotage, or subversion, or—or whatever it is you think. Let’s assume that this is a natural phenomenon we have to overcome, until it’s proven otherwise.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then Sagara said finally, “Agreed,” and folded his arms. But he continued to watch her face with hawkish interest. “So long as you cooperate with my investigation.”
Another flaring of hatred toward him. “My investigation, too. All of ours. I hope you don’t mean to monopolize it. That would be very dangerous, in terms of bias. Or corruption.”
Sagara smiled to himself then, an ironic expression that used one side of his mouth. “Do you not trust me, Park?”
“It sounds like you don’t trust me, Sagara.”
His smile vanished. “I don’t know who you work for.”
“What do you mean? I work for ISF, of course.” Then: “Who do you work for?”
Sagara held her gaze. “ISF, of course.”
They both let that hang in the air for a minute, gauging each other. Park was confused. Was Sagara implying that some third party was involved? Did he have reason to believe that someone on the ship was not employed by ISF?
That there was someone who could actually profit from sabotaging the expedition?
But what a form of sabotage, she thought. Implanting nightmares in people’s brains. Making them sleepwalk. Hurting themselves. How ludicrous to ascribe that to the work of a human agent. Either he had access to evidence she wasn’t aware of, or she would have to go back into his files to find some hint of extreme paranoia, instability in his past. How could he look at her and conclude that she had anything to do with this? That she had some ill intent toward the people on the ship?
“Have you been in contact with ISF?” Park asked finally, just to break the silence. She tried not to let him see how much she needed that hope.
The security officer gazed at her for a long, inscrutable moment. His face seemed to waver in the light before her, as if she were looking at a mirage. “No,” Sagara said finally, gravely. A capitulation. “Communications are still down.”
“Because of the storm,” Park said, equally heavily. “The particles in the atmosphere must still be lingering—causing interference.”
Sagara’s eyes sharpened, but otherwise his face gave nothing away. “Perhaps.”
That annoyed her, too. What did he mean by perhaps? Did he blame her for the malfunctions on the ship as well? He couldn’t possibly think she was tampering with the systems, could he?
“I was hoping to look to ISF for help,” she said, wanting to establish her innocence.
Sagara looked, for a moment, like he wanted to laugh. “I’m sorry, Park,” he said, his look both amused and macabre. “I wouldn’t look to them.”
“You wouldn’t? Why not?”
He shook his head. “We’ve been cut off. There will be no help from that quarter. Not now, not for the foreseeable future. Even if comms were to come back online, it would take, what, over a day to even send a request for help? And we all know how much can happen in a day.” He paused again, and this time she couldn’t decide if he was threatening her or sharing her fear. His next words were slow and deliberate. “No. It’s my belief that, no matter what happens next . . .” He looked at her. “We are on our own.”
His words echoed in her head later, while she was in her office examining Jimex for damage. On our own. On our own. No, Park thought. She was on her own. Especially if Sagara thought she was some kind of supernatural, superpowered villain. She felt as if rocks had been tied to her ankles, and she was being dragged towards a chilly waterfront. Now she had triple the worries weighing down her mind. She had to worry about helping the crewmembers as the acting psychologist of the ship. And she had to worry about investigating what Boone and Wick and Sagara were hiding from her. And what was causing these nightmares. And why Keller was frozen, and why Reimi had fallen sick.
And how she could prove her own innocence.
She gritted her teeth. Keller had told her once that their role on the ship was to be the Deucalion’s glue. Just as Reimi the engineer scurried around, silently repairing and jury-rigging parts of the ship that fell into disrepair, Park and Keller conducted their own kind of maintenance on the ship’s eleven other minds. When there were conflicts, relationships on the brink of collapse, sanities about to dissolve underneath the strains of the expedition’s demands—she and Keller were there to patch things up. Solder things back together. Bolster fragile supports. Keep the crew from buckling under the stress. They were the adhesive that would hold the ship together until they could ferry themselves back home.
She had never felt it was an appropriate metaphor, though she hadn’t told Keller so at the time. Glue did bind things together, but it also so easily came undone. It was so soft and pliable. Under the right heat or pressure, it was in constant danger of falling apart.
“I am uninjured,” Jimex said, interrupting her thoughts.
Park blinked, sitting up. “What?”
Jimex let his shirt fall back down. He had been showing her his torso—too-pale, straight as a board, nipple-less—with that frank lack of embarrassment all androids possessed. “As you can see, Sergeant Boone did not injure me. Would you like me to remove my pants?”
“No,” Park said quickly. “God, no.” She shook her head. “I’m glad. I thought after you told me to run, he would destroy you.”
“He was preoccupied with other things,” Jimex said blandly. He eyed her for a moment, then said, a little accusingly: “You seem injured.”
Park looked down at her hands. She was sitting on the couch in her office, with the MAD propped on her knees. The door was locked, but she hadn’t decided yet whether or not to use it. “I wasn’t hurt, I don’t think.”
“But you are agitated,” Jimex prompted. “Your heart rate is abnormal. Elevated.”
Her mind flashed over the events of the day. You’re damn right my heart rate is elevated. Out loud she said, “They’re hiding something down in the utility rooms. Boone was down there earlier, guarding it. Do you know what it is?”
“No,” Jimex said, shrugging a little.
“But you clean Deck C very frequently.”
“Yes.”
“And you never saw anything out of the ordinary?”
“I do not know what your definition of ordinary is.”
Park sighed. The limitations of a primitive model, yet again. She could expect only minimal help from that quarter—but at least she knew he was concerned about her wellbeing. Otherwise he would have never asked her to run. That was comforting, at least: that someone on this ship still cared about her safety.
Suddenly Fulbreech came to mind. He knew something, too, she thought; maybe the very something Wick and Boone and Sagara were hiding from her. He had asked her, distressed, not to press him about it when they were in the mess hall the day before. It’d had something to do with Eos. And a body.
Could she risk going to him?
Before she could follow that line of thinking further, someone knocked at her door. Park tensed, then looked at Jimex; she didn’t want to send him away. Didn’t want to be alone with anyone, really, after what had happened. Jimex, sensing her thoughts, retreated to the far corner of her office and seemed to enter standby mode. He was not actively listening or watching anything, but he could be reactivated at a moment’s notice. Park turned to the door and unlocked it with her inlay commands, calling, “Come in!”
The person who entered was not anyone Park expected. It was Hunter, Boone’s lieutenant and Park’s bunkmate: she came sullen-faced, hump-shouldered. She said, shying away from the doorway like a skittish pony: “Boone told me to check on you. You didn’t come to the ship meeting.”
Park stared at her. Hunter’s mouth twisted. “He thinks you’ll have more rapport with a woman.”
“Oh,” Park said. She waited, but Hunter said nothing else. Whoever declines to speak first is the one who has the power, Park thought—but Hunter had the fortitude of a Greek stoic. She folded her arms and stared into the middle distance until Park said, “How is Boone?”
“A jackass, as always,” Hunter said. “He and Sagara were having a dick-waving contest for that whole meeting. Waste of time.” Again she fell silent. Park ventured, “How are you feeling about what happened with Holt?”
She’d listened to the meeting, a little, over the inlay system. The other crewmembers had been told that Holt had demonstrated signs of a psychological breakdown, that he had been tranquilized and frozen to prevent another episode. Reimi, Keller, and Ma were all coincidences, Chanur had said—unfortunate victims of either natural illness or the vicious proton storm that had struck the broadside of Eos the day before. In general the other crewmembers had seemed to accept this explanation; they sounded content enough to resume their daily activities, with Wick urging them to pair up and take care of one another.
But Hunter had been one of the few called to the lower decks to help transport Holt. She’d seen the physicist’s smoking body. Had heard Wick’s staticky orders over her inlays. Park remembered how the woman had gazed upon Holt’s blackened face without emotion.
“It was an unfortunate necessity,” Hunter drawled. Her voice curdled with sarcasm. “What happened with Holt. Hazard of the job.”
“Are you concerned in any way about how your superior injured a fellow crewmate?”
“Hazard of the job,” Hunter said again. Then she shot her a knowing look. “I thought you weren’t allowed to do patient sessions anymore. I don’t need to tell you anything.”
“No,” Park said, feeling suddenly very tired. “I suppose not.”
Hunter shifted her weight back onto one heel; then she grimaced, looking briefly regretful. “I’m sorry about Keller, anyway. Getting frozen like that. It’s too bad. She was nice.”
“Yes,” Park said faintly. “She was.” Why were they talking about Keller in the past tense—as if she had ceased to exist? But that was how it felt, she thought, with her shuttled away in some dark box. Humans really were simple: their brains could be fooled by primate logic. Out of sight, out of mind. Out of reality.
Hunter’s eyes flicked up to her again, as if she knew Park’s thoughts. She seemed to shrug off her quick flash of empathy, like she was discarding an outfit in a dressing room. It wasn’t a good fit, her expression seemed to say. She said brusquely, “Just tell me what I should tell Boone, so he doesn’t think you might go crazy.”
Park interpreted this as: Boone expects you to be blubbering and distraught, so he hopes you’ll spill your womanly guts to his crony. He was probably scoping out how much she had figured out, what else she might know. Weighing how much of a threat she was. He and Sagara were probably working together on that front.
If that was the case, Park thought, they should have sent a more amiable spy. Hunter had the warmth of a razor blade.
“I’m perfectly fine,” Park told her. “These are the kinds of experiences I’ve been prepped to expect from a colony mission.”
Surprise flitted across the combat specialist’s face. She unwound her tall frame from the doorway and said, “I see. Well, I’ll tell him that.” She waited, as if Park might blurt out something else; then she turned. “Bye, Park.”
“It’s very admirable of you,” Park said then, “to handle things with such—aplomb.”
Hunter threw a look over her shoulder: half derisive, half pitying. “It’s something you have to learn,” she said. “Not giving a shit. If you let things get to you out here, you might not make it home.”
Then she left. For a while Park sat there in silence, letting Jimex stand inert in his corner. Something Hunter said nagged at her. Not the part about not giving a shit, which sounded like standard posturing, but the part where she’d said Park was not allowed to question her. You’re not allowed to have patient sessions anymore. How did Hunter know that—that Park’s sessions had been suspended? Had Boone told her?
And had they taken away that power from her, not as a measure to stop the nightmares from spreading . . . but as a way to stop Park from asking questions?
Stop, she told herself. That’s paranoid. But her heart clamored in her chest. That was a tactic she felt Sagara would employ. Insulate her—cut her off from other people. From other sources of information. If Park wasn’t allowed to hold her patient sessions, she wasn’t allowed to find out anything from anyone. And wouldn’t that be something he wanted, if they were all really intent on hiding things from her?
Like what was down in the utility rooms.
She stood, leaving the room with Jimex still on standby. It was clear now that Boone and Sagara and Chanur had their allies, and at best all others were oblivious or neutral parties. With Keller frozen and Jimex so—simple, Kel Fulbreech might be the only resource available to her. He had been resistant in the mess hall, Park knew that. But she thought she might be able to get past his reluctance if she really tried. He’d been willing enough to bandy words with her in her office last night. There had to be some way of getting more information out of him. And even if he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—assist her, she still might be able to get a read from his topography.
At this point, anything was better than nothing.
She spent the walk over reviewing strategies, tactics, methods of persuasion. Lines she might say to get him to buckle. But when she got to Fulbreech’s bunk, which he shared with Wan Xu and Holt, she quailed. The door was closed. Park thought of being alone with him in that dark and narrow space and felt sweat form a patch on the back of her decksuit.
I shouldn’t drag him into it, she thought to herself, her knuckle resting on the cold steel of the door. If he isn’t a part of it already. He’s made it clear that he fears ISF’s retribution enough to keep quiet.
And why am I assuming he’s safe for me, anyway, when the others are in control of everything else on the ship? Why do I think that I can trust him?
I should go back to my office and never speak to him again.
She knocked. She heard someone stir, then roll off their bunk with a creak. Fulbreech—alone, to her relief—opened the door and then half-shut it again in surprise. “Park?”
“Fulbreech,” she said, trying to keep her voice as brusque and businesslike as possible. “Can I speak to you? Privately?”
Wordlessly he opened the door. Park stepped inside, but kept her distance from him. It was clear he had just woken up: his blond hair was tousled, his eyes full of grit. And yet her chest still gave a kind of hard clutch when she looked at him. What was that feeling? Fear? Anxiety? Why did she feel as if he’d backed her into a corner, when she was the one who had come to visit him?
“What’s this about?” Fulbreech asked. He was yawning. It was not quite yet lights-out hours, but the expedition members were on rotating shifts again, some sleeping sooner than others to go out earlier in the morning. That meant Boone or even Sagara might be sleeping now, Park realized. If they were slotted to go out tomorrow.
“I want to talk about what happened today,” she said to Fulbreech.
He grimaced. “You mean with Holt?”
Park nodded. “They told you something about it at the meeting.”
“They said he had a breakdown,” Fulbreech said slowly, “and they tranquilized him.” He looked at her in sudden sympathy. “That must be tough for you, especially with Keller gone. I hope you know it’s not your fault—things like this happen pretty frequently on—”
Park made an abrupt gesture and cut him off. “They didn’t tranquilize Holt,” she said. Already she was chafing at his kindness, his hand-holding. “They shot him. Boone did, I mean. Did you know he has an electrolaser gun?”
Share information, she was thinking, and earn trust. Obligate the other person into reciprocating. Fulbreech’s eyebrows snapped down, not too quickly; that meant his reaction was honest. “No,” he said, looking troubled. “I didn’t know that. So you’re saying Wick and Sagara lied at the meeting?”
“They don’t want to spread a panic on the ship.”
He scratched his chin. “How do you know all this?”
“I was there.”
“That’s why you were running! Are you all right?”
It only took a moment for her to decide the tone of her answer. “Frankly, no,” Park replied, straight-faced. “A lot of things are happening at once. With Keller gone, I need someone else to help me . . . process.”
That ought to strike a chord with his altruistic side. Fulbreech stood there in the half-dark, thinking; he rubbed his hair into spikes as he thought. Park took the opportunity to assess the room, which she had never seen, but it was featureless: every bunk but Fulbreech’s was made up with military precision. There was a small book lying steepled on his pillow, but Park couldn’t read its cover in the gloom. She was surprised; she hadn’t seen a paper book since she was a child.
“You won’t find anything incriminating,” Fulbreech said then, interrupting her thoughts. His smile was wry.
Park looked back up. “What do you think I’m looking for?”
“I don’t know. Something you can put in your file about me. Something that screams of repression. Maybe you think I wet the bed or suck my thumb.”
“You’re very self-centered,” Park told him stiffly. “You seem to think I spend a lot of time thinking about you.”
“Don’t you?”
“No.”
Fulbreech smiled. Then his face turned grave. “Will Holt be all right?”
She shook her head. “He’s in a medically induced coma. Chanur said that he ultimately should recover, but he might have some facial tics.”
Surreptitiously she waited for his response: disgust at Boone, alarm at the situation. But Fulbreech only said, sucking the air between his teeth: “Why’d they shoot him?”
Park looked at him closely. Now was the time to find out how much he really knew. “It was down in the utility rooms,” she said. “Holt was . . . sleepwalking. In a trance. He tried to go through a door down there, and Boone shot him to prevent him from getting through.”
Fulbreech was shaking his head. “Idiot,” he breathed to himself. “No point to that.”
The back of Park’s neck prickled. “What do you mean?”
He caught her watching him, hesitated, then shook his head again. “It’s nothing. Look—Boone is crazy, we all know that. He’s an ass at the best of times, a tyrant at the worst. It sounds like he got trigger-happy. He’s probably used to throwing his weight around on Mars.”
“It’s not that simple,” Park insisted, frowning. “He’s hiding something down there. And it’s important enough that he would try to kill Holt to avoid compromising it.” She met his eye. “Don’t you think?”
Fulbreech paused for the briefest moment, and in that moment a dozen micro-expressions flashed over his face. Fear, uncertainty, guilt, doubt. That alone told Park what she needed to know. He knew what was down there. Maybe they all did—except her.
“Fulbreech,” she heard herself say. “What’s in the utility rooms?”
He averted his gaze. “Nothing, Park,” he murmured. “Really, nothing.”
Liar! Park felt as if he had struck her, slapped her open-palmed across the face. She felt the sudden urge to get away from him. “I’m going down there,” she announced, turning back to the door.
Fulbreech looked alarmed. “Wait,” he said, putting a hand out. “Park—what if Boone catches you down there? What if he does the same thing to you as he did to Holt?”
She looked back at him over her shoulder, almost sneering. “Why would he, if there really is nothing down there?”
Fulbreech stared at her. Finally he said unhappily: “There are things you don’t need to know, Park. Things you shouldn’t know. But it’s for your own good. Your own protection.”
“Is that how you justify it?” she demanded. “You’re hiding things from me—lying to me—so you can protect me?”
No one asked you to do that, she wanted to add, viciously. I don’t want or need your protection.
Fulbreech spread his hands. “Just trust me,” he said, his blue eyes so earnest they ignited a kind of fury in Park’s heart. “Forget about all this. Go to bed. Everything’s going to be all right. I promise.”
She turned to unlock the door, taking care not to slam it behind her—to not let him see how much he had incensed her. She would not allow him to think his actions had any emotional effect on her whatsoever. “Good night, Fulbreech,” she gritted out.
The door swung shut between them with a distant little click. Park stalked off into the dark, fuming; Fulbreech didn’t follow. Park didn’t know if she was even more annoyed by this or relieved. He spoke to her as if she were a child! And she’d thought that she could still trust him—could still appeal to him for help. But all he had for her were platitudes, meaningless deflections. Go to bed? Forget about this? Who did he think she was? And what did he think their relationship was, that he could give her a proverbial pat on the head and send her on her way without outright insulting her intelligence?
What good are his promises? Park asked herself. Her scalp seemed to crackle with the heat of her anger. She couldn’t rely on him for anything. One moment he was cozying up to her, interrogating her about this and that, inviting her along on secret and forbidden excursions. The next, he was rebuking her for asking too many questions, withdrawing his support, or worse—actively working to deter her from finding out anything for herself. All under the pretense that he was concerned for her wellbeing. No, his promises were no good. She couldn’t trust him, just like she couldn’t trust Sagara or Boone. Actually, Fulbreech was even more dangerous, the most frightening of the three: he concealed his allegiances behind a smile.
Nothing in the utility rooms, hell, she thought as she skulked down the corridor that eventually led to the Deck C ladder. She kept to the shadows, what little there were—but there was no one, human or android, who had been stationed to get in her way. She still couldn’t believe that he would lie to her, so bald-faced. What exactly did he think she needed protection from? Did he think her that fragile, that she couldn’t stomach whatever ugly truth was down there?
She looked forward to proving him wrong; to cracking open that mysterious door and unveiling whatever it was they were all concealing. If Boone was down there, she’d lunge for the door, if she had to. If it was Wick or Sagara, she’d talk her way past them. And in the end she would point at the thing and say, “Is this what you call nothing? Is that the thing worth killing for?”
She couldn’t conceive of what it could be. She only knew that if she didn’t find out, she’d be stuck in this hamster wheel of fear and uncertainty for the rest of the journey home.
If we ever make it home, came her dark and unbidden thought, then.
She walked for a long time with nothing but shadows to accompany her. It was a little strange that they hadn’t put a guard on something that even Fulbreech was eager to keep hidden—but Park told herself that she ought to feel grateful. And humans had to sleep, too. Even the androids were inactive for longer periods of time now, without Reimi—to slow their eventual deterioration.
But as time went on, she began to wish for a little company, something to direct her irritation and energy towards. For some sign of other life on the ship. It was too quiet—she could barely even hear her own footfalls. And as she made the descent down the hatch to Deck C, the corridor to the utility rooms suddenly seemed unfamiliar to her. She hadn’t paid enough attention when Jimex was in the lead. Thankfully, it was not as dark as the first time she had made the trip, but the hall’s turns and angles made Park feel like she was being led up, not down. The path stretched ahead of her like a long, gray snake.
This isn’t the way, Park thought, confused. I made a wrong turn somewhere.
But she forced herself to go on. She was sometimes easily disoriented, especially when the artificial gravity was on. Even now she felt the wave of nausea, the stomach-lurching dizziness. She was Earth-born; her senses were unused to helping her navigate the dense warrens that formed the innards of spaceships. She told herself that if she kept following the corridor, she would eventually reach a part of the Deucalion that she recognized.
Onward she climbed. Gradually Park’s sense of unease—and her conviction that she was in the wrong part of the deck—grew. The air here was humid, warm, almost stale—and she remembered how cold and lightless the trek had been the first time. She had the eerie feeling that the floor and walls were moving around her. Not rotating, as some parts of the ship did, but . . . heaving?
A trick of the light, she told herself, ignoring her damp palms. A consequence of not having Reimi around to conduct maintenance on the lighting modules. The flickering panels cast shadows on the walls that made it look like they were shifting. Respiring. It didn’t help that the air was so muggy and damp, as if she were walking into the gullet of something alive.
Something darted at the corner of Park’s eye. Her head snapped around—but there was nothing there.
Don’t run, she told herself, aware of the irrationality of the thought. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was following her.
She crept onward, now shuffling a little in the lambent gray light. Park’s heart was rapping quickly in her chest; she strained to hear the sounds of the others, of proof that there were still people on the ship. That she hadn’t suddenly been cut off from the world of the living.
The tunnel crooked left, then right, then left again. She was going in a zigzag—no, a circle. Park’s internal compass spun crazily, and soon she lost all sense of familiarity or direction. She looked around for some landmark, some way to steady herself; when she tried to pull up the ship’s map on her inlays, METIS, the ship’s computer, informed her that it was an experiencing an error. No directions could be offered—and no one else could be reached.
The air grew warmer and wetter. Park’s sense that the walls were breathing persisted: the floor felt a little spongy under her feet, and the gray walls had a sheen like old meat, the pipes and panels that traced them like viscera. Her stomach lurched a little; she imagined the taste of blood was in her throat.
Down the hall, there was a scuttling.
Park turned and looked back in the direction she had come. “Hello?” she said. She was aware of how feeble her voice sounded; how uncertain and pleading it was. But at this point she would have taken any answer, as long as it was someone she knew. Even the appearance of Boone, with his burliness and electrolaser gun, would have been preferable to being alone and lost for a moment longer.
But there was no answer. Only more scuttling, like the tapping of spider feet, closer and louder. Even though there was nothing there.
Park turned and began to run.
The scuttling sound followed her, seemingly right on her heels, along with an acute sense of pursuit—as if someone’s regard, full of intent, was arrowing down the corridor after her. Park had to keep herself from screaming. She was, suddenly, too afraid to look behind her.
She sprinted around a corner and found herself colliding forehead-first with something warm and solid. Park automatically lashed out, but whoever it was caught her wrists.
“Park!” a familiar voice exclaimed. “What are you doing?”
She looked up and, to her shock and knee-buckling relief, found Fulbreech standing in the light in front of her. She nearly threw her arms around him, despite her earlier anger; instead she stepped away from him and said, “What are you doing down here?”
He looked at her, bemused. “I didn’t like where we left off. And I wanted to make sure that you didn’t have any nasty run-ins.”
She felt a little chill at the base of her spine. “Nasty run-ins?”
“With Boone,” Fulbreech said. His eyes had that earnest look in them again. “You know—an encounter that would end with you in the freezer.”
“Right,” Park said. “Of course.” She shook her head; he was thinking about her protection, again. But she didn’t quite have it in her to be annoyed with him this time.
Then she realized something. “How did you get down here before me?” Park asked, bewildered. She glanced behind her, at the empty corridor. “You didn’t pass me on the way.”
Fulbreech blinked. “You took a long time. I must have gotten here first.”
“But I went straight here from your room.”
Fulbreech spread his hands. “I don’t know, then. I assumed you stopped off somewhere.”
Park had to bite her lip to keep from questioning him further; her mind buzzed, questing and examining her fuzzy idea of the geographical improbabilities of his claim. As far as she knew, there was only one ladder down to Deck C, and that was the one she had taken. But there were a few different routes to get to it from Fulbreech’s bunk; could he have possibly taken another path after she’d left, arriving at the hatch far before her? Or was there some other secret entryway to Deck C that she wasn’t aware of?
“Did you . . . notice anything unusual, on your way down here?” Park asked finally.
Fulbreech looked blank. “No,” he said—and he was honest, as far as she could tell. “Did you?”
Park didn’t say anything. Didn’t want to say anything—she was afraid of giving herself away. The way she had taken was not the way she had gone the first time. She was sure of that. And the feeling that she was being followed . . . She hadn’t imagined that, had she?
But what other explanation was there? Was her memory that faulty? Or was her troubled mind playing tricks on her?
The possibility frightened her deeply. She was stressed, yes, but she had never experienced delusions from her stress before. Or felt such a preternatural feeling of fear. Is this how it starts? she asked herself. What if I’m experiencing the first symptoms?
What if this is what Holt and Ma felt?
She shook herself and blinked. I’m tired, she thought. She hadn’t slept since before Holt was shot. And she was no longer sure what time it was—it was so hard to tell without checking the computer, here on this ship without windows. The tired human brain created illusions, misfired the wrong hormones and chemicals after a long enough period without rest. She knew this. That’s all there is to it, Park told herself, shivering. I’m tired. That’s the only thing that’s wrong with me.
“Park?” Fulbreech was giving her a concerned look.
“It’s nothing,” Park said. She stepped past him to look at the trio of doors. “Let’s just get this over with. Are you going to help me look?”
Fulbreech sighed. “Yes,” he said heavily. “Only to keep you out of trouble. But there’s nothing there.”
“We’ll see,” Park said.
So they proceeded with their search. The doors Park had seen Boone guarding were plain things, innocuous-looking enough: they were made of the same dingy-gray plate metal that enclosed any other supply closet or cargo hold on the ship. Each door had its own separate palm lock, a simple biometric guard that scanned the faces and fingerprints of authorized crewmembers. For a simple utility room, every member should have access—if there was nothing inside to hide.
Fulbreech reached for the left door, but Park, remembering that Boone had stood in front of the middle, said, “No. The center one.”
Fulbreech cast her a sidelong glance before laying his palm against the middle lock. Park tensed, half-expecting some alarm to go off, or a booby-trap—but almost immediately she heard the grating and tumbling of the door’s mechanism unlocking. The door slid open, and Fulbreech ducked inside.
Park waited, staring into the darkness of the closet. It seemed impossibly small, hardly bigger than a broom closet. Fulbreech’s shoulders nearly touched both walls. “You see,” he said, turning to look at her in a resigned way. “Nothing.”
Park immediately suspected foul play. He knew there was something in that room; she knew it, too. Boone had been guarding something.
She squeezed herself in with him, then regretted it immediately; the tininess of the space forced her to cram herself up against his chest. She looked away, ignoring the heat coming off his decksuit, and felt around, stroking the walls, running her hands along the shelves. But there was nothing. The room was bare, aside from a few common tools and cleaning devices. Fulbreech even clicked on the cranky, unflattering light to help her search.
Nothing.
Eventually Park squirmed her way out of the little room. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would Boone shoot Holt for this?”
Fulbreech squeezed out after her. “I told you,” he said. “It’s not about the room. Boone was just trigger-happy—or scared of Holt. His gut reaction was to shoot first, ask questions later.”
She glared again into the barren little closet, refusing to believe it. There was fraud going on here, some kind of petty deceit, but her thoughts were too jumbled to clearly perceive what it was. Could she be mistaken? There was no way. “Then why was Boone standing down here in the first place?”
“I don’t know,” Fulbreech said. “You’ll have to ask him that.”
She had the absurd urge to push him, as if they were squabbling on a playground and she could win something by asserting her physical dominance where logic had failed. But instead she channeled that energy into searching the other two utility rooms. Again, there was no resistance, no lock to stand against her—and inside she found nothing but a small cleaning unit, a rolled-up mat. Some toolboxes. She went as far as sorting through each plasma cutter and rivet gun on every shelf, hoping for a hidden lever or button. Fulbreech watched in silence as she rummaged, Park growing more and more frustrated.
Finally she flung the last auto-wrench into its box and rounded on him. “You moved it,” she accused. “That’s why you came down here ahead of me. It wasn’t to keep me safe—you headed me off to hide it.”
Fulbreech’s face wasn’t smug, or gloating, or relieved. Instead he only looked sad and a little pitying. “Believe what you want,” he said, shrugging in a resigned way. “But that’s not what happened. I’m sorry, Park.”
“There was something down here,” she repeated, but even to her own ears the proclamation sounded hollow. Her feelings were a riot of confusion and alarm and righteous anger; how could this be? Where was this thing they were all hiding?
She wished she had come down alone, after all. Even if Fulbreech was orchestrating some deception against her, she couldn’t help but feel a little humiliated in front of him; and when he gave her that sympathetic look, she wanted to scream. No doubt he thought she was a little frenzied, a little unbalanced. She wanted to run away from him; the dim walls of the corridor contracted around her like a vein.
“I’m sorry,” Fulbreech said again. “You should just let it go.”
You’re lying to me! Park thought—but her shoulders slumped. No point in hurling accusations when she had no proof to back them up. And such a display of emotion would only render her more vulnerable—more discreditable—than she already was.
She began walking away from him, without looking back. Fulbreech followed, like a patient guardian following a child who had to ride out a tantrum, and after a moment he said, “You said you were born in New Diego.”
Park wasn’t in the mood to make small talk with him anymore. “What of it?”
“So that means you’re Earth-born.”
“Obviously.”
“But not conscripted.”
Park didn’t answer for a long time. They walked in silence for a while, letting something hang in the air between them, sloshing uneasily. Park kept her eyes away from the walls this time, though her brain beat so hotly with anger and embarrassment that she thought it might burn away any illusions she’d seen earlier. Finally she said, “I don’t understand.”
Fulbreech tried to lengthen his stride to catch up to her, but Park only sped up in response. “Most of the people on this crew are colony-born, or conscripted,” he said, his voice a little strained from the effort to keep up. “They don’t put that in our files.”
No, Park thought. They didn’t. She’d had to guess, or infer from what other people said when they thought she wasn’t listening. But she didn’t know where he was going with this line of thought, and pursed her lips against the idea that he was trying to distract her from what had just happened. But Fulbreech persisted: “On missions like this, ISF prefers to use people from the colony pools only. But there was such a rush that they had to bring people from Earth. People who aren’t conscripted. You see?”
“No,” Park said flatly.
Behind her, Fulbreech sighed. “ISF likes control,” he said, enunciating clearly, as if she were foreign, or slow. “There was a mission last year where a battleship was deployed to Halla to take out a terrorist base. The conscripted gunmen on board knew that. But the non-conscripted were told that they were going to Mars—just to prevent them from leaking it to the terrorists. Some of them were from Halla, and never knew they’d bombed it until they got home.”
Park turned and stared at him. But before she could ask more, Fulbreech resumed walking again, making it clear that he wasn’t going to say more. Now it was Park’s turn to follow him; she dogged his footsteps in a daze. She needed sleep; she couldn’t quite process what he was telling her. Was he saying that the expedition members—the ones who were compelled into service to the ISF—were forced to hide the very nature of their mission itself? That the secrets ran deeper than the mysterious side projects, the details of Eos—that their very purpose for being there was presented differently to each side?
But ISF hired me to monitor the situation, she thought. To report back on it. What point would there be to that if they wouldn’t let her know everything?
Fulbreech’s hand bumped into hers. Park snatched her arm back as if she had been bitten; Fulbreech pretended not to notice. Overhead there was a plinking sound. It made Park think of the sound that had filled New Diego when hail clattered against the biodome.
“Asteroid shower,” Fulbreech said to Park’s unspoken question, looking up. “It must be minor, or METIS would have activated the shields.”
Park struggled to pull herself out of her own thoughts. “Are we safe?”
“Oh, sure,” he answered. “We’re always safe on the Deucalion.”
Park thought of Holt’s charred suit flaking off his body in drifts like gray snow. Fulbreech met her eye and grimaced, as if he knew what she was thinking. “Hopefully these are only temporary problems, Park,” he said. “Every expedition has its share, especially during the first wave.”
The thought of other people settling here had not even entered her mind—she had almost forgotten they were here to determine if Eos was a suitable place to live. A place to build up and populate. “So you’re saying this is normal? All of this is to be expected?”
Fulbreech looked away. They were nearing the airlock—the great set of double doors that led to the outside. “I’m saying we have to make the best of what we’ve got.”
They slowed. Park stopped in front of the enormous vault. It was a complex archway with its own console terminal dedicated to opening each door, governing the quarantine procedures for the space in between. She imagined that she could feel a chill coming off the metal—that some trace of Eos was leaking through. She couldn’t remember clearly what the planet looked like, anymore. Would she ever be able to see the twin suns again—the strange Eotian ice? Or would they leave with her still ignorant, like the Hallanese crewmembers who’d attacked their own home without ever seeing it?
She took a deep breath and said, “Have you found anything out there yet?”
Fulbreech glanced at her, frowning. “You know I’m not supposed to talk to you about it.”
Park felt so tired that she wanted to cry. “I know,” she said wearily. “But it’s not abnormal for me to wonder.”
Fulbreech exhaled. “No,” he said, a concession. “It’s not abnormal at all. But . . .”
Then he grimaced, as if she’d done something to hurt him; as if she’d slipped a knife between his ribs, and he could not believe her betrayal. She saw it in his face: he wanted to help her. Wanted to please her. Wanted her regard. But he was afraid of something. The consequences of disobeying his orders, his conscription, perhaps—though if he wasn’t being dramatic for her sake, she had to admit: it looked even more dire than that.
Finally Fulbreech closed his eyes, as if trying to recall a distant memory. Then, in a low voice, he said, “The planet itself is beautiful. There’s a place I particularly like, not far from here. We call it the Glass Sea. There’s no snow, just ice—ice of all colors. The ground looks like one of those shards of green bottles you’d find in the ocean back home.”
Park waited. Fulbreech continued, eyes still closed: “Out in the distance you can see the white horizon—we think it might be a salt plain—and then huge pillars of ice jutting up into the sky. Bigger than Everest; bigger than anything back on Earth. Some of the pillars are pink and purple, like rock candy. A lot of light blue, which turns to gray when the light goes down.”
Park closed her eyes, too. She felt Fulbreech shift, as if to take her hand, and before he could she said, “What do you mean when you say ‘the planet itself’? What else is there?”
Fulbreech paused. When Park opened her eyes, she saw that he had turned away from her, his shoulders rounded as if expecting an assault. “I don’t think,” he said, “that humans can live here, Park.”
“So why are we still here?”
Fulbreech looked at her, and for a moment he looked like a stranger, his face was so grave and changed. The light shifted, and it seemed to Park that the walls shrank inward, tensing up as if the room were holding its breath. All around them was the dim roar of the ship—the bombardment of ice and stone and the fragments of stars.
“Fulbreech?” she repeated. “Why are we still here?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” Fulbreech said miserably.
And that, she finally believed.