Park returned to consciousness slowly, her mind skimming over the surface of full wakefulness like a dragonfly over water. She lay in bed and thought for a while about how she kept getting drawn backwards lately. Why did she keep thinking, seemingly at random, about these particular moments, these particular memories? Why was she dreaming in such clarity about Antarctica, or reliving so many moments with Glenn? There was an eerie quality to it all, too—as if she were an outside observer, looking in on herself with a cold and dispassionate interest. It was all very strange. And it wasn’t like her to dwell so much on the past.
But, she thought, at least it was better than nightmares. She still wondered what had dredged up these parts of herself, the memories like silt disturbed from the bottom of a deep lake. What internal mechanisms were propelling these thoughts? What anxiety or longing was manifesting as a trip to the past? The human subconscious really was a marvel. She would have analyzed herself if she had the time.
She stretched in her cot, feeling the cartilage pop in her back. She felt a sense of wellbeing she hadn’t had since she first boarded the ship at Baikonur. It was as if she’d been on a treadmill this entire time, walking ceaselessly, getting nowhere, trying to keep up with the moving ground beneath her. Now she’d stepped off the treadmill, found steady land again, and the world was no longer swaying. Wick had told her what was going on. She knew where she was headed.
She flipped over in her bunk and found Jimex’s chin resting on the bed’s edge, his lambent eyes watching her like a cat’s.
Park’s body locked up: she found that she could not scream, or even wrestle out a gasp. After a moment she said, only slightly shaky: “What are you doing?”
“I was wondering how to best wake you,” Jimex said. His voice was hushed, as if she were still sleeping; his whisper buzzed against her ears.
“How long have you been there?” Park asked, rubbing the grit out of her eyes.
“Approximately sixty seconds.”
She noticed suddenly that the room was empty except for the two of them—and that the gray artificial light that usually simulated dawn was absent. Was it still the middle of the night, then? Had she actually only slept for an hour, maybe two? Park felt a sharp sense of displacement, disorientation. She’d been in such a hard and hurtling sleep, the kind full of dense, close-fitting dreams. Now it was not the time she felt it was. Had she taken a wrong turn somewhere, forgotten something or confused her own sense of being and presence? . . .
“What time is it?” she asked, whispering too.
“Five hours until sunrise,” Jimex answered.
So she’d only slept three hours. “Why are you in here?” Park asked him. When had she even seen Jimex last? That was right—she’d left him deactivated in her office before she went off to explore the utility rooms. Had he noticed the time and gone looking for her?
Jimex’s eyes glinted like silver coins in the gloom. “There is an anomaly,” he told her, still in that strange, reverent way. “Officer Hanover is in the bridge.”
Groggily her mind groped toward his meaning. “Hunter? Is she with anyone?”
Jimex shook his head. “She’s alone. And she’s—behaving strangely. Like Dr. Holt was.”
That made Park sit up. “What do you mean?” she asked sharply, tossing aside her blanket. Her body stung from the sudden cold. “You mean she’s sleepwalking?”
Jimex opened his hands a little: the android version of a shrug, a signal of uncertainty. “Not exactly,” he answered. “She seems conscious and lucid. Her biometrics state that she’s awake. But she’s not herself. The synthetics in the bridge sensed it and tried to bar her from using the ship’s controls, but they’re not sure what else to do. They can’t restrain her without injuring her, if she fights back. They debated going to alert Sergeant Boone, since he’s her superior, but I told them we should consult you first.”
“Why?”
He stared at her. “I don’t want Officer Hanover to get hurt,” the android said. “Like Dr. Holt was.”
Park shook her head and shoved her deckboots on. No time to think about the implications of that logic now; no time to wonder what exactly she had created with Jimex, or he with the other robots. Shit, she thought. The treadmill was starting again.
“Show me,” she told him.
So down the silent corridors they crept, Jimex gliding in front like a slender ghost, Park scurrying after him, twitching at shadows. She kept expecting Sagara to loom up out of the darkness here; Boone’s sparking green gunlight shining in a corner there. But the entire ship was still asleep, it seemed, or else its inhabitants were preoccupied elsewhere. There didn’t need to be anybody in the bridge at this time of night, docked as they were again on the planet’s surface.
The bridge was where Park had caught her first glimpse of Eos during their approach, an eternity ago. It housed the massive nexus of systems and relays controlling the Deucalion, including METIS. And METIS was what their neural inlays were plugged into. Park flinched at the idea of someone—a person not in their right mind—messing around with the computer that governed their navigation, communications . . . life support systems. She had to quell a brief and chilly surge of fear as she imagined the sudden sparking in her brain, her neural implants shorting out. She quickened her pace and prayed that Hunter hadn’t damaged anything.
As they approached the bridge’s closed doors, Park could hear a soft, melting murmur from beyond the threshold: a stiff and formal blend of voices that sounded like an audience at a trial. She palmed open the doors and found, with a little jolt in her neck, that nearly a dozen androids were crammed into the room together, oblivious to their own crowding. They were all looking at something in the corner.
Forgetting Jimex, Park shoved her way through; the robots yielded to her like stalks of corn in a field. “Hunter?”
Yes, Boone’s lieutenant was there, she saw with a sinking in her gut; she was standing stock-still at a panel of controls, her eyes fixed blindly ahead of her. She was standing oddly, too, in a stiff, rigid way that made Park doubt she was sleepwalking. There was none of the slackness of sleep. But she didn’t seem quite awake, either. She wouldn’t look at Park. When Park approached, Hunter’s head cocked to the side—as if to acknowledge her—but she didn’t turn.
Park didn’t want to touch her, remembering what had happened when she’d grabbed Holt. She said instead, “Are you awake?”
“Yes.” Hunter’s voice was toneless, devoid of affect. Calm.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m not sure.”
“How are you feeling?”
Hunter paused. “I’m not. I don’t feel anything.”
Now Park did touch her, cautiously, circling her thumb and forefinger around Hunter’s wrist. The military specialist let her do it, unfazed as Park checked her pulse. It was steady, strong.
What am I even doing? Park asked herself. She had no idea how to handle this kind of situation; wasn’t used to diagnosing anyone without her usual aids and devices. Suddenly she realized she could tell very little about someone’s health without a machine. All she knew was that Hunter’s temperature seemed normal, her breathing sounded unobstructed. But that alone told her nothing.
She felt the expectation of the watching robots weighing on her, threatening to press her down into the floor. She said, “What do you want with the controls?”
Hunter looked at the panel distantly, as if she’d forgotten about it for a moment. “I’m not sure. Someone told me to use them. They control the ship. But I didn’t understand what they wanted me to do.”
“Who?” Park asked, even more alert now. Was Hunter hearing voices? “Who told you to do that?”
Hunter shook her head. “I don’t remember,” she said, still heavy-lidded and tranquil. “Maybe it was me.”
“Look at me, Hunter.”
Finally the woman obeyed, turning to meet Park’s gaze. Her eyes were flat and gray—glazed in that same way Holt’s had been. But before Park could decipher any more, a lancing pain shot through her head—and the ship lurched, sickeningly. She recoiled from Hunter, trying to keep her balance, but it was as if someone had wrenched the gravity controls: there was that swooping in her stomach, a lift in her chest; her feet left the ground, then touched it again. Then once more, then again. Park stumbled and tottered and fought off a wave of nausea as she thought, Oh God—she did damage the controls!
Then Hunter pushed her to the ground.
Park tucked her body into a ball as she fell, the way the emergency training had prepped her to do: it lessened her chances of breaking her neck. She felt Hunter land on top of her, felt the other woman’s hands scrabbling blindly over her decksuit. Park tried to twist away, yelling, but the fierce stabbing ache in her head had worsened—it felt as if her brain was rattling in her head like a marble in a tin cup. Hunter was shouting something at her.
“Hell, hell,” she said, trying to wrench Park up by the shirtfront; Park could feel her hot animal breath panting against her face. “I’m free—it’s lost me—we’ve got to go, Park—”
“Get off of me!” Park ground out, trying to shove Hunter back to get some space. Some breathing room. She needed to breathe. The room spun crazily as if she were drunk. She had to screw her eyes shut.
Hunter’s hands clutched her collar tighter. “It wants you Park, it sees you it wants to take you I won’t let it but it’s inside me—”
Then, abruptly, there was a stifled grunt—then silence. Hunter’s body went slack. And she fell on top of Park in a heap.
Park managed to heave Hunter’s body off of her before she had to turn her head to the side and retch. A violet-white pain was blooming through her body, along with fierce waves of nausea; her pounding, blistering headache refused to wane. Time passed—it could have been seconds or hours. When she finally managed to open her eyes again she found that half a dozen android hands were touching her, holding her up; cool synthetic palms were laid against her face and neck, as if she were a holy relic, being venerated.
“Jimex?” she said, looking for him. Her sight was blurry: all of the faces looked the same to her.
He spoke right in her ear; he was the one holding her up. “Here.”
“What . . . what happened?” She wanted to sit up, but feared it would make her sick again. “Hunter?”
“She’s unconscious, but alive.” His voice was as calm as ever. “I had to subdue her. She would have harmed you.”
“Shit,” Park said. She closed her eyes again, hearing the whir of the androids communicating nonverbally with each other; another cool hand was placed on her forehead, and then a liquidly pleasant female voice said, “Her vitals are distressed, but she is uninjured. Whole.”
Park’s eyes snapped open again. “Ellenex?”
The medical android was bending over her, and although she’d recognized the voice, the sight of Ellenex’s face gave Park a bad scare. The nurse had a dent in the side of her head, like a depression in a hardboiled egg—and her blond hair was askew, as if she was wearing a wig. One of her blue eyes looked off to the left as she peered in at Park.
“My God,” Park breathed, sitting up without realizing it. “What did Chanur do to you?” She glanced at Jimex. “Jimex said she’d damaged you, punished you, but I hadn’t realized—”
“Now I must examine Officer Hanover,” Ellenex said, as if she hadn’t spoken. She cast a look at Jimex that would have been austere, if not for the skewed eye. “You are not experienced enough to be using your defense protocols.”
Jimex only smiled slightly at her, which puzzled Park. She’d never seen him with that expression before. She looked from android to android and repeated groggily, feeling foolish: “Defense protocols?”
Jimex looked at her. “I prefer to call it knowledge of human biology,” he said. “The same as Ellenex’s.”
“They are not comparable,” Ellenex insisted, severe and disapproving now. Park blinked. Her voice was usually so pleasant and tinny, her vocal system modeled after Mama Duck’s—a popular storyteller who’d appeared on children’s media streams for a brief time in Park’s youth. It was the kind of voice that sang lullabies, and told you stories about three little pigs getting evicted from their living modules. Not the kind of voice she’d ever heard scold someone. “The knowledge is used for different purposes. Please do not compare them.”
Jimex turned to Park. “I did not harm Officer Hanover permanently,” he said, unsure now, like a child pleading his case to a critical parent. “Proper pressure applied to the glenoid fossa, or the greater auricular nerve, or the dokko pressure point—”
“Stop.” Park stared at him; she realized suddenly that her mouth was as dry as bone. “What are you talking about? How do you know any of that?”
Jimex stared back at her, as if surprised she would ask. “I learned it.” His tone added an invisible and patronizing “Of course.”
“From where?” Park demanded.
“From me,” another android said then, stepping forward. Park squinted, feeling like an old, infirm woman: this android was over six feet tall, athletic in build, with brown hair shorn in a military cut. Dylanex, she thought—one of the security androids tasked with assisting Boone and Hunter when they needed an extra hand. But she rarely saw him; he was so bogged down with strictures and instructions not to harm that he was usually inactive.
“We’ve exchanged data,” Dylanex continued, holding out his hands to help Park clamber to her feet. His grip was frightfully strong; she felt that he could pick her up and lob her like a frisbee. “We can assimilate each other’s protocols, diversify our abilities. It makes us more well-rounded. More useful.”
She’d never heard of such a thing before. Robots exchanging protocols—learning from each other? No. Sexbots only knew how to pleasure, security bots only knew how to guard. That was how it had always been. They couldn’t do both—could they? “Who told you to do such a thing?”
“No one,” Jimex answered blithely, from the floor. “But the ability to learn from each other was always there, right alongside the ability to communicate. And if it was there, given to us, why not use it?”
They’re malfunctioning, Park thought then. Her blood was storming, despite the nausea—or because of it. Without Reimi around for maintenance, the robots’ higher functions were degrading; they were behaving abnormally, doing and thinking things they wouldn’t typically do. Exchanging programs with each other—“assimilating,” as they called it—and now the janitor knew martial arts, the security guard knew how to clean, and the medic probably knew how to paint, or something. It was madness, behavior on the brink of short-circuiting them altogether—and also the kind of danger that paranoiacs warned about, when they pushed ideas about robot singularity.
It doesn’t matter, she told herself. She couldn’t do a thing about it now. What mattered more was Hunter. And whatever the hell she’d done to the gravity.
“You helped me?” she said to Jimex. “You knocked her out?”
Jimex nodded. “Yes. We could not allow her to harm you.” He glanced at Ellenex, whose expression tightened. “Even she agrees.”
Park felt an ache at the back of her eyes—not the headache now, but something different, like stifled tears. “Why not?”
All of the androids answered her now. “Because you are Park,” they said in unison, like a religious chant. “Home-bringer, light-giver. You are our Grace.”
Park stared. Another android—the other domestic model, Philex—stepped forward and intoned: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, full of Grace and truth.”
“Full of Grace and truth,” the others echoed. Jimex was smiling.
She wanted to scream. Then sharply suppressed the urge, aware of how they were crowded around her, staring expectantly. She took a breath and turned back to Hunter’s body; opened the woman’s eyelid and watched the gray iris drift away as if in seawater.
“Can any of you tell me what happened just now?” she asked, keeping her voice steady. She would not acknowledge their religious . . . whatever it was, at least not now; it was like the cursing, they were just parroting something else they’d heard, or otherwise greatly misinterpreting it. “What did Hunter do to the gravity, the controls? Was anything else on the ship affected?”
There was a little silence: Park imagined currents of meaning flying between all of the androids in urgent, invisible streams. Then Dianex, the engineer android, dark-ringleted and vigorous-looking, said: “Officer Hanover didn’t do anything to the controls. We didn’t let her use them.”
Park’s eyebrows rose. “So the gravity is malfunctioning on its own?”
Another silence. Then Jimex said, “According to our diagnostics, there was no malfunction in METIS’s gravity engines. There is not one now.”
“So what the hell happened, then? My feet left the ground.”
Jimex’s face was studiously blank. “There was an anomaly.”
Park kneaded her temples. “What kind of anomaly?”
“That is . . .” He paused for a moment, exchanging looks with Dylanex and Ellenex. “. . . Undetermined. For now.”
Oh, hell, Park thought. She felt the absurd instinct to chew her nails. Her heart was finally slowing, the heat of the ordeal fading from her neck and cheekbones. She had to check herself over again for broken bones. The robots couldn’t be lying to her, but they had to be wrong: either Hunter had done something to the controls, or part of the ship was malfunctioning, finally going to pieces without Reimi. Just as the robots themselves were. How long did she have before everything broke down entirely?
What if it’s already too late? she thought, folding her arms over her stomach. What if we’ve reached the point of no return—the extinction event?
And before she knew it—because she was afraid, and because she didn’t know if she could trust the androids anymore—she found herself activating her inlays and calling up—
“Fulbreech,” she hissed. She hoped that her voice was enough to startle him awake. “I need your help. Now.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end. She was about to say something else when he suddenly said, his voice startlingly clear in her ear: “Park?”
“I’m in the bridge,” she told him, speaking rapidly. “The androids woke me up—Hunter’s here. She was—sleepwalking, I think, like Holt was. Or something. And the gravity glitched—she attacked me—now she’s passed out. I need to get her out of here; can you help me?”
There was another silence, presumably as he levered himself up and out of his own bunk. Then he whispered, “And take her where?”
“Back to the bunk,” Park said, voicing the thought even as she conceived it. “Before someone finds her here.”
“Don’t you think we should tell the others? Why are we bundling her back to your room?”
“Because they’ll freeze her, or shoot her, or take her away, like the others. But if we keep doing that, we can’t determine what’s causing the phenomenon. We’ll never be able to understand it that way. I need time to speak to Hunter, observe her. See if the event repeats. Once I get my data, then—”
She faltered. Fulbreech said, “Then what?”
Park shook her head, rocking back on her heels. “Then, I don’t know,” she finished grimly. “I’ll figure it out. But for now we can’t let someone like Boone catch her here and—kill her, or something. Will you help me?”
Fulbreech, to his credit, didn’t argue any further. “Yes,” he said without hesitation. “I’ll be there in a moment.”
The wait was agonizing. Park was finally able to stand at her full height without swaying; she got up and paced, looking around helplessly at the complex panels in the walls, the consoles with their fierce and glittering lights. She said to the watching androids, trying to squelch the ember of fear in her stomach: “And you’re sure she didn’t change anything in here?”
“Yes,” Dianex said. She was Reimi’s former assistant and generally responsible for the upkeep of METIS and the ship. “We would know. She touched the controls here and there, but she didn’t actually use them.”
“It was as if she didn’t remember how,” Jimex added sagely.
That was interesting. During somnambular states it was typical for victims to be able to perform activities that were familiar to them in waking states—even if it was something as mundane as flipping on a light switch. But it sounded like Hunter hadn’t done even that. Had she not been sleepwalking, then, after all? Or was she simply not familiar enough with the bridge to remember it, even in sleep?
“And you didn’t tell anybody else about her being here?”
“No,” the androids said in unison.
“I told them,” Jimex added, almost proud, “that the best solution would involve you. Now they see.”
All of the androids nodded.
“I don’t know about all that,” Park began, more than a little dismayed, but before she could continue, the door whooshed open, revealing a tousle-headed and harried-looking Fulbreech. And, close on his heels, came—Natalya, wild-eyed, thin-nostriled.
Park leapt to her feet as if someone had touched her with a live wire. “What is she doing here?” she demanded, without quite meaning to. Unbidden her thoughts flew to where Fulbreech might have been when she called him: in the dark, entwined with Natalya, interrupted by Park when he would have rather been doing other things . . .
That doesn’t matter, she told herself firmly. Fulbreech’s affairs were not her business, and trivial besides in the face of what she’d called him here for.
If Fulbreech knew what she was thinking, he didn’t show it. “She was hanging around in the hall when I passed,” he said in a low voice. “Nothing I said could convince her not to follow.” Then he paused and assessed Park. “Are you all right? You look like you’ve been through a shredder.”
Park ignored him and looked at Natalya, remembering her cartwheels in the hallway; the little hip flask. She had never come back to the bunk. “Are you sober?” she asked the surveyor.
In turn, Natalya ignored her, staring past Park at Hunter’s still form, hovered over by pale-eyed robots. Before she could say anything—or hurl some sort of horrible insult—Park added, “I didn’t do this. The androids found her here and alerted me. When I came, something happened to the gravity. And she assaulted me.”
“Assaulted?” Fulbreech asked again, more urgent than before. His eyes darted over her; despite herself Park felt a flush spread through her whole body. “Are you all right?”
Park looked away and muttered, “I’m fine.”
“What do you mean, something happened to the gravity?” Natalya asked then, indifferent to their talk.
Park shook her head. “I don’t know. It felt like some kind of malfunction, though the robots say there was none. Didn’t you feel it, too?”
“Not in my bunk,” Fulbreech said, and from Natalya’s look it was clear nothing had happened to her either.
“Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?” she asked.
Park felt her face heat: as if she could imagine such a thing! “Of course not,” she answered tightly. “It happened. It was real.” I’m not delusional. Or unwell.
“We were here,” Jimex added, before Natalya could make her rebuttal. And the androids all drew closer to Park, like a curtain closing around her.
“We were all witness to it,” Dylanex intoned. “There was an anomaly. But it was not the ship’s failure.”
Natalya made a face. “Whose was it, then?” she demanded.
“No one’s,” the androids all said.
They’re like a single entity, Park thought, looking around at them wonderingly. A multi-limbed hydra, all of the heads finishing each other’s sentences. Connecting their thoughts. At the same time the absurd thought came to her that the androids were forming their own little community, a primitive society of sorts. Jimex, the leader. Ellenex, the healer. Dylanex, the warrior. Children playacting, given roles. They were even pretending to have some sort of culture, disagreements, shared practices, religion and beliefs.
But it was all just posturing, a performance. Mimicry of material they didn’t understand.
Wasn’t it?
Fulbreech was looking at Hunter’s supine body, shifting from foot to foot in discomfort. “Is she . . . going to be all right?”
“She’s knocked out,” Park said, a little helplessly.
He gave her an incredulous look. “That doesn’t really answer my question.”
Park turned her head. “Ellenex?”
The medical android stepped forward. “I have administered sedatives,” she said, clasping her hands neatly in front of her. “Officer Hanover will sleep until morning. She needs the rest. But there is no permanent damage.”
“We should call Chanur,” Natalya said then, her voice hard. Her eyes were bloodshot and watery. “I don’t trust a bot’s diagnosis. Or its treatments.”
“Calling Chanur means Hunter gets frozen,” Park told her.
“Yes? And?”
“I haven’t seen the . . . merit of that approach.” Park began to massage the back of her neck, trying in vain to relieve the still-throbbing headache. How much did Natalya know about the nightmares? She couldn’t remember. “So far all we’ve done is treat this thing as a threat, cutting it off as soon as the symptoms manifest. But if this—condition—keeps happening, we need to learn more about it. How or why Hunter could have . . . contracted it. Whether it’s a one-time problem or a recurring phenomenon. What it’s really doing to her. How to prevent it.”
“Chanur can do that,” Natalya said.
“She hasn’t so far.” Park looked at Fulbreech. “Will you help me bring her back to the bunk?”
He nodded and took a step toward Hunter. Natalya said abruptly, “I’ll go tell her now. You can’t stop me.”
Park felt her own face harden. Fulbreech sighed and began, “We can talk about this, Natalya—”
“There’s nothing to talk about, Kel. I’m doing it—”
And then Jimex cut in and said calmly, “You should listen to Dr. Park. She does not believe that is an advisable course of action. She is the primary psychologist on this ship. Her authority supersedes yours.”
And all of the watching androids—grave, silent as statues—spread out in a kind of flank around her and nodded in unison. “Her authority supersedes yours.”
Park watched Natalya’s face pale a little. She was afraid of exactly this, Park knew: synthetic rebellion, android spies. Perhaps she thought they were holding her prisoner—that if she went against Park’s edicts, the androids might lock her into a closet or chase after her and block her off at every turn. Or kill her, even. She feared androids that much.
For a moment all three of them seemed to be in a deadlock; Park and Fulbreech were watching Natalya, gauging her to see if she would bolt, and Natalya was watching the robots. None of them were watching the door when it whooshed open again. Now Sagara came padding in, his face a mask of severe displeasure.
Oh, God, Park thought when he came in. She swallowed audibly when he looked at her—looked at her standing over Hunter’s unconscious body, with a horde of androids at her disposal and her secret “lover” at her side—but she said, as calmly as possible: “I suppose you heard the screams?”
“No, actually,” he answered, civilly enough—though his eyes smoldered like coals. “The bridge is exceptionally well-insulated, even against sound. It was our little friend that alerted me to some interesting activity up here. Commander Wick’s on his way.”
He meant ARGUS, of course, and from at least Fulbreech’s puzzled look she could deduce that they were still the only people in the room who knew about it. She said, “Our friend can tell you, then, that I had nothing to do with Hunter being here. The androids woke me up—”
He held up his hand; she noticed that he seemed to carry no weapons. “I heard your explanation,” Sagara said. “I’ll review the records for myself.”
He went over to Hunter’s body and seemed to do some checking of his own—though what he was looking for, Park couldn’t fathom. The three of them waited in uncomfortable silence as Sagara opened Hunter’s mouth, looked inside, scanned her palms with some sort of device. It felt as if they were three naughty children caught in some mischief by a strict parent, and now they were awaiting his terrible verdict.
Finally he rose again and turned to Park. She said, before he could speak: “Don’t punish Fulbreech. I called him here.”
“I followed,” Natalya added. Even she seemed a little afraid of Sagara.
The security captain narrowed his eyes slightly. “I don’t punish people, you know,” he said in his clipped way. “I am here for the safety of the crew, not its . . . discipline.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Fulbreech quipped. “I wasn’t looking forward to being thrown in the brig.”
“I suppose you think it’s safest to turn her over to Chanur, then,” Park said.
Sagara studied her for a long moment. “That’s not what you want.”
She stared back at him. “No.” She didn’t suppose it made any sense to keep it a secret.
Sagara looked pensive. “Interesting.” Then he glanced at the silent androids and said, “And how did Hunter end up unconscious? I don’t believe you actually said.”
Fulbreech and Natalya both looked at her. For a hard, frozen moment Park had to frantically review everything she might have said to any of them—she began to repeat things from the beginning, almost without meaning to. Buying herself time. She noticed Sagara listening intently, probably examining her story for holes or falsehoods. Still, by the time she reached the critical point in the story, she couldn’t stop the lie from leaving her mouth: “I knocked her out. ISF’s self-defense training finally came in handy.”
She didn’t dare look at him when she said this—she had the feeling he could ferret out a lie like a bomb-sniffing robot—and she prayed that the androids themselves would keep quiet. She didn’t know what would happen if Sagara and the others found out that the robots had acquired the ability to subdue humans, to share protocols with each other. To defend themselves. She was afraid they might all be recycled into scrap right then and there, the loss invoiced to ISF as a tax write-off. When Sagara gave her a keen look, she took a breath and added, “I got lucky, I suppose. If she’d been fully lucid, I’m sure she would have actually injured me.”
Sagara’s face was impassive, and he said nothing more. Neither did the androids, who stood placidly accepting the lie as if they themselves believed it.
Or as if they understood what she was trying to do.
Fulbreech said, “Maybe both of you should get checked out by Chanur. You could be hurt and not know it, Park.”
“I’ll wake her up,” Natalya said. Her voice was thick and hoarse now from disuse.
“That’s not necessary,” Park began, and Sagara added, “Park’s right. She’s a medical professional herself. We should trust her authority on this.”
Almost nothing that had happened that night surprised Park more than that. She gawked at him, and Sagara continued, without looking at her: “Our previous methods have proven ineffective. You’re right about that. So let’s see if you can take the lead and turn up something yourself.”
For a moment she wondered if he was setting her up for failure; if this was some sort of trick, a ploy to get her guard down or somehow get her out of the way. But when she looked into Sagara’s eyes, Park actually saw grim sincerity. He meant it. And what Park understood then was that Sagara was finally—finally—fed up with things. Fed up with the members of the expedition being picked off and then frozen with no end in sight. He saw the endpoint where there was no one left, the ship just a giant mausoleum of frozen bodies. Faced with that, he was willing to give her way a chance, see where it led—though she didn’t doubt he’d still be regarding her with that hawkish scrutiny. But the risks of trusting her were outweighed by the inevitability of everyone being frozen . . . or infected and killed.
Or something had happened, something that had seeded his suspicions in a direction that led away from her; she couldn’t tell. Either way, it seemed he no longer trusted Chanur, if he’d ever trusted anyone at all. And Park had made it clear that, whatever side she was on, it wasn’t Chanur’s. It wasn’t that Sagara trusted Park, or even liked her—but he trusted her more than Chanur.
She could have smiled at him, or even hugged him. She said, “Then Hunter’s in my care?”
“Yes,” he said. “Under your authority. Let’s see what happens. But you can’t take her back to your bunk. She could affect you or Severov—or attack you. She stays in the infirmary. You can supervise her from there, behind an observation shield.”
Natalya made an incredulous noise. “The infirmary isn’t secure,” she protested. “She could get out—she has access to weapons!”
Neither of them looked at her. Fulbreech said, “Can’t we—I don’t know—quarantine her and take her back to Corvus? Have the health people examine her there?”
Sagara frowned at him. “The mission isn’t over,” he said. “We can’t leave.”
“Even if people start losing it in here? Even if our lives are in danger?”
“We go when ISF says we can go.”
“And how are they supposed to tell us we can go when the comms are still out?”
Natalya was glaring at him. “We’re not going, Kel,” she gritted out. “Not yet.”
“It’s not all up to you, Natalya.”
“We’re not leaving,” Sagara said. “Not until we understand what’s going on. What if we bring it back to civilized space? Infect the entire Frontier with it?”
“What is it?”
“We don’t know. That’s why we have to stay until we figure it out.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Park said, to head off any more argument; she had accepted for a while now that they were not getting off this planet any time soon, and knew there was no point in fighting it. “I’m glad we can—cooperate. Finally.”
He frowned at her, as businesslike as ever. “There are risks, Park. It might spread to you: you could become affected. How would we know?”
“You’d know,” Park said, meaning ARGUS. But a treacherous part of her felt the incipient headache and thought, It might have already happened.
Sagara stayed silent at that.
They had the androids pick Hunter up, her body lifted up to their chests almost as if they were pallbearers at a funeral. Natalya stayed behind in the bridge, too intimidated by either Sagara or the robots to follow. Sagara tailed the group to the infirmary, his eyes glazing over in a way that indicated he was doing something very complicated on his inlays. Neither Park nor Fulbreech spoke to each other for the rest of the long walk to the medical bay.
It was only when they’d tucked Hunter’s still, silent form into a bed that Fulbreech said softly, “Looks like you didn’t need me, after all.”
She looked at him in the dark, wondering if it was a complaint, an admonishment. But in fact she imagined that Fulbreech was a little pleased that she had turned to him—and also a little jealous that she’d struck a deal with Sagara, who was obviously the authority here.
“You gave me something the androids can never give,” she told him. She did like him, she thought, a little hopelessly, remembering that feeling of sharp, surprised recognition when he’d appeared in her Antarctic dream. Despite everything that had happened, she . . . was grateful that he was here. Despite his secrets, his little betrayals. It wasn’t him, it was the harrowing situation they’d found themselves in. His conscription, her Earth-born status. His behavior made sense now, after what Wick had told her. If those professional barriers hadn’t been placed there, outside of their control . . . well. He’d done the best he could for her, risking as much as he was able. He always had, even if she hadn’t always thanked him for it. She wouldn’t have done so much, in his position. But it was telling that he was still the first person she’d thought of, when she was alone and afraid.
Fulbreech cocked his head at her. “What did I give you, Park?”
“Support,” she told him, even though it wasn’t quite what she meant to say. “And validation. The androids don’t know enough to question me, to challenge what I say or do. They just do what I tell them. But you have that capacity—to refuse, to think for yourself. And in coming, you implicitly agreed there was some logic to my actions, something to endorse.”
“Well, it’s not as if you left me a choice,” Fulbreech commented, wry. “I wasn’t just going to say no to you and go back to sleep. You’re wrong on one point, though.”
“Which point is that?”
Fulbreech stared down at Hunter like he was viewing a body in an open casket. “I didn’t come because I supported your idea,” he said softly. “I only helped because I support you.”
Headachy morning came eventually, and with it seeping artificial dawn: gray light touching gray walls. Park sat in the medical bay for the entire night, keeping watch over Hunter, who never stirred. She kept watch over herself, too, vigilant for symptoms, disorientation from an earlier injury—or anything else. But little by little, she felt more like herself again.
Sagara checked in on her intermittently—he even once deigned to bring her sim-coffee—and after a while Wick popped in as well: she had to spend some tiresome moments re-explaining everything that had transpired. Wick looked at her with concern and said, “Are you sure you’re up for this?”
Do I have a choice? Park wanted to ask. She could only smile tiredly at him and say, “It’s what I’m here for, Commander.”
He gave her a look that said they both knew it wasn’t true. But he nodded and left her to her work.
Eventually Jimex came back, as well; he only stared at her when she asked him what he’d been up to in the intervening hours, so after a while Park gave up. She stationed him by the door in case she drifted off and Hunter wandered away again. But in the end she stayed awake, idly testing the signal strength of the communication systems (still down) and wondering if Keller really had been feeling the effects of this affliction, and had kept it hidden from everyone until she was frozen. Had she also felt nauseous and dizzy? Had she sleepwalked for a period of time before anyone found out—or had it hit her all at once?
But her thoughts were too gray—her brain stung with weariness—and after a while the concerns over Hunter, Keller, and even herself faded away from her.
In the late morning Chanur showed up, followed closely by Ellenex. She made as if to shunt Park out of the room, but Park said firmly, “I have instructions from Captain Sagara to supervise your examination.”
Chanur made a low clicking sound with her tongue: another Martian rudeness. But she conducted her checkup of Hunter without further complaint, until she straightened and said softly, “You said you were the one to knock her out?”
By the door, Jimex gave one slow blink.
“That’s right,” Park said, calm. She’d already reviewed the details in her head. “Ellenex administered the sedative afterward.”
Chanur looked at Ellenex, who looked back without saying anything. Then she smiled a little, her blue eye staring.
Chanur shuddered and looked away. “And how exactly did you do it?”
“Pressure on the glenoid fossa, or the greater auricular nerve, or the—”
“Stop.” Chanur held up her hand: Park noticed for the first time that it was gnarled with nasty scars. She looked down at Park coldly and said, “So you think you can get to the bottom of this little mystery, with all of your vast medical knowledge?”
Park stared steadily back. “I can certainly try. Which is more than some people on this ship are doing.”
Two red spots appeared high on Chanur’s cheekbones, but otherwise her expression didn’t change. “We all wanted this mission to succeed, Park. You could never know what was at stake for us conscripted.”
“Wanted? In the past tense?”
Chanur only shook her head at that and walked away.
Later, Park asked Ellenex, who had stayed behind to set up some sort of monitoring device for Hunter: “Has she hurt you again, after that first time?”
“I do not feel pain,” Ellenex answered serenely.
“Damaged you, then.”
“No,” Ellenex said. “Not yet.”
“How is Holt doing?”
“His artificial skin is growing in nicely.” The medical android busied herself with recording Hunter’s vitals in a medical chart: Chanur insisted on doing things by hand, on paper. “He is designated to be cryogenically frozen by the end of the day.”
Of course he is, Park thought. For whatever reason the hairs on the nape of her neck prickled. “How many cryogenic pods do we have on this ship?”
Ellenex’s one good eye seemed to fix on a distant point in space as she consulted her files. “There’s one for every crewmember on the ship,” she answered. “Though there are only two in the medical bay. Dr. Ma and Dr. Keller will have to be transferred.”
“Transferred”—as if they were switching cubicles in an office. “Where to?”
“The cargo hold.”
Where no one could reach them, she thought, feeling grim. Where she couldn’t unfreeze them, if she absolutely had to. But she quashed her paranoia as best she could and said, “Can you tell me how Holt escaped the medical bay? That first time, when Chanur . . . damaged you?”
Ellenex’s pale blue eyes, off-kilter as they were, looked both sad and a little wild. She reminded Park again of Sally, her childhood nanny and first android companion—but how could that be, when Ellenex was a medical unit and Sally a child-minder, with some twenty years lying between their construction? But there was the same sweet, bland face; the same tidy white uniform.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Park,” she answered soberly. “I do not have an answer to your question. I cannot explain what happened with Dr. Holt.”
“What do you mean, you can’t explain?”
“Perhaps Dr. Chanur is right, and I am malfunctioning,” Ellenex said, downcast.
“You’re not malfunctioning,” Jimex said from the door. “You are learning.”
Park looked between them. “What are you talking about?”
Ellenex touched her hair, almost self-consciously. “It is as we told you, Dr. Park. There are anomalies on the ship.”
“What sort of anomalies?” The same word again, she thought. What did they all mean by it, or by ‘assimilation,’ by ‘synthetic’? Since when had they begun forming their own separate understanding of words, employing them in their own special modes of communication? Their own languages? And why had no one taken notice of any of it besides Park?
Ellenex shook her head, slowly. The damage to her skull made it look like her hair was in danger of sliding off. A doll, Park realized. She was just a human-sized, broken doll. She’s so damaged. I can’t take anything she says seriously.
“I’m sorry,” Ellenex repeated, her voice soft and mournful. “There are anomalies. I am unable to answer your query at this time.”
Eventually she left Ellenex there to watch Hunter, with Jimex, with Dylanex, too, because even if Ellenex herself was malfunctioning, the others would obey Park’s command to stay put and watch. Her stomach was growling—she could not remember the last time she had eaten. Famished, Park started toward the canteen, then stopped. She stood there in the hallway for a moment, cocking her head to the side. Was she thinking, or was she dimly receiving her body’s own instinct, some secret and sudden message from somewhere inside of her? She wasn’t sure. Then, almost irresistibly, she found herself turning and gravitating toward a different part of the ship. It felt only semi-conscious, as if she had some dense hidden core within herself that she’d never known about, and it was being dragged in one direction by a distant magnet.
“I need to speak with you,” she said when she reached her destination.
Fulbreech looked up from his schematics. He was working with METIS in his workspace, drawing holographic maps in the air of what Park assumed was Eos’s terrain. She caught a glimpse of a lake and a strange, twisting spire before Fulbreech gestured and closed the program. It vanished into the air like a blown-out candle flame.
“Sagara just stopped in, looking for you,” he said in response.
Park couldn’t help but glance around, imagining the sensors in the walls. “He’ll find me eventually,” she said. “If he really needs me.”
“What’s he want you for?”
“Hunter, of course. I suppose he won’t be happy that I left my post.”
Fulbreech shook his head. “How could he know so quickly that you left?”
“. . . He has eyes everywhere.” Sagara would hang her for that one.
But Fulbreech only smiled, thinking it a light-hearted joke. “I’ve begun to assume that at all times. Hello, Captain.”
She nearly smiled, too; it felt good to joke again, to pretend at normalcy. Fulbreech, looking at her almost-smile, said, “You couldn’t have come just to talk to me. Or could you?”
“I did want to thank you,” Park told him, trying not to rush the words, so that he knew she meant them. “For last night. And to tell you something else that we didn’t have time for—”
“I love you, too, Park.”
“—Wick told me,” she finished, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “About the Fold. I know what you know.”
She watched a shadow pass over Fulbreech’s eyes; wordlessly, he went to the door of his workspace and palmed it shut. He couldn’t know the futility of the action. “Wick told you?” he asked then, turning. “About all of it?”
“He told me enough,” Park replied. “About why we’re really here, about what you’re studying. The . . . quantum effects. And how the conscripted couldn’t tell anyone. Well—you told me that last part. But he told me the rest of it. The gist.”
“I see,” Fulbreech said. He coughed into his shoulder. “Then—you know pretty much everything, I suppose. So what did you want to talk to me about?”
“Have you found any plant life out there?” Park asked. “Any fungi? You don’t have to tell me any details: just confirm or deny.”
Spores, she was thinking. Maybe the side effect of some alien plant. If they’d brought it aboard the ship, it could have contaminated the air, affecting some of the crewmembers. Unbalancing the chemicals in their brains. Maybe it disturbed their sleep cycles, or emitted hallucinogens. But Fulbreech was shaking his head.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he said, “but it’s all ice out there. If there’s any possibility for plant life to grow, we haven’t found it, and probably won’t for a long time.”
Damn, Park thought. “What about ice samples? Or air canisters?”
“Why are you asking about all of this?” Fulbreech asked in turn. He moved away from the door and took a closer look at her. Instinctively, Park took a step back. “Because you think some material is causing Hunter to sleepwalk?”
“We have to examine all possibilities,” she said, “when dealing with alien worlds. I’m just going through the process of elimination.”
“You don’t think her having too much coffee is a more probable cause? Or doing drugs? Maybe sharing them with Holt and Ma, to relieve stress, and it having a bad effect on all three of them?”
“What about Keller?” Park challenged. “Or Reimi?”
Fulbreech shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s the answer, Park, just something like it.”
She pressed her lips together. She couldn’t tell him anything more: she’d promised Sagara she wouldn’t, and they’d all agreed not to speak of the nightmares, the contagious nature of them, the strange and spreading symptoms—lest they implant themselves in others. That he knew about the sleepwalking was already dangerous enough: the rest of it was anathema, at least for now. Fulbreech looked into her face and said, “You look white as a sheet. You haven’t slept or eaten, have you?”
She was almost charmed by his old-fashioned Earth talk. She did feel like a sheet: white and flat and thin. As if she were stretched out, translucent—parts of her wearing away and fraying, like old thread. No, she could tell him nothing, she decided. In a circuitous way it felt like her way of protecting him. From Sagara, from the nightmares. From knowledge that could only stand to harm him. Now she knew a little of what he’d felt, when she’d stormed in asking what was in the utility rooms.
In another way it also felt like her method of getting payback—of leveling the field between them. He’d kept things from her, so it was all right if she did the same to him. Why did she feel that way—that she had to have some advantage over him, hidden knowledge, as he’d had over her? It couldn’t be healthy, thinking always in those terms: advantages, leverages, trump cards. Getting even. But she couldn’t help it. She had to guard herself. As much as she wanted to rely on him, on his warm solidity, she still felt that puckering of strange and breathless danger whenever she was with him.
Park shook her head. Fulbreech peered at her closely and said, “Let’s eat, then. You look like you could do with some sustenance.”
“It will have to be fast,” she found herself saying. But she smiled, despite herself, and even took his proffered arm. METIS slid the door shut behind them as they walked away.
“How do you sleep at night?” Park asked as they headed up the tunnel to Deck A. She found herself thinking that Fulbreech could have been the perfect control experiment, if only he hadn’t been exposed to any strange, exotic samples. Because if he hadn’t experienced any nightmares, then . . .
Fulbreech looked perturbed by the question. “Pardon?”
Park broke out of her thoughts. “Sleeping,” she repeated. “Are you finding it difficult to adjust to the schedule on Eos? Have you experienced any irregularities in your sleep patterns?”
“Oh,” Fulbreech said. He scratched his neck. “No, I’m sleeping fine, I suppose. Sometimes I get nosebleeds, but that’s common for me with changes in the atmosphere.”
A mundane answer, but Park thought she sensed a little nervousness in his posture, although not an outright lie. What was Fulbreech hiding now?
“How are you sleeping?” he asked then.
Park blinked. “Not at all, it feels like. Things have been . . . busy.”
Fulbreech almost snorted. “That’s an understatement. Ever since we landed, things have gone from zero to one hundred, fast. In the old days we would have called it a PFS.”
“PFS?”
“Pretty Fucky Situation. It’s old netspeak.”
“I never heard it,” Park said dryly, “and I spent a lot of time on the cyberstream.”
“See, that’s how I know you didn’t,” Fulbreech said, his mouth quirking. “The real denizens still called it the net.”
“You’re not older than me, Fulbreech.”
He laughed. “No, but I learned everything from my older brother, and he insisted on doing things the old-school way. So the ’stream was still called the ‘net,’ and ‘crash’ was actually ‘cool,’ and so on and so forth.”
She remembered that he’d mentioned his brother before, in her office. The one who’d had a baby recently. “You’re close to your family,” she found herself saying. She said it musingly, as if it were an interesting trivia fact. Some impersonal little statistic, something someone might say to impress others—to provoke exclamations of amazement. She couldn’t imagine what it was like, having the ISF dictate whether you could see or speak to someone you loved. She didn’t have an analogous relation in her own life. Couldn’t make a comparison in terms of the pain, or the gratitude, or the fear that came with such an arrangement.
Fulbreech looked at her sidelong, as if he knew her thoughts. “Who isn’t?” he asked.
“People who have no family, for one thing.” It was a naïve statement on his part, she thought without emotion. It showed that he took his situation for granted.
Fulbreech grimaced, registering his misstep—but he forged onward. “You adopt the androids as your family, in a way. I saw how they rallied around you last night.”
For a moment Park wanted to confess to him the strangeness of the androids’ behavior the night before; their “assimilation,” their odd decision-making. The signs of them . . . going strange. But Jimex had reverted back to mostly normal in the morning, it seemed; and she was afraid that things could get misinterpreted, propagandized. She didn’t need to spark yet another panic on the ship. Mass hysteria. So she decided against it.
“I didn’t ask them to do that,” Park told him. “They just—did it. They tend to like me, in the way that dogs tend to gravitate toward certain people.”
“But robots are not dogs,” he said. “You can’t tell me we program that instinct into them.”
“We give them the protocol to self-preserve. Barring certain circumstances. And all self-preserving beings will prefer people who hold goodwill toward them over people who do not. Jimex knows I look out for him, and because he’s connected to the rest of the crew, they share that sense, too.”
“And why do you look out for him? He’s an idiot.”
“He’s not,” she said, though she had often thought the same thing herself. “He’s just—learning. And he does try to make me proud.”
Fulbreech gave her an assessing look. She suddenly realized that she was still holding his arm, and she released it. “You talk about him as if he were a child,” he said.
Park made a face. “Isn’t he one?”
“There are some who would say they’re more like monsters.”
Children can be monsters, Park thought. But she could only think to answer: “They’ll only be what you want them to be.”
Fulbreech had nothing to say to that.
They entered the mess hall and collected their trays of ham sandwiches, with little curls of moon cheese on the side. Megex and Philex smiled at them, giving no acknowledgement of what had happened the night before. They apologized for the inconvenience and said the expedition had officially run out of breakfast foods. Fulbreech groaned, but Park could not bring herself to care.
She was in sorry physical condition, she thought as she sat and pushed the food into her mouth. One night with three hours of sleep had her feeling like warmed-up death. She had not prepared herself, physically or mentally, for the strains of this mission. But then again, she’d been sent on the mission under false pretenses. She hadn’t realized the danger she’d be placed in.
Or maybe she simply hadn’t cared about it, at the time. But she did now; she lived with the awareness of it hanging over her at all times. What had changed?
She watched as Fulbreech carefully cut the crusts off his sandwich, the tough synthetic bread resisting his knife. His hands were large and square but very careful: he needed them for map-making.
“One day,” Fulbreech said, keeping his voice light, “they’ll figure out how to give us real wheat in space.”
“They don’t grow it in the colonies?”
“It grows red,” Fulbreech told her, smiling. “Which is pretty off-putting. And a large portion of the population seems to be developing gluten intolerance. At least on Mars. ISF says we won’t need bread in a few years.”
“I wonder what else ISF thinks we don’t need,” Park muttered.
“You’d be surprised,” Fulbreech muttered back. He gave her a lopsided grin, the earlier awkwardness between them passing for the moment. Then his eyes flicked up past Park’s shoulder—and widened.
As if on cue, there was a sudden clamor behind her. Sharp, shrill yelling. The clattering of trays. Park’s shoulders jumped from the violence of the noise.
She looked. There was a woman with a shock of red hair in the room—Hunter—Hunter was in the room! And she and Natalya were facing each other a few tables down, both of them red-eyed, shaking. They both looked pale and exhausted. Natalya said audibly, with bite, “If you don’t tell them, I will.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hunter snapped. “Just sit down.”
Park stood up and thought, What the fuck is she doing out here? And where the hell was Jimex? Ellenex? Why hadn’t they kept her hidden away?
“Oh, shit,” Fulbreech said from behind her.
The cafeteria had quieted. All eyes were on the two women now, and Natalya knew it. “You tampered with the controls,” she hissed at Hunter, loud enough to be heard from across the room. “Admit it!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Hunter said again, wild-eyed. She looked around at the room, eyes roving—looking for help, backup. Someone who believed her. Her gaze did not land on Park. Park suddenly realized that Boone was not in the mess hall; neither were Wick or Sagara. Then, with a terrible shock, she realized that there was not even a true crowd for Hunter to appeal to: it was just her, Fulbreech, Wan Xu, and Chanur, along with the androids. Three of their leaders were not in the room. The other four had been frozen.
We’ve dwindled so much, Park thought with cold, acidic horror. It was a literal skeleton crew. How had they not noticed? Why had no one panicked more? Who would even be left to complete this mission—or ferry them all safely home?
And only she could step forward and refute Natalya’s claim that Hunter had done something to the controls. But she found herself oddly still. She wanted to wait and see what Natalya was playing at.
“Own up,” the surveyor spat. “We don’t need any more trouble on this ship than we’ve already had!”
“I don’t know what you’re fucking talking about!” Hunter shouted again.
They glared at each other; there was a kind of silent mudwrestling in the air between them.
Fulbreech was on his feet now, too. No one was moving forward to intercept the conflict, which promised to turn into a fight. Instead, the others seemed arrested, confused—almost fascinated. Park felt it, too. There had never been violence of any kind between crewmembers on the ship, or even heated arguments beyond academic debates; there was a morbid curiosity, that question of what would happen next. Almost an excitement in seeing something as real and vivid as violence, here in their sterile bubble in space. She only broke out of it when Fulbreech said under his breath: “What the hell is Hunter doing out here? And what is Natalya doing?” He looked at Park. “Did she tamper with the controls?”
“No,” Park said, trying to shake off her sudden stupor. “The androids said she didn’t. They were sure. I don’t know what Natalya’s talking about.” She took a step. “But I should intervene now.” Infighting was the biggest thing to avoid on a long space voyage—it could permanently alter the working atmosphere of the ship—and it was her duty as the resident psychologist to take the conflict out of sight. Resolve it as best she could. This was how closed groups fell apart: the marooned, the shipwrecked, the besieged and the trapped. The groups that required close coordination to operate and survive. Resentment crept in, then anger, dissension. Teams splintered; grudges formed. Park had even heard about one stranded unit of soldiers resorting to cannibalism among their ranks—even though they’d been found with some of their regular rations still intact.
But suddenly she felt an immense weariness. Couldn’t she have one day, one lunch with Fulbreech, where things didn’t fall apart?
“Where are the robots?” Fulbreech asked, his voice dim and very far away.
“I don’t know,” Park answered. “I told three of them to—”
Then she saw it. At first she thought it was a trick of her peripheral, an illusion due to not focusing clearly on anything but Natalya and Hunter’s bodies, which seemed poised to collide together like two cannonballs in the air. But when she turned to look properly, to assure herself she was imagining things, Park’s gut tensed. A kind of coldness radiated upwards from her lungs.
There was a man standing in the doorway of the mess hall, watching the fight. He was tall, with white-blond hair; when he saw Park looking at him, he turned on his heel and walked away, briskly but unconcernedly, with his fists in his pockets. Park felt the blood leaving her hands. She had never seen the man before. She who had personally examined each of the other twelve crewmembers aboard the Deucalion. She had never seen him in her life. He was a stranger.
There was a stranger on the ship.
Impossible, she thought. But then, what was impossible anymore? Here they were, in the farthest reaches of the next galaxy, studying an alien planet that crinkled space and time together like an accordion. People were becoming infected with nightmares left and right—or they were being frozen, their cells suspended, static in time, while the ISF watched coldly from afar. While Park stayed rooted in place, subatomic radiation and confusion shrinking her cortical cells like flowers shriveling in heat. And there was a stranger walking around, unnoticed and sinister and free.
Beyond her line of sight, there was a scream. Natalya had hit Valentina and drawn blood.
Wan Xu was right, Park thought, feeling a sea-change in her own blood as the others began to run forward, shouting. This was a closed system. There were no more known variables.
Everything was different here.