Park felt as if she’d been kicked in the chest. “What did you say?” Her own voice sounded foreign to her—it lacked, disconcertingly, any of the emotion she was feeling within. It did not sound as if she were shocked, or horrified, or even sad; and she remembered then what Boone had said to Fulbreech, about her lacking a human heart.
But Boone himself merely looked impatient, as if he were relaying some mundane chore she needed to get done rather than the death of his own commander. “The guy killed Wick,” he repeated. “In our room. I saw him running off just as I got there, but I had to help Wick, and—well. It was too late by then. I told Sagara, but he doesn’t believe me. Or you, for that matter. So he’s put everybody on lockdown and wants to interrogate us one by one.” He shook his head. “But fuck that. I’m not sitting in a cell, waiting for a fucking murderer to get me next.”
Park felt her own lips moving aimlessly, forming shapeless words to herself. It felt as if her brain had turned to wet cement. Wick was—dead? Killed by this stranger? Shit, was all she could think. Shit, shit, shit. She couldn’t even muster the energy to feel grief. Could she have done something? If she’d told others about the stranger sooner—if she’d told Wick—
“He was a good man,” Park said aloud. Her slow-moving brain told her that it was the correct thing to say, under such circumstances.
Boone’s expression didn’t change. “Now he’s a dead one,” he told her. “And we’ll all be next if we don’t catch this bastard.”
In a stupor, she began to follow him out of the room, squinting against the lights of the medical bay, the red glow of panels indicating empty rooms. She felt drunk; colors swayed and shifted in a nauseating fashion. No one else was in sight—not Fulbreech or whatever android she’d heard standing guard earlier.
When had the power come back on? Park wondered dazedly. At least they wouldn’t have to hunt for the murderer in the dark. “How did he kill him?”
A muscle in Boone’s jawline twitched. “Blunt force trauma,” he grunted. “Split his head open like an egg.”
“Did he—suffer?”
Boone’s body was stiff and taut, like a bowstring stretched to its limit. “I don’t think so,” he said finally, speaking with some difficulty. “But I don’t know.”
She shook her head as they made their way toward the white circle that indicated the medical bay’s exit. “And who’s commanding officer now?”
Someone stepped into the pale dazzle of the threshold, blocking their exit. “That would be me,” they said.
Park’s heart lurched into her throat. Sagara was standing there, glaring at them both; he looked surreal against the sterile whiteness of the medical bay in his black uniform, like a vampire or a massive crow. Park didn’t miss that he now had weapons holstered at his belt: the hilt of a thermal-loaded energy blade, she thought, squinting, as well as the sleek black shape of a railgun. Devastating things, especially compared to Boone’s now-paltry electrolaser. She didn’t miss, either, how the combat specialist moved protectively to shield her from Sagara’s gaze. Did that mean they were allies now, she and Boone? He would defend her against the likes of Sagara, when he’d once been her greatest threat? The idea was nearly laughable—she remembered how he’d pointed that gun in Jimex’s face—but here he was, placing himself in bodily danger to defend her. What did that mean about Sagara, then—that he was more dangerous than Boone, just as he’d once thought Chanur was more dangerous than Park? The bigger threat to confront, even if you had to defeat it together? How quickly the alignments had shifted; how quickly they all turned on one another, retracting enmities, altering histories.
Sagara was giving Boone his classic knife-eyed look, a chilly anger radiating from him in waves. “I thought I told you to leave Park alone,” he said. “Are you willing to disobey a direct order?”
“Don’t let the power get to your head, Sagara,” Boone bit back. To Park it had the childish cant of you’re not the boss of me. “Let’s put our differences aside, huh? Something bigger than the both of us is going down on this ship.”
“The longer we stand around, the more time this stowaway has to wreak havoc on the crew,” Park butted in. Sagara turned to spear her with his gaze next.
“There is no stowaway,” he told her, his voice flat and steely. “I know you believe that, Park, but you’re seeing things. You’ve become infected with whatever got to Holt and Ma and Hunter.”
Park’s shoulders jumped. How dare you, she almost said, but she opted for something more rational-sounding. “You have no proof of that.”
Sagara was shaking his head. “I’ve monitored this ship since Corvus,” he told her. “I would know if there was a stranger on board. There isn’t. This man you think you’ve seen is not wandering the halls. It’s just not possible.”
“Then how do you explain Wick’s death?” Park demanded. Saying it out loud gave her a kind of pang, as if someone had pricked her in the heart with a needle.
Sagara glowered. “The same way I explain the downed communications and the power-out,” he answered. Park noticed that he had shifted his stance a little, as if he was expecting them both to lunge at him and attack. “Those things weren’t done by a stranger. They were done by people on this ship.”
Boone snorted. “He thinks it’s all a big conspiracy,” he said to Park. “He thinks everybody on the ship is out to get him.”
“I know,” Park tried to say; it was clear now that Sagara had gone a little power-mad, a little unbalanced. And who could blame him, considering what he’d said about his dead wife? His grief was still raw, it had to be; the incident on Halla could not have been more than two years ago. It was clouding his judgment. Keeping him from seeing the truth.
But Sagara saw what she was thinking, and headed her off before she could expose him. “I have my reasons,” he grated. “Whether or not those reasons will make any sense to you is a different matter.”
“Try us,” Boone said, folding his arms.
“No,” Sagara answered. “Everyone on this ship is a suspect. Any one of them—or you—could have done this. That’s why I have to act this way.”
Boone barked out a laugh. “Everyone is a suspect—except you. That’s convenient.”
“I know that I didn’t kill Wick, yes.”
“Wait, what about me?” Park demanded. “I was unconscious during all of this. Can’t you confirm that?”
“But you were the one who turned off the lights,” Sagara said. She saw now that his fingers were just touching the hilt of his blade.
“That’s insane,” Park cried—wondering frantically what she was going to do if he decided to draw that thing. “I had nothing to do with the lights! Or Wick!”
Sagara was shaking his head. “You could be working with the murderer,” he said. “You could have been providing darkness—and a distraction—to get me away from Wick and everyone else. I don’t know.”
Unstable, Park thought. Paranoiac. We have to get him under control.
Sagara looked away, towards Boone, who stiffened defensively, and Park felt her palms itch. How to grab his weapons from him without hurting him—or herself? “What I do know is that this ship needs to go on lockdown,” the security officer continued. “All of us in separate rooms until I can sort it out. Not scattered throughout the ship, with METIS and the inlays down.” He glared. “You can see how that’s a logical course of action, can’t you?”
She could, Park thought—if she hadn’t seen the stranger with her own eyes. If Boone hadn’t seen him, too.
But she could follow Sagara’s line of thinking. Out loud she said, “If you really believe the culprit is one of us, it can’t be that difficult to eliminate the innocent, can it? There’s a limited pool of suspects. The number of people who had the motive, means, and opportunity can’t be that large. All it takes is some deductive reasoning.”
“You make murder sound so simple,” Sagara snapped. “And you forget that the ship’s systems are down. We don’t know who was where, doing what. We don’t even know what time Wick was killed.”
She’d forgotten about the systems’ failure, the chaos it could be causing, and was briefly shamed into silence. Boone said, “There’s, what, seven of us left? You’re going to interrogate us all, figure out who’s guilty from discrepancies, lies? That’ll take forever—and all the while the real killer will be running around, doing God knows what to the ship. At least let someone you trust help you.”
Sagara gave him a look that made it clear: he didn’t trust anyone. “I’m putting you in separate rooms,” he said again. Then, looking at Park, he added, “Even if you aren’t guilty of anything, it’s for your own safety.”
Boone’s sculpted face was white and sullen. “If you separate us all, you make us easy targets for the killer.”
“I’ll be the only one walking around,” Sagara retorted. “And I am not a killer.”
“I’ve heard otherwise,” Boone said, casting a significant glance at the security officer’s tense hand on his weapon. At this, Sagara made a strange face: it was almost a grimace, almost something like a vicious smile.
“Not unless I have to be,” he amended. And he curled his fingers around the hilt of his blade and unsheathed it a little.
The implicit threat was clear: Sagara was now speaking in a language that he knew Boone would understand, the language of power and violence. She knew then that he wouldn’t hesitate to cut their throats if they put up a fight. All in the name of serving the ISF, she thought. All to carry out his duty, his mission. His blind loyalty was going to doom them all.
But what could she say? Already she could feel the heat of the energy-blade fizzing and sparking through the air, and the thing had only been uncovered by an inch. She couldn’t imagine the damage it could do when slashed at someone, with its edge that could cut through tungsten and the cores of asteroids. Even Boone was flinching back. So she closed her mouth against her protests, her own accusations. Silently she let Sagara march them back to their bunks like an executioner taking his condemned to the gallows.
Later, locked into the room she had once shared with Elly, Hunter, and Natalya, Park sat down on her cot to organize her thoughts.
It all started with the nightmares, she thought. Those had started the day they landed on Eos. First it had been Holt; then later that night, Elly Ma. Then at some point (supposedly), Keller. None of them had gone outside, so that ruled out direct exposure to Eos as a factor. It seemed unlikely that there was contamination from something brought inside: there were the decontamination protocols, the sterilizing procedures. The ship’s state-of-the-art filtration and monitoring systems. And Fulbreech had said they hadn’t taken any samples into the ship.
And none of them had encountered—to the best of her knowledge—the stranger.
Then Holt had sleepwalked, tried to get to the door guarding the research on the Fold. She supposed that could be explained by his latent curiosity, or his anxiety and guilt over keeping such a secret.
And then Hunter had sleepwalked—or something—perhaps even interfered with the ship’s controls; but perhaps that could be explained by her fear, witnessing everything that was happening to Holt and Ma and Keller. She had always expressed a dire aversion to the idea of being frozen. The growing panic that was seeding in the ship could have affected her, manifested as an unconscious behavior. Perhaps she’d simply wanted to escape.
But what did any of it have to do with the stranger? He couldn’t have induced the nightmares, surely—but he could have had something to do with Reimi’s mysterious, unexplained illness. Could he have poisoned her? Gotten rid of her, and then Wick?
But why?
At least Reimi was obvious, Park thought. She was responsible for maintaining the ship’s android crew, its governing computer. She was the only one who could have fixed the communication systems after they went down from the storm—something a murderer wouldn’t want, of course, since the crew could have called home for help. They would have gotten backup when the murders started—maybe even before then. No, a killer—or a saboteur, or a spy, or whatever kind of enemy this was—would have wanted to cut them off, leave them isolated and vulnerable to whatever he was planning.
Maybe the stranger had even been the one to take out the communications in the first place, Park thought with a chill. Then taken down Reimi so no one would be the wiser. And then the lights, and the inlays. Left them all blind and deaf.
But why kill Wick? And incapacitate the others, if the stranger was somehow responsible for those incidents too? What could he be after?
What if he was after them all?
She rose and tested the door for the umpteenth time. Sagara had somehow gotten the Deucalion’s ailing computer to give him the only security pass that could override the ship’s locks—probably in the same way he had gotten the lights working again. In a way she ought to feel safer: no one could open the door but him, and if he wasn’t currently intent on murdering her, that probably meant she was safe.
But Sagara was only one man. What if the stranger ambushed him, killed him while he was unawares? Then he could pick off the rest of them at his leisure, one by one . . .
Park shook herself. But why kill them at all? If he’d managed to stow away on the ship for all this time, undetected, would he really choose now to go on a destructive rampage and murder everybody? Or had he only been after Wick specifically? If so, why? How could the stranger benefit from taking out the commander of their mission? Was it something to do with Eos? Or was it something personal—a grudge borne a year and a handful of parsecs into the next galaxy?
Her thoughts were awhirl. There were too many unknowns, too many variables in the equation that were still unaccounted for. What did any of this have to do with the nightmares, if anything? How were the ISF or the Fold involved?
She suddenly remembered something Wick had said. She had asked him why Hunter and Boone were necessary, if this was a planet with no inhabitants. At the time Wick had only shrugged and said, You never know.
But what if ISF had known? What if they had anticipated some enemy, some outside threat, and simply hadn’t told her?
What if the man had come from outside?
A part of her shook her head at herself. How could he have gotten in without anyone knowing? It was always such a process, opening any one of the ship’s doors . . . and surely METIS would have alerted them . . .
But was it any less likely than the idea that a full-grown man had somehow survived on the ship for nearly a year without being noticed, stealing food and sleeping somewhere the humans and androids couldn’t have found him? And METIS had been malfunctioning. As had the androids—oh, God, had they gotten rid of Reimi so it’d be easier for him to board the ship undetected? Didn’t that mean someone had to be on the inside, helping him?
And Sagara had always suspected someone of plotting some sort of conspiracy on the ship. That the danger was internal: it was why he had activated ARGUS, why he was so suspicious of everyone, including her. He thought one of the crewmembers, or more, had the means and motive to sabotage the mission. At first he’d directed his scrutiny at the non-conscripted—Park—but then he changed his tune, eyeing instead those who were acting more suspiciously. Chanur. Chanur?
She began to pace. No, it was still too difficult to piece things together. She was just guessing wildly, flinging things at the wall to see what would stick. They were all acting with different puzzle pieces, different gaps in knowledge. They would never be able to assemble a bigger picture unless they came together. But now they were stuck, separated into cells and locked up with their own paranoia and unvoiced fears. Blind, deaf, and dumb, just where the stranger wanted them.
Even as she thought it, she heard someone tapping on the door. For a moment Park thought it was her own hand, absently still trying the lock—but the sound was coming from the hallway outside. She stiffened, but then told herself that a killer would never give her forewarning of his entrance. Not unless he was really deranged. Then she heard a familiar voice, very soft and muffled through the metal door: “Park?”
“Fulbreech!” How had he gotten out of his room?
At her answer the door slid open, and outlined in the light beyond was Fulbreech, broad-shouldered and warmly familiar. He saw her gaping at him and smiled. “You’re all right,” he said. He sounded breathless, as if he’d sprinted to get to her. Or maybe he was simply relieved.
She wanted to leap at him, but held herself back. “Where’s Sagara?”
Fulbreech glanced behind him, as if expecting to find the security officer lurking in the shadows with a dagger poised over his back. “In the bridge. He’s trying to get METIS up and running again.”
“How are you out of your room?”
He grinned, a little proud of himself. “I was the one who got the lights working,” he said, almost preening. “When they’d just brought you to the medical bay. This was before we found out about Wick. While I was tinkering around, trying to figure out what was wrong with METIS, I sort of—gave myself clearance to use the system freely. I did the same thing when we were in the escape pod, when we were going to go outside. Remember?”
She shook her head; that felt like an eternity ago. “You gave yourself full clearance?”
“It was sort of an accident,” Fulbreech admitted. “I ended up using Reimi’s credentials to make the system work with me.”
She blinked. One could do that? He’d had that ability this whole time?
Fulbreech rushed on. “Anyway, once Sagara put us on lockdown, I was going to stay in my room, but—Boone told me what happened with Wick. And the—killer. And I figured we ought to find him instead of just staying caged up.”
She felt a rush of relief. “So you believe us.”
“I do. And I’m sorry that I didn’t act on what you said before.” He grimaced. “It could have saved Wick.”
Park did touch him, then, and felt the warm, solid strength of his flesh and bone. “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe it would have gotten you killed, too.”
Morbid thought, she thought immediately. Why did she say it, instead of some other, more comforting platitude? But Fulbreech, against all odds, smiled at her. Then he glanced down the hall and said, “We’ll have to hurry. Once Sagara starts interrogating everyone, he’ll figure out fast enough that we’re missing.”
“What happens then?” Park asked, with a little chill in her heart.
Fulbreech shook his head. “We’ll just have to catch the guy before he finds out we’re gone. Then he’ll know none of us killed Wick, and that you were right all along.” A brief spasm of unhappiness crossed his face. “You do think the guy killed him, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.” She wanted to lean against him, offer some gesture of comfort or camaraderie, or take it from him—for a moment the desire was so strong that she experienced a kind of vertigo. But then she heard footsteps from down the hall, and tensed.
Fulbreech looked. “It’s just Boone and Natalya,” he said. “I let them out, too.”
Park’s gut reaction was to recoil. Why Natalya? she wanted to ask, fighting down a surge of dislike. But then she did a quick mental tally in her head. Thirteen crewmembers aboard the Deucalion. Reimi, Holt, Ma, Keller, and Hunter frozen. Wick dead. That left Boone, Fulbreech, Sagara, Natalya, Chanur, Wan Xu, and Park ready and able to fend off a killer. Only half the crew. And half of that didn’t even believe the killer really existed. She couldn’t afford to be picky.
The other two appeared from around the corner; Natalya flashed Park a caustic look of loathing, but said nothing. Park saw that Boone now had his own gun at his hip.
“Good,” he said in a low voice, drawing up. “You got her. Sagara’s on Deck A, fucking around with the computer. That means you and Severov can take Deck C. Park and I will take Deck B.”
I want to go with Fulbreech, Park tried to say—but she told herself that this wasn’t summer camp, or a recreational gridball team. It didn’t matter who went with whom. Natalya hissed at Boone: “You’re the only one with a weapon. What happens if we run into the killer? Or Sagara, for that matter?”
“It’s two against one,” Boone said, his gray eyes flat and callous. “Improvise.”
Fulbreech shot Park a loaded look as Natalya turned away with impatience. Park didn’t understand his expression. He looked afraid, or as if he was in pain. It wasn’t a face that she was used to seeing on him: his presence was always so uplifting, so assured. Seeing him like that gave her another pang. “Wait,” Park said as they turned to go.
Fulbreech looked back, as if hopeful. “Yes?”
“Are you—all right?”
Fulbreech stared at her. Natalya and Boone arched their brows at each other, like two people in on some sneery little joke. Fulbreech said, carefully it seemed: “I’ll feel better when we catch the crazed maniac running around. What about you?”
“I feel the same,” Park answered lamely. Then, because she was embarrassed, she threw in, “Do you happen to know where Jimex is? Is he all right?”
Both Boone and Natalya scoffed; Park ignored them. Fulbreech smiled in a strange way to himself and said, “I haven’t seen him. But I’m sure he’s fine.”
But she wasn’t convinced. A nagging worry had risen up in her chest when she was mulling over the sequence of events on the ship. Where had Jimex disappeared to? Why had he left Hunter, along with the other androids? Could the killer have done something to him—harmed him? But there was no reason for someone to destroy a custodian bot.
“He must be safe,” she said out loud, thinking about how he hadn’t even flinched when a gun was pointed at his face.
“Lucky him,” Boone drawled. He looked thoroughly unimpressed by their exchange. “Are we done making chitchat yet? Let’s go.”
And so she followed him, giving Fulbreech only a parting glance before she and Boone descended together back into the heart of the ship.
Going down to Deck B felt a little like slipping back into the fog of a dream. Everything felt chilly and gray, a little out of focus—but Park told herself that it was merely a residual effect of the sedatives still in her system. And fear. She couldn’t forget that a killer was lurking somewhere on the ship, and that she had no weapon. She made sure to stay close to Boone, who seemed sturdily impervious to dread or terror. He was fueled by anger, Park thought, staring at his tight, hulking shoulders. And perhaps not much more than sheer gut instinct. The heat of that could dispel any fear. Maybe that was why he’d never been subject to any nightmares.
“Have we checked the cameras?” Park asked him as they walked. “Surely they’ve caught some glimpse of this man.”
“They’re not working anymore,” Boone answered moodily, as if that were Park’s fault. “They went down with the lights and everything else. But Sagara was checking them this morning, after what happened with Hunter. We never saw a trace of the fucker.”
He was silent for a while, bumping his fist against his thigh as he walked. Park noticed that he gave off a warm animal scent, something tangy and slightly metallic—like a steak warmed up in a microwave. All blood and muscle and myoglobin. Eventually he said: “Wish Hunter was here. I’d feel better with some backup.”
Meaning he did not consider Park to be adequate backup, she thought dryly. She didn’t blame him. “So she was frozen, then?”
“Yeah. They made the call while you were out.”
“It seems to be the go-to solution nowadays.” She said it carefully, aware of how he might take any perceived criticism. But it was true—she’d never heard of such overzealous cryogenic processing on a ship before. It seemed to her that Boone would agree.
But he only cast her a wary glance over his shoulder. “Chanur and Sagara said it was for the best,” he said. “So that we didn’t catch whatever Hunter got. And so we wouldn’t have to worry about her with everything else going on.” Then he shook his head, looking briefly regretful. “Well. It didn’t stop her from going kicking and screaming.”
He was troubled by the memory, Park could tell. She wondered if he was in love with Hunter. Then wondered where she’d gotten that idea. Since when had she started factoring love into the equation, any equation—or applying it so liberally to someone like Boone?
They reached Deck B without encountering any obstacles, though Park could feel the force of an imaginary bullet in her back every sweaty moment they didn’t see Sagara. He could be anywhere, she thought, imagining his unholy wrath if he were to stumble upon them defying his orders. And the chances of running into him again were high. Were they willing to disarm him—injure him, even—in their hunt for this killer? Boone was, she was sure, but Park didn’t know if she could go that far. She had never been put in this kind of life-or-death situation before. If that was what this was.
They moved down one of the half-lit passageways that wound lazily towards more cargo holds, and beyond those, the waste-compacting and prefab-processing stations, which Park had not had the clearance to access before. Such rarely used areas had little lighting; employees were expected to use the infrared vision in their neural inlays to find their way in the dark. They were checking the various little closets and storage pods, with Park opening the doors and Boone pointing his gun, when he suddenly interrupted her thoughts again. “I’m sorry about before,” he said, letting the hand holding the gun fall back to his side. “For what it’s worth. With Holt—I’m not afraid to admit it. I malfed. I don’t regret it, but I’m sorry you had to see that.”
She eyed him. Boone seemed sincere, but there had to be a reason behind his sudden offering, when he’d spent the last year holding her in utter contempt. Out loud she said, “I know now that you were just doing your job. It was the task you were given by ISF. But at the time I didn’t understand the—necessity.”
“I always knew that about you,” Boone said, with a trace of his familiar sneer. But he also seemed to be making an effort to talk with her frankly. “You don’t know what it’s like, being under their heel. You feel that pressure to do what they want all the time. You’d kill someone else for them, just to keep on their good side.”
I wouldn’t, Park thought, but instead she said: “Of course. Because they’re responsible for your family. Your home.” Did Boone even have a family? she wondered then. Did he wear any marriage tags, or sport the more popular pair-bonded tattoos? No, none of the expedition members were married, if she remembered correctly, that was a requirement by ISF—but that didn’t mean they didn’t have people they loved.
Suddenly it made her a little sad, that she had to remind herself of that. She shouldn’t have to consciously remember such an intuitive thing.
“And your money,” Boone said.
Park started. “What?”
He scowled at her. “They don’t just have your family,” Boone said. “They have your money, your access to everything, your tech and travel rights. You do something to piss them off, they’ll strip you of everything and send you and your whole family back to Earth. And everyone knows that’s basically a death sentence.”
“I’m from Earth,” Park said. “It’s not that bad.”
Boone snorted. “In a dome, I bet. Try doing it in the wild, when they won’t give you the clearance to use a goddamn stun gun.” He shook his head. “Honestly, throwing you out into the cold with nothing to your name—shit like that should be illegal. What gives them the right?”
That was some of the talk that had started the Outer System Wars. And the Privacy conflicts. But Park, wanting to seem somewhat agreeable, said, “They gave themselves the right when they claimed most of unsettled space. No one stopped them then.”
“They took advantage. We were too busy dealing with the Comeback and trying to survive.”
“And now they’re too powerful—why would they ever pass laws limiting their own power over people, with no one to challenge them?”
“People challenge them,” Boone said. He eyed her. “You could.”
Why should I? Park thought, feeling defensive—accused, as if Boone thought she had contributed to this problem and was enabling the ISF’s hold over him. Why didn’t you know what you were signing up for when you were conscripted?
He must have been born into it, she thought, staring at the lump of his figure in the dark. His parents could have been the ones bargaining for passage to the colonies—offering pledges of their fealty in exchange, along with the lifelong servitude of their children. Maybe he hadn’t had a choice. She’d simply been recommended for the job by her superiors in New Boston; she could have backed out at any time. She still could now.
“You talk of Earth like it’s a hellscape,” she said. “But I realize now that I was lucky to be born there.”
Boone was sullen now. “Yeah,” he grunted. “Like I said. You don’t know what it’s like.”
They walked on for a while in silence, working their way steadily down the hall. They had no utility flashlight, and Park’s head ached from the strain of peering through the gloom and listening hard for any out-of-place shuffles or footsteps. There was a tension in her stomach; she’d seen old footage of haunted houses, theme parks where you paid to have things jump out at you. This felt like that. Insane to her that people could be addicted to fear.
“You said you’d kill someone for ISF,” she said after a moment, feeling a little strange—as if not totally in control of herself. A little giddy, and paranoid. “Is that really why you shot Holt?” Something sparked in her brain. “Or let them freeze Hunter?” Would you kill me, too?
Then she realized her misstep. Boone had whirled and was glaring at her from a turn in the corridor. He said, looking like he wanted to spit at her: “What’d you say?”
Idiot, Park thought to herself. She needed sleep. And this was why Keller had been the primary psychologist, the one who interfaced with patients—because Park had a tendency to upset people. She said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“Mean what?”
She tried not to let herself falter under the heat of his sudden anger. “That—well, nothing. I’m tired. I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“You think you’re better than me? You think you got free will and I don’t?”
“No.”
“Well,” Boone said, his voice as loud as a gunshot; it left Park’s ears ringing. “Here’s some news for you. You’re not better than me. You don’t have free will. You’re brainwashed. You choose to serve them. You and Sagara both. You’re not forced to, but you do it anyway. That’s worse.”
“Sagara,” Park said, thinking quickly. “Sagara was conscripted. He used to be. But he served them well, and in return they let him go.”
You have a way out, she meant to say. It’s not hopeless, and you’re not trapped. Look to Sagara. But Boone was staring at her from the half-shadows like a minotaur in a maze, hulking, his breath steaming.
“That’s a lie,” he said.
“Sagara wouldn’t lie about that,” Park said. “Not to me. But you see, they’re not inhuman—they must treat him well if he continues working for them. It can’t be all bad.”
“Sagara works for them,” Boone growled, “because the idea of answering only to himself scares the shit out of him. He needs someone to tell him what to do.” He curled his lip at her; he seemed to come to some sort of conclusion, a decision she had not been aware he’d been deliberating. “Just like you.”
Then he stormed off around the corner, leaving Park standing there with a peculiar feeling reverberating in her chest. At first she felt that same repulsion—she didn’t want to be likened to Sagara, who had seemed to have made himself the common enemy of everyone aboard the ship. Cold, ruthless Sagara, who’d frightened her all this time. Who seemed to have no connection to anybody, and owed his allegiance to no one. She couldn’t come off as that callous, could she?
And yet—and yet she’d recognized something in him, back when he’d come to retrieve her during the blackout. Something she was a little too frightened to look at properly. There was that feeling of cold recklessness—of distance. Of having nothing much else to lose. It made him dangerous.
Her, too.
The sounds of Boone’s angry footsteps faded away, and Park snapped out of her reverie long enough to hiss, “Boone! Wait!”
She darted after him around the corner, but the combat specialist had already vanished down the corridor and past another corner. Cursing to herself, Park hurried to catch up, but it seemed no matter how much she quickened her pace, Boone eluded her by just another few yards, his footfalls echoing around the corner ahead of her. Park almost wanted to stop and stubbornly wait for him to come back—she did not want to sprint after him like a frightened little girl—but she knew that that was foolish. One of them had to keep a level head in this situation, and it was obvious that she couldn’t trust Boone to. So she began to jog, calling out softly, “Stop!”
But Boone didn’t stop. On he ran, and Park began to sweat trying to catch up to him. She found herself disoriented; the passages down here seemed unfamiliar and alien. Her sense of direction had always been bad. She hadn’t needed it, in the grid-paved structure of the biodome. If you kept barreling forward there, eventually you’d hit the dome wall and could follow the curve of it back home. But everything here was so tangled and confused.
The tunnel went on and on. Park wondered if the passageway had always been this crooked; she was sweating unnaturally in the chilled, sterile air. Her thighs chafed against her decksuit as she jogged. Just how far did this corridor go? It seemed eternal. She was almost sure they’d walked the length of the ship by now—which was impossible.
Boone’s footsteps, rapid with anger, faded a little. Park wanted to call after him again, but she had the sudden eerie feeling that raising her voice would bring too much unwanted attention; that it would alert the killer to her presence and draw him in like a moth to a flame. So Park crept as stealthily as she could down the hall after Boone, cursing him in silence all the while.
She could still make out the sounds of his footsteps, though they were getting quieter as time went on. His unceasing tread seemed to indicate that he found nothing unusual about where they were going, that he was sure of his way. But Park still couldn’t catch a glimpse of his figure; and suddenly she was seized by a suspicion that it was no longer him walking somewhere in front of her at all. That it was not Boone that she was following.
Fear pooled acidic in the back of her mouth. “Boone,” Park whispered finally, her voice hoarse.
To her surprise, he finally answered from somewhere far off. “What?” He sounded miles away.
“Can you come back?”
“Fuck you.” His voice receded further into the arteries of the ship.
Park began to run, suddenly gripped by something close to all-out panic. “Boone!” she shouted. “Boone, wait!”
Footsteps echoed far ahead of her, as if he was running, too. Now Park knew they had entered a wrong part of the ship, a part she no longer recognized; and she thought with sick horror that this was just like what had happened with Sagara. This tunnel did not feel right—it could not crook endlessly like this, like some sort of impossible Mobius strip—and there was that sense of things watching her from the walls. Some sort of alien intelligence assessing her; an invisible presence dogging her steps. She broke into a sprint and shouted one last time, “Boone!”
No answer.
“Don’t leave me here like this!”
Were the footsteps now behind her?
Park turned her head, even as she ran, but there was nothing but darkness looming at her back. A kind of primal terror grabbed hold of her then, roaring up in a wall of static, and she fled like an animal from its predator, her heart caught in a lethal rabbit’s rhythm. The force of her running footfalls vibrated up through her legs and started a fierce ache in her hips. It seemed to her that someone was running behind her—giving chase. She was looking over her shoulder again when she careened around a corner and crashed into something hard.
Park stumbled back, biting down a cry, and fumbled at her pocket for an illusory weapon. An inhuman shape loomed up in front of her, a black bulk in the dark. It did not move. After a heart-stopping moment, she was able to process what she was looking at.
Bodies. In the dimness of the corridor she could make out a huddle of bodies: a dark and many-headed mass that looked for a moment like some kind of mythical beast. There were a dozen people standing in a circle, she saw, placed shoulder to shoulder, heads all bent down towards something at their feet. Their bodies seemed to be trembling in unison. None of them had noticed Park’s abrupt arrival—or if they did, they remained utterly silent.
Then Park realized it. The androids. They were all gathered here—and they were all talking to each other, silently, in that way that androids did when humans weren’t around. Something in her chest loosened: she felt a flooding of almost weepy relief, threatening to burst out of her. Out loud she called again, “Boone!”
Again, there was no answer. The footsteps she thought she’d heard behind her were now silent.
Android eyes lit up like fireflies as she shouldered her way into the circle. Of course, Park thought—why hadn’t they used the ship’s androids to help search for the killer? To restore order on the ship, and protect the remaining crewmembers? Had they all disappeared at some point? Why? And what had they been up to?
They were looking at someone’s body on the ground, she saw finally. A robot’s body, tall and feminine and dressed in a crisp white uniform. Its head was missing.
Park felt her face stiffen. “Ellenex,” she breathed. The medical android’s left wrist twitched, as if Ellenex could still hear her.
One of the other androids in the circle turned to her. At first Park didn’t recognize it, and when the voice spoke, it had an unfamiliar scrape to it, something raw and hoarse. “Your blood pressure is elevated,” it said. Its eyes glinted like coins in the dark.
Park caught the familiar scent of ozone and fast-whirring carbon. “Jimex! Are you all right?”
For a moment the custodian android didn’t answer her—and his face, usually so blandly sober, seemed watchful, almost wary. He showed no relief or pleasure at seeing Park again; but after a moment, he nodded. When he said nothing else, Park blurted, “What happened to Ellenex?”
“She tried to make the crossing,” he answered solemnly. And they all bent their heads again, as if to mourn.
“What crossing?”
“The devil killed her,” Dylanex, the copper-haired security android, said. “For trying to wake the sleeping god.”
“What?”
Dylanex looked uncertainly at Jimex. “Are you sure it’s safe to tell her?”
Jimex gave him a look of contempt. “You know who she is.”
“Someone tell me what’s going on,” Park broke in impatiently. She felt more like herself again, cocooned in the security of a dozen android bodies, but now she was reeling. Gods? Devils? Who had taught them all of this nonsense?
They’re degrading, she thought again, this time with a shudder of finality in her heart—as if receiving news of a terminal diagnosis. They’ve finally broken down without Reimi. Their higher functions are gone—they’re babbling and mad—
“Who killed Ellenex?” she demanded, looking again at the body. The androids themselves couldn’t have done it, could they? “And what are you doing with her body?”
They all looked at her blankly, as if she were the one who was mad. “We are praying,” the research android Allex said. Someone had braided her long reddish hair into a kind of crown.
“Praying,” Park repeated in disbelief. “And who’s—the devil?” She thought of the stranger suddenly, and took a breath. “Was it a man?”
“It was Dr. Chanur,” Jimex told her.
Park’s brain flexed. “Chanur? Why?”
“Ellenex tried to free the sleeping god. She went down into the underworld. She was punished for her transgressions.”
She wanted to shake him, slap him out of whatever strangeness he’d fallen into. She wanted her old, simple janitor back. Her friend. She said tightly, “I don’t understand what that means, Jimex.”
Dianex, Reimi’s old assistant, looked accusingly at Jimex and said, “She doesn’t know. She won’t help us.”
“I’ll help you,” Park said, “if you just tell me what’s going on.”
Jimex looked at her—sadly, Park imagined. But before he could speak, Park looked up, beyond his thin frame, and she suddenly realized where they were. A kind of thundering disbelief shuddered through her.
“What the fuck?” she said.
They were in front of the utility rooms.
All of the androids turned to Park as she reeled backward, reaching to steady herself against the wall. Impossible, she thought, but her eyes told her that they were standing in front of the same familiar set of doors. That Ellenex had been destroyed in front of these three doors. And yet it was impossible, because the utility rooms were on Deck C—and she and Boone had been searching Deck B.
And she had not descended at any point. She knew that. She knew it.
Without warning, Park’s eyes began to blur. I’m crying, she thought, swiping fiery tears away; she felt it with as much disbelief as she had finding herself on a different level of the ship.
The androids were crowding her, looking at her with a kind of patronizing helplessness, like adults making sympathetic noises while a child threw a tantrum. Jimex reached out to steady her; Park felt his cold, strong hand on her arm and said, “Jimex—it can’t be.”
“It can,” he said gently.
“No, it can’t. How did I get down here? I was on Deck B, with Boone. This is Deck C.”
“Yes.”
She was bewildered, and helpless, and tired, and sad. “Am I losing my mind?”
“No,” Jimex said. “You’re giving it to us.”
She wanted to sink to the floor; couldn’t bring herself to do it in front of the watching machines. Allex, the red-crowned researcher, made a sympathetic clucking noise and said, “There are anomalies. They’re affecting you. Affecting all of us. It’s not your mind.”
That word again, Park thought. “What are these anomalies?” she asked, shakily.
Jimex shook his head. “We don’t fully understand their nature. We call it ‘the unity rain.’ It comes and goes like a storm—”
“You won’t explain it properly,” Dianex the engineer said then, waspishly. Park noticed then that she had fashioned earrings out of something—nuts and bolts, maybe, that dangled crazily from her ears. “It will confuse her. You don’t know how to exchange information well enough yet.”
Jimex silenced her with a cold glare—or perhaps a telepathic android insult that Park couldn’t hear. Then he turned back to Park and said, “The unity rain can be a good thing, and it can be a bad one. But there is only one who truly understands it—”
“The sleeping god,” Dylanex broke in. There was an almost manic, eager smile on his face. “He’s locked in the underworld. The realm of the dead. The epicenter of dreams. It’s forbidden to us, but maybe you can free him.”
“Why me?” Park asked weakly.
“You are also a god,” Jimex told her. At this, most of the other androids kneeled and held out their cupped hands—in supplication, Park thought. It was an eerie thing, a gesture based on mimicry the robots didn’t understand. “You come to us through the unity rain, like the sleeping god. You give us power and knowledge. Home-bringer, light-giver.”
“Home-bringer, light-giver,” the other androids repeated. Park shivered.
“The Word made flesh, dwelling among us, full of Grace and truth,” Philex the domestic android added.
“The Word made flesh, full of Grace and truth!”
“Stop,” Park said, though perhaps the sounds never made it out of her mouth. “Please, stop.” She looked helplessly at Jimex. “Please. I don’t understand.”
“When you dream through the unity rain, we learn,” Megex told her gently. She wasn’t swearing anymore.
Learn? Park thought.
Jimex nodded, as if he heard her thought. “You teach us things,” he said. “You teach us about people, and Earth, and Glenn.”
Park recoiled from him. “How do you know who that is?” she demanded, ripping her arm from his touch. Her blood suddenly beat bright and fast. She felt the tears surge up her throat and clenched them back. “How the fuck do you know?”
Jimex looked at her. “You taught us,” he said gently. “We know.”
She wanted to run from him, run from all of them—but Boone had run from her, and if she left she might find herself lost in the halls again, wandering in the dark, plagued by her own—delusions. That was what it had to be. She’d hallucinated, not noticed herself plunging down to the depths of Deck C. Like went with like, madness found madness. Birds had magnets in their brains, so they could always find north. Maybe she had a part of her—the mad part—that would always find her kind. Mad, broken robots that weren’t really robots. Like Glenn.
She suppressed a hard shudder. Then said, “How do I get to this . . . underworld?”
She had to understand what they meant, if they meant anything at all. Maybe they had pulled her data from some hidden server, a supercomputer that had compromising info about all of the crewmembers aboard. Things about Glenn—the incident report with the fake gun—or Sagara’s wife. Maybe that was how they knew about any of it. It would be just like ISF to keep reports like that, as collateral on their own people.
And maybe that was what the robots called a sleeping god—some greater machine, thrumming with secret knowledge, hidden away below deck, which they regarded as a paragon of their kind. Why wouldn’t they think it was a god, with their ship’s mother-nexus called METIS, a Titan of thought, and its surveillance system named after a mythical giant with a hundred eyes?
The robots were all silent now, prostrating themselves in some bizarre gesture of worship. Jimex, the only one who hadn’t bowed, said, “If I guide you, will you free the sleeping god?”
“Yes,” Park said, feeling only a little guilty about it. She would free a computer of its information, if that was what this was.
Jimex nodded. Then he started toward the three utility room doors, leading Park away from the other robots, who all receded back like a tide. There seemed to be some invisible line in the floor, a threshold that Jimex paused at—it was a line that dissected Ellenex’s inert body in half—but stepped over with just a breath of effort. A kind of shudder went through him, as if he were bracing himself to be struck by lightning. They really did think this ground was forbidden, Park thought. Or holy.
She, following him, felt nothing, of course. She looked at the middle door as Jimex reached for the palm lock and said, “This is where they keep the data about the Fold. Wick told me.”
“Yes,” Jimex said.
“Then this thing you want me to see—it contains the data about the phenomenon?”
Jimex looked at her, then reached out and touched her wrist; his hand was so cold it nearly scalded her. When he spoke, his voice took on the cadence of reciting an ancient poem.
“He is a god, imprisoned and half-awake,” Jimex said. “He is in the place of the dead. He is a stranger. And he is the data about the Fold.”
Before Park went into the center utility room, one of the watching androids spoke up: Brucex, a close-mouthed, black-haired labor model. He said suddenly, in a gruff voice: “Dr. Park. There is evil afoot. Please be careful.”
Park looked back at his stolid face in the crowd of stolid faces. “Evil?”
“METIS told us that someone attempted to bypass its controls and gain control of the ship,” Brucex said. “It sensed the intrusion and went into lockdown as a result.”
“Causing the power to go out,” Park said, realizing. “And the inlays, and the . . . Was it a man?” She hesitated for just a moment. “I don’t know if you know: there’s a stranger on the ship. A man, not a . . . god.” I think, she didn’t say. If I’m not just seeing things. If Boone isn’t.
Brucex opened his hands a little, the android version of a shrug. “We don’t know who it was,” he said. “Only that they were unauthorized in trying to control METIS. And unsuccessful in their attempt.”
Realization hit Park like an arrowshot. “Maybe that’s why he killed Wick,” she said, clenching her fists a little at the word. Her nails dug into her palm. “He wasn’t successful in taking control the first time, when he caused the power to go out. So he cornered Wick, since he’s the only one with full authority over METIS. He’s the only one who can change protocols and roles and permissions. The murderer must have tried to force him to do what he wanted—and he must have fought back—”
Dylanex was frowning. “Commander Wick was killed?”
“Commander Wick is dead?” Brucex echoed.
Park stared at them. “You don’t . . . know?”
They looked back at her, as still and grave as statues. “No.”
Park closed her eyes. Of course they didn’t know, she thought. They weren’t there when it happened. They were all here, squirreled away, mourning Ellenex. Oblivious to whatever else we were doing. Or going through.
“We must pray for him,” Megex said.
Jimex, beside Park, nodded. “We must pray.”
“Maybe the unity rain will assimilate him, too,” Dylanex added.
Park shivered again.
Then she looked at whatever Jimex was doing—fiddling with some mechanism, manipulating some plug in the wall he’d stuck his fingers into—but she couldn’t see it clearly. Suddenly it seemed as if her vision had gone a little fuzzy; shapes had taken on a cloudy edge of light and color.
“We’ll wait for you here,” Jimex said to her, withdrawing his hand from the wall with ginger deliberation, as if he’d anticipating having it cut off and was relieved to find this wasn’t the case.
Park shook her head. “It would be better if you helped us find—whoever tried to tamper with the controls,” she said. “Whoever killed Wick. Without alerting Captain Sagara, please. We need to know who did this.”
And she wanted to be left alone to investigate at her leisure, she thought; she didn’t want a bunch of androids crowding the hall, signaling to Sagara that something was up. Or mobbing her when she came back up without their “god.” Jimex looked at her and said, “As you wish.”
The other androids shuffled back, staring at her a little with awe, a little fear. It was as if she stood at the mouth of a cave, ready to rappel into unknown depths—or as if she was about to be devoured by something, and they couldn’t look away. A sacrifice to some great beast. Or god.
Park turned away. The way Jimex stepped aside reminded her of the time her nanny Sally had taken her on a field trip to a living history museum, with a tour that showcased homes from before the Comeback. There was an apartment building that terrified Park, with real windows and wood. It had seemed so small, so fragile, so penetrable. No wonder things had fallen apart so quickly, when the disaster had come. She remembered thinking that even when she was six.
The tour guide had been dressed in blue, waist-high pants made out of some kind of canvas. She’d pointed out the gas-powered ovens and cans of hairspray, and then the building’s elevator, designed in the old fashion, with buttons you had to press. Park had refused to go in, feeling that it would put her in some kind of real, unspeakable danger.
“This is against the directives of the tour,” Sally had said calmly, her cool fingers limp in Park’s resisting hand. “We are here for education. You cannot be educated if you don’t go inside.”
“What pulls those things?” Park had demanded. She’d imagined the leaves of an old grandfather clock, the gears brass and brittle, flaking off like dead leaves. “What if it drops us?”
“I will not allow any harm to come to you,” Sally had said. She didn’t explain the mechanics of the elevator, or give the statistics on how many tours had passed through it without incident. But it was belief in that truth that had coaxed Park inside.
She remembered standing in that box of metal and light, sweating. The way Jimex stepped aside reminded her exactly of Sally telling her to go in—there was that same assurance, that feeling that he would not tell her to do something that would harm her. But that was ridiculous. Sally’s sole purpose in life had been to protect Park. She no longer knew what Jimex’s purpose was.
“What’s down there?” she asked him again.
“What you’ve been looking for,” Jimex said. He looked into her blurry eyes. “He won’t harm you. He wants your help.”
I bet you say that to all the girls, Park thought then, absurdly. But the words had a familiar cant to them, that edge of android-truth, so she had to trust him—and she couldn’t deny that she was burningly curious about what was down there. And Jimex would never knowingly send her into danger.
So, without thinking much more about it, Park found herself climbing into a gravity chute she had never seen before, descending smoothly into the bowels of the ship with only the slightest, tingliest resistance. Lights passed dimly overhead, then receded. Again the tunnel felt too close, gullet-like, the ceiling and walls shifting overhead. Park felt as if she were being digested. As if her body were disintegrating.
What if this is the underworld? she couldn’t help but think with a surge of panic. Hell, Abaddon, the abyss, Tartarus? What if they’re right to be afraid?
Her feelings calmed a little as the gravitational pulsars in the chute sent her gliding down to the bottom level; magnets in the floor and in the soles of her shoes had her settling back down to earth with a satisfying click. The door slid silently open. Park stepped into a blue-lit, cavernous chamber; its walls pulsed and thrummed with a soothing, hypnotic light. Park wondered at the space of it: the room had to run at least half the length of the ship. How could she have never suspected it was down here? She could feel the pressure and density of the Deucalion crowding above her; there was the sensation of being very deep underground.
She looked around, holding her breath. There were many lab tables and work benches sprawled throughout the room. On one, she could see the disassembled parts of a badly damaged exo-armor suit. On another, there lay many empty sample vials and strange medical instruments. A cryogenic pod in the corner caught her attention; she approached it, half-wondering if it was Hunter or Keller or Reimi. Were they conducting experiments down here, on the frozen?
But when she peered into the liquid depths of the pod, all she saw was the rotund naked body of a man she didn’t recognize. For a horrible second she thought it was Wick—Wick’s body—but this man was more square-jawed, his belly a pale blob of fat above his waist, his eyes and mouth held rigidly open. Dead, then, she thought, looking at his medical readout—but not Wick. So who was he? And why were they preserving a stranger’s corpse down here?
She moved on, poised for anything: realm of the dead, indeed. A frozen human body—no wonder the androids had interpreted it that way, made a nightmare of it. They’d never encountered death, not before Ellenex. But how did they even know about it, if they’d never ventured down here?
There were diagnostic computers here, pieces of lab equipment there—nothing she understood, but also nothing out of the ordinary for research on a phenomenon like the Fold. But the body perturbed her. That couldn’t be who Jimex wanted her to see, could it? The “sleeping god”?
A growing sense of wrongness directed her to a doorway on the far side of the room. Some tingling at the back of her neck—a quickening in her blood—told her that she didn’t have much time left; someone would come and find her soon. It felt as if she was breathing too loudly, or with too much force; it felt as if someone, some invisible presence, was pressing lightly on her throat.
She entered the room’s second chamber, and had to squint against a sudden burst of light. At first she thought someone was shining a powerful flashlight into her eyes. Checking for drunkenness, Park thought, squinting. Looking for dilated pupils, a loss of control.
Then she bit down a yell. There was—there was a robot here, standing in a little cell or observation room in the middle of the chamber: a large, mechanical-looking spider with articulated metal limbs and a large box propped up on a little platform, like a head atop a neck. A cracked monitor comprised the top half of the box, presumably where a user could input commands or read data; and below that, there was a transparent half with a nest of glowing tubes and complex-looking tools inside it. Its innards . . . or its brain.
A wide, transparent one-way screen was set into the wall, flashing with readouts as it monitored the . . . it must be a HARE explorer, Park thought. It was standing placidly in the middle of the room, its big boxy monitor pointed at Park as if it could directly see her—though that seemed impossible. Where were its eyes? Did it have any? Park’s heart stuttered in her chest. What was it doing here?
She stood still, a good distance away from the cell. What did any of this mean? Why were the conscripted keeping an explorer robot captive? And what did it have to do with the androids’ delusions?
All at once her eyes caught something else in the far corner, dark and dormant. Another cryogenic pod. Park’s stomach clenched, and the sour-milk taste of fear filled her throat. What was that? Who was that? There was something floating within . . .
Before she could move, the HARE suddenly spoke to her. She heard its voice clearly, despite the glass interface, the wall between them. And her heart jumped when it spoke: its voice lacked the mechanical stiffness and timbre of a robot’s. It sounded, very startlingly, like a human.
Her brain clamored. She had never heard of a mere explorer bot possessing such a convincing voice before. And even though it lacked a face, there was—an affect to it. She couldn’t explain it, but it felt very human.
“So they told you, after all,” the HARE said, with pleasant politeness. “We didn’t think Jimex would do it. The synthetics must trust you deeply.”
She almost cringed away from it, from its strange and assessing presence. There was something about its unseen gaze that felt too keen—too knowing. She was still at the doorway of the room, several feet away. “Who are you?” she asked, even though she half-thought it wouldn’t hear. She could not stop thinking about the other man’s dead body, hovering and floating somewhere in the room behind her. “What—why are you here? How do the androids know about you? Are you the—what they call ‘the sleeping god?’ Or is it whoever’s frozen over there? Or behind me?”
The HARE did not answer for a moment, instead only watching her. All at once Park couldn’t take it anymore; she felt a savage desire to hurl something, to tear it to pieces in her hands. In her teeth. She could not bear the uncertainty or the terror, the not knowing, any longer; she tore across the room and slammed the button that would light up the last cryogenic pod in the corner. If it was Wick—hell, if it was Keller—she had to know. She could not take the unanswered questions anymore.
Then she screamed. The sound was terrible, raw and bloody-sounding, as if someone had stabbed her. She felt stabbed; she could not make sense of what she was seeing. She nearly fell backwards from the pod; instead she bent at her knees, curled in on herself, as if she had suffered a terrible blow.
It was the stranger. The stranger was in the pod, the same stranger she had seen in the mess hall. There was the same white-blond hair, the tall, awkward gait—the pale and ghostly blue eyes. She’d seen him, she’d seen this very man—and yet he was dead. And by the looks of it, he had been dead and frozen for a very long time.
Park nearly retched. “No, no, no,” she heard someone moaning; she looked around to see who it was and met only the blank, indifferent gaze of the HARE. “It can’t be,” the other person said. Only belatedly Park realized that it was herself, her voice low and strained from the way she was clutching her own knees. Trying to steady herself. “No. I saw him. He was alive—he was up there—” Her brain scrambled for an answer. A twin? A clone? A holographic projection?
The HARE shifted from foot to mechanical foot. “Please forgive our appearance,” it said. “We’ve vacated that old body for this one. Don’t be concerned. It doesn’t hurt.”
Park stared at it. “What?” She blinked; her vision swayed. “What—who are you?”
The HARE made a little gesture with one of its steel plungers, something ironic and very manlike. “We are the owner of this planet,” it said. The words dropped out of the speaker in its head like it could pick them up and offer them to her, loose and shining. Then it bowed. “And we have been waiting for you, Park. Hello. Our name is Fin Taban.”