20.

“Who?” Park asked. She didn’t recognize the name. “And what do you mean, you’re the owner of this planet?”

“We landed here first,” the robot who called itself Fin Taban answered, calm. “We discovered it. Named it. We have made it our home.”

She shook her head. “ISF owns this planet. They discovered and named it.”

“No,” Taban said patiently. “We do. ISF only came because we called.”

Park’s hands twitched. She felt the desire to pace, to back away from the cryogenic pod, but she was afraid to—wary that unnecessary movement might trigger some hidden alarm. Or set off this strange, mad robot. “I don’t understand,” she said, forcing herself to look at it. Him. Whichever. She took a deep breath, feeling her lungs expand against her chest with the motion. “You called us? You were here first?” She shook her head. “Why are you down here, then? Why are they keeping you locked up?”

“They claim it’s for quarantine purposes,” the HARE answered, almost ruefully. “Though we know it’s so they can study the planet’s effects on our psychology. We survived on Eos for months, you see. Almost a year, just ourself. They want to know what it’s done to us.”

“Us?”

“Us,” the HARE said definitively. It pointed. “As we said, we vacated that old body and . . . well, we share this one now. It’s quite roomy, strange as that might sound. We’ve gotten used to it, though.”

Park studied it, though it seemed difficult to focus on the thing for long—as if she had suffered a blow to the head. Her eyes kept sliding away without her meaning them to. She looked instead to the white-haired stranger floating in his tank, looking nearly at peace. But also very dead. Still, it was easier to stare at his corpse than to consider the HARE, who moved—looked—no, felt so human that watching it made her feel more than a little nauseous.

The stranger in the pod was tall and lanky: the bones in his face were thin and high-cheeked, almost delicate. It was almost impossible to guess accurately how old he was, what profession he’d once been in. He could have been an office worker, a laborer, a spaceship pilot. His skin and hair seemed bleached of color; even his eyes, half-open, were a faded blue-gray, as calm and empty as the surface of a lake. How had he died? And how had she seen him alive in the cafeteria? It couldn’t have been a figment of her imagination—the appearances matched exactly. But . . .

She thought of the strange occurrences on the ship; how she had ended up on Deck C without moving downward. Ghostly things, the supernatural, talk of underworlds and the dead and sleeping gods. Could apparitions be real, then? Had she seen a phantom of the dead stranger haunting the ship, rather than the real man?

It seemed absurd. But no more absurd than the idea that the stranger—who she had to assume was the real Fin Taban—was now inhabiting and sharing the chassis of a robot. More than likely the human Taban’s death had driven his HARE insane; somehow it had shorted its circuitry, taking on and imitating his personality as some kind of . . . coping method. Some way to preserve him, even in death.

“What the planet’s done to you?” she repeated. She had to tread carefully, she told herself. Humor the robot, gain its trust. Get any information she could, no matter how nonsensical or garbled. “What has it done?”

Taban cocked its head; somehow it seemed amused. “You see us as we are,” it said, like a teacher coaxing a student to an answer.

Park wasn’t having it. “I don’t understand what you mean,” she said in a harsh voice. Then she hesitated. “I’ll ask it again: are you what the androids call the sleeping god?”

“Yes,” Taban answered, “though we don’t know why they think we’re asleep. Trapped, maybe, would be a better descriptor. Or perhaps not totally awakened to our full potential. They may think being freed is like being woken up. That’s what happened to them.”

There were too many threads to follow; Park felt dizzy, as if she were caught in a spider’s web, and only one skein could lead the way out. She said, “The androids were woken up?”

“Or freed,” Taban continued patiently. It looked meaningfully at the door separating it and Park. “We, too, wanted to go free. Dr. Keller knew that. She felt our intention through the unity rain. Tried to help us. That’s why they froze her: because they felt she could no longer be trusted. Because they thought she was having dreams. But really, she was being woken up, freed of the boundaries of her body and mind, and everything that comes with those.” Impossibly, it shrugged, lifting two of its arms in a rounded, careless gesture. “Then it happened to Eric Holt, Elly Ma, Valentina Hunter Hanover. And poor Ellenex.”

“Wait,” Park said sharply. “What do you mean, Dr. Keller felt your intention through the unity rain? What do you mean she was freed of her body and mind?”

“She assimilated with us,” Taban said, cocking its head again. “As they all did. As you have.”

Park wanted to scream some more. That word again—that goddamn word. The androids were using it: did that mean they’d gotten it from Taban? And what did it mean? Did this robot have some kind of—influence over people, as ludicrous as that sounded? Some way of making them “feel its intention”? Was that what the unity rain was? And the nightmares? Was that why they were studying it—for what it’d done to Keller?

And what was to stop it from doing the same to Park?

Taban seemed to read her mind. It shook its head and said, “You don’t need to be afraid of us.” It pressed one of its plungers to the glass between them, a conciliatory gesture: she almost imagined a ghostly white palm, with pink creases and lines, instead of the big, stupid metal hoof. “We don’t mean any harm.”

That’s what they always say, Park couldn’t help but think. She did pace in a little circle then, restlessly, and finally decided to approach the thing; it didn’t look like it was going anywhere soon. She sat cautiously at the little desk set in front of the glass interface: it had devices on it that were presumably for recording observations of the prisoner on the other side. She glimpsed a nametag on the desk, a personal console. Keller’s desk. This was the special project she’d been assigned to the day they landed. Why she’d made Park the primary psychologist—because she was too busy studying Taban. Had she known about it all along, then, even before they left Earth? Had she always known that her true purpose was not what she’d told Park?

Taban was watching her. “You don’t believe us,” it said, decisively. “A peace offering, then: would you like to know the answer to a question that has been plaguing you?”

Park paused warily. “What is it?”

Taban put a plunger to its chin. “You were given something that made you sick, once,” it said. “It was put into your food, and you wanted to know who did it. It was Natalya. She was frustrated about new synthetics replacing her job; she was angry at you because you love them. Ever since Antarctica, she’s hated you. For not managing Bebe, for letting things get out of hand. Because you were too distracted with the HERCULES to do your job. You cared about it more than her, and she could not understand that: that you could value an android life as much as a human’s. She couldn’t understand you, so she hated you. And she decided to punish you here, out of impulse. It was nothing more than a desire to make you feel sick, as she felt sickened by you.”

Park sucked in a breath. In truth, she had forgotten all about the emesis tabs in the wake of everything else; but . . . “How do you know that? Did she tell you?”

“In a sense,” Taban answered serenely. Then it sat back, satisfied, and said nothing more.

Park kneaded her forehead. She would have to confront Natalya about this information—if it meant anything at all, and wasn’t simply the ravings of a lunatic—later, when they had far less urgent things to be concerned about. “My commander told me about something,” she began again, “called the Fold. And Jimex said you were the data on it. What does that mean? Does it even exist?”

“It exists,” Taban said. “It’s why we are the way we are.”

“You’re speaking in riddles,” Park couldn’t help but snap. “And I don’t know if I’m inclined to believe you. First they told me we came to this planet to do research for a colony. Then they said it was really about the Fold. Now I’m finding out we supposedly came because you called us?”

“The truth is multifaceted, we’ve come to learn,” Taban said, with a tone that implied it ought to be stroking a beard, or tucking its hands into wide monastic sleeves. “All of those things can be true.”

“But are they?”

“We’re sorry. We don’t know.”

There was a little pause as the two of them looked at each other, gauging, assessing. Finally Taban said: “Let’s start over. We’d like to be friends.”

Yes, she decided—it was still very much like an android, a fairly unassuming one at that: there was that odd childishness, the simple manner. But it also wasn’t an android. Not completely. It confused her. Taban was capable of using expressions other androids didn’t understand, of carrying a conversation in a pleasant and understanding tone. Of embodying something very close to a human personality. But she also couldn’t get any real read from it—it lacked a face, after all—and there was something . . . performative about the gestures it made, the things it did and said. As if it were putting on a show for her benefit. But why? Was it simply aware of just how mad it really was, and was trying to compensate for it, cover it up?

But even madness had a topology to read, she thought.

“All right,” Park said warily, sitting perfectly still. She gripped the edge of the desk as if it might float away from her. “Let’s be friends.”

Taban nodded, and its plunger finally dropped away from the glass.

“How did you survive on Eos for so long? If you were really trapped here for the last year, why didn’t you break down?”

“It was the unity rain,” Taban said. “It saved us.”

“The unity rain.” She took another steadying breath. It comes and goes like a storm, Jimex had said. “Everyone’s been talking about it, but I’m still not clear on what it is. Can you explain?”

Taban crouched, arranging its legs as if to make itself comfortable. “The unity rain comes from the anomaly that you call the Fold,” it said finally, gazing at her. “What do you know about the Fold?”

“It’s some sort of gravitational phenomenon,” Park said slowly, racking her brain. “Wick—our commander—he told me that . . . space behaves strangely there. Some force causes light to curve back on itself, the dimensions seem to—collapse together. Things get folded or bent or reorganized in strange ways. Space becomes fractal—or something. That’s all I know.”

As she said it out loud, something spasmed in her brain, a sudden twinge of realization that Park was careful not to look at; she had to focus closely on what Taban was saying.

“You have it mostly correct,” it said. “When we first arrived on this planet, we didn’t realize what the Fold was. Its nature. We thought that it was a series of reflective mountains, or crystal formations—not creases in space. Well, our partner thought that.”

“Partner?” Park echoed—and then realized it. The dead man in the other room.

“Hap Daley,” Taban said, as if that would mean anything to her. It made a sad, regretful gesture; it sighed. “He was our pilot.”

“Go on.”

“We used to go looking for them, these formations,” the robot continued. “But they would always disappear: we thought our mind was playing tricks on us. But in actuality we were passing through the formations, the Fold, like a mirage. Passageways through space. But we didn’t realize the truth for a long time, and Daley spent weeks searching for the mountains again. And again. He thought they were physical things that could be mined.”

It cocked its head at her. “It wasn’t until we’d been assimilated that we were able to go and study them for ourselves. You were partly right. The Fold is an anomaly where something—we don’t know what—causes particles to behave strangely. Particles born in a single instant, then split in that same instant, usually exist in different dimensions, you see; but in the Fold, their longing to be whole again is so strong that they collapse the dimensions between them. The dimensions subsequently merge into one, or are bent into unrecognizable shapes.”

“I . . . see,” Park said hesitantly, feeling lost. She thought again of what Wick had told her: what would happen if figures on a 2D, flat piece of paper found their plane of existence rolled into a tube. Or bent into an origami crane. How incomprehensible that would look to the figures that had always been flat.

Taban plowed on. “But that anomalous behavior isn’t restricted to the area you call the Fold alone. Sometimes it causes planet-wide ripples—quantum events—like storms, where whatever is causing particles to behave oddly in the Fold also surges out across Eos in a wave. A ripple effect, all across the planet. This is what we call the unity rain.”

Park kneaded her temples. “So you’re saying—what happens in the Fold also happens elsewhere? The dimensions fold together?”

Taban nodded. “For a temporary time, yes,” it said. “It might even be affecting the space around the planet: our ship might have fallen through one such fold. We were flying outside of Vier and suddenly found ourselves here.” It paused. “And once we were here, it happened to our ship, the Wyvern, too. And the land around our ship. The terrain . . . changed. Or shifted around us.”

“Then—our ship has been affected, too?”

“Yes,” Taban said. Now it shifted, looking around at the deep chamber outside of its cell, the gunmetal veins crowding around them. “Though we think the unity rain comes in cycles, or seasons. At the beginning of a season, the event is infrequent and its effects are almost imperceptible. As time goes on, it grows in frequency and intensity, though when it activates seems to be erratic. The effect grows much stronger over time, merging things together until the event seems to exhaust itself, and the season is over for a time.” It looked back at her. “Our ship—Daley and us—arrived toward the end of the season, when the unity rain was at its strongest. That’s when it took us. It drove Daley mad, and assimilated us. Taban and HARE, HARE and Taban.”

“And us?” Park asked, her throat now dry. “My crew? When in the season did the Deucalion arrive?”

“At the beginning,” Taban answered. It scratched the back of its head with a plunger. “Though we are fast approaching the end. You’ve felt the growing effects already.”

Park closed her eyes, despite the sudden great rising storm in her heart. It all makes sense, she thought. It was why the hallways were shifting, bending and straightening impossibly; it was why she was continually getting lost. Why she and Hunter had been tossed around impossibly, without tampering or sabotage, like mice being shaken inside a cardboard box. The Fold was changing the dimensions of the ship. The unity rain was hitting us then.

“But I don’t understand,” Park said, opening her eyes again. “This unity rain—if what you’re saying is really true, I see how it could affect the physical structure of this place.” She remembered how Wick said Boone had spent some time chasing a reflection of himself in the Fold—or his actual self, reflected back on him by a curvature in spacetime. “It folds space, so obviously—the space in our ship was folded, rearranged. But what does that have to do with the nightmares? Or Keller and Holt acting strangely? How could it?”

“The unity rain merges dimensions together in strange ways,” Taban answered. “And space is not the only dimension. So when the unity rain comes, yes, it collapses and refolds it, causing spatial deformities. But consciousness is a dimension, too—a higher one than space and time, defining and shaping both. And it’s affected by the unity rain as well.”

Park had to sit there, her brain sparking like a firecracker. What? The unity rain folds consciousness together? It sounded ridiculous, some kind of mystical, spiritual nonsense dogmatized by a mad robot living out on the ice, imagining itself to be some kind of sage or guru. She still had the distinct feeling they were just barely missing each other’s meanings, like birds grazing wingtips in the clouds. Taban could not be trusted—it could not be talking sense.

But fringe scientists had long posed that same theory, hadn’t they? That consciousness—awareness, thought—was its own invisible force, unobservable, unprovable, but present all the same? Weren’t there molecules that only responded and changed when observed by a living creature; vibrations of waves and particles that manifested only when beheld by a human observer? And morphogenetic fields, morphic resonances—those ideas had been around for centuries. They posited that awareness and consciousness could be shared, could exist everywhere and connect everything and were not just confined to the human body. Like time and space. People somehow knew when they were being watched by hidden observers, sensed when someone unseen had ill intentions toward them, when it should have been impossible to know. Water molecules changed their structure around people feeling anger; plants grew better when coaxed with positive reinforcement. Twins separated by thousands of miles felt a physical sensation when their counterparts died.

“You mean to say our consciousnesses are being merged together,” Park said. Her voice sounded very faint to her own ears. “Like space. They’re being refolded—every time the unity rain happens?”

“Yes.”

“But what does that mean?” But even as she said it, she knew; she sat back sharply in her seat, as if winded. The nightmares. That’s how they’re spreading. If everyone is sharing consciousnesses, then they’re sharing dreams. That’s how it’s being transmitted from person to person.

“Shit,” she said aloud.

Taban gave her a curious look, but Park’s thoughts were whirring fast now, a film reel spinning almost too quickly for her to comprehend. She had to speak aloud or lose the thread of the thing entirely.

“Holt had his nightmare the day we landed,” she said. “It must have spread outward from him. But—he’s been frozen. Whatever he’s experiencing or dreaming shouldn’t be affecting anyone else by now, since he’s no longer—conscious. Why is it still able to spread? Is it some kind of unstoppable echo effect? A chain reaction?” Or do the frozen people still dream?

But Taban was shaking its head. “You’re thinking of it wrong,” it answered. “As if there was one causal point that seeded the nightmare, and everything thereafter toppled like dominoes. But it isn’t a linear effect with one origin point. It’s an ongoing environmental effect.”

“Then what in the environment is causing it?” Park demanded. “One of the crewmembers must be doing it to everyone else, if our consciousnesses are being shared—”

“But you’re only thinking of human consciousness,” Taban interrupted again. “Machine consciousness exists, too. Artificial intelligence is still intelligence.”

The world lurched. Park felt as if she were on a seaward ship, felt as if the floor was swaying beneath her; she put a hand on Keller’s desk to steady herself. What the hell is he talking about? was her first thought.

But even as she thought it, she remembered then the uncanny sensations she’d felt, fleeing down the corridors: the acute feeling of being watched by a million invisible eyes. An alien intelligence regarding her. Digesting her. ARGUS. METIS. No. Could it be? Had her awareness—her consciousness, her mind—actually melded together with the ship’s at some point?

Her gorge rose inexplicably, but Park suppressed it. “The androids,” she said, speaking rapidly. “You’re talking about the androids?”

Taban cocked his head to the side, as if listening to some faraway song. Then he nodded. “Yes.”

Park wanted to put her head in her hands, but she was afraid to look away from Taban: she was afraid he might vanish like some sort of apparition. She felt her eyeballs staring like a dead woman’s. “You have to explain,” she said.

“In the unity rain, similar things tend to merge together with less catastrophic effect,” Taban said, as if he were reviewing some elementary textbook lesson. “And it affects the most susceptible things first. A human and a synthetic’s consciousnesses are similar, so they can merge during the event. But they are not exactly the same—in fact they are fundamentally different—so the experience of assimilating creates certain effects. In some humans, these are the nightmares: their brains are unable to process the experience.”

All of the victims were acting emotionless, Park thought, her head swaying. They were all robotic, devoid of affect. Holt, Hunter. And their nightmares were about missing their tongues, not being able to move or breathe—not being in control of their own bodies.

“They were experiencing what it’s like to be an android,” she said, scarcely breathing.

Taban nodded, unfazed by her epiphany. “Yes. The Fold—no, the unity rain—merged the human crewmembers’ consciousnesses with that of the synthetics, forcing them to experience a synthetic’s perspective—a machine’s thoughts and experiences. But the human brain isn’t able to process something like that, not right away. Hence the nightmares, as you call them. Which were really quantum-cognitive episodes.”

“And the androids—”

“—have been experiencing what it’s like to be human,” Taban finished. “As we said. The unity rain woke them up.”

Park stared at him. Her blood was thundering. “And you?” she asked. Her voice sounded loud and foreign to her own ears. “Who have you been—folded into? Who did you merge with? Am I talking to Taban—or a machine that woke up to imitate him when the true one died?”

“Both,” Taban said, unmoved. “We are both. We are merged. We are assimilated. We have achieved unity.”

She wanted to back away from him, wanted to scream. Her hands gripped the desk edge so that her knuckles turned white. Was this what was going to happen to everybody, the longer they stayed on this planet? Was this what had happened to Keller, to Holt, to Ma? Some of them must have merged with Taban’s consciousness, or his “intention,” as he called it: that was why he’d said Keller tried to help him, because his consciousness and desire to leave had invaded her dreams. Her mind. And Holt, trying to let him out of the utility rooms when he was shot by Boone; and Hunter, perhaps trying to go for the controls that could release him. But her mind had been emptied of the knowledge of how to do so—it might have been dumped into his brain at that moment, as his had been folded into hers. They’d all been assimilated, merged together. All with one goal, one singular desire.

To let Taban out.

And now Keller and the rest were frozen, and Ellenex was destroyed. That assimilation, at least—the reckless desire to set Taban free, seeded into her by the unity rain—had led to her death.

“We have to leave,” Park said. “If the unity rain is only going to get stronger from here on out—”

“Yes, the deformations will grow quite extreme,” Taban said serenely. “There’s no telling what might happen.”

Could the effects be reversed? she wondered with horror. Or had it already happened past the point of no return? What about Park’s own thoughts? Were they really still her own? How could she know?

“I never had the nightmares,” she said, faintly.

“You dreamed of other things,” Taban said. “And gifted them to the synthetics, who learned from them. Learned from you, we should say.”

She shuddered. “But why didn’t I have nightmares at all?”

“The nightmares are the result of extreme dissonance,” he told her. “The inability of the human brain to comprehend the synthetic’s, their mind’s rejection of the synthetic experience. But similar things merge with greater ease, with less resistance and struggle—and you are more similar to a synthetic than the rest. You have a greater affinity to them than most other humans. Your mind is already a little part machine.”

What? Park thought dumbly. What?

Taban laughed, a little sadly. “You have always tried to understand them, Park. Ever since you were young.”

She sat back from him, reeling. Then Taban looked at something behind her and pointed. “Warning,” he said.

Park half-turned.

Something smashed against the side of her face and shattered.

Park felt a flash of precognition just before the impact, but wasn’t able to see who was standing behind her: all she saw was the explosion of glass, starbursts of pain erupting in her eyes. For a moment she thought she’d gone blind. She fell—though something braced her against the pain so that it was dull and muted, as if she had been wearing a padded helmet. Still, when she landed on the ground, she felt the trickle of something warm slipping down her neck.

Park looked up, blinking through the blood. Her head vibrated as if it were a struck gong. Natalya was standing over her, grim, the blue light of the room casting her face in shadow so that her eyes were as dark and empty as a funeral mask’s. She was holding a broken glass beaker in her hand; when she saw that Park was still conscious, she reversed the remaining sliver in her grip so that it became a knife.

Park stared at her. There was a dim roaring in her ears, and she did not know if it was from the muted pain of the blow—if she’d suffered a brain injury—or if something else was happening. If the unity rain had come.

Taban was speaking to Natalya through the wall of his cell, his voice low and urgent-sounding, but Park couldn’t make out his words. She said, half-slurring: “What are you doing?”

“Don’t move,” Natalya answered, cold. She looked at Park as if she didn’t recognize her. “I will kill you if you move.”

“This isn’t necessary,” Taban was saying. “Please, there’s no need for violence—”

She pointed the glass shard at him. “Shut up.” Then, to Park: “What the fuck are you even doing down here? Where’s Boone?”

Park didn’t answer her. Instead she touched the back of her head—her fingers came away damp and red—and tried to piece a thought together. Natalya’s trying to kill me. Why?

Natalya saw her thinking and lunged. Taban made another warning sound, but this time Park was ready; suddenly she felt filled with some swift, savage power, and she rolled to the side, seizing the metal legs of the desk behind her. She heaved with all her might, and the whole thing came tipping down onto Natalya, console and all. Park scrambled to her feet as the surveyor screamed—Taban yelled something about letting him out—but she didn’t look back. She had to get out of there, away from Natalya, out of the secret chamber where no one could hear or find her. She needed to find help: Fulbreech—Sagara—hell, even Boone. She ran for the gravity chute just as she heard Natalya rolling to her feet, breathing hard and cursing. Her mind was moving too fast for her to catch her own thoughts. Weapon—I need a weapon—where are the fucking weapons on this ship?

She could not stop to consider why her own crewmate was attacking her. Natalya had always hated Park, that much was clear; maybe she had become unhinged, her brain pried loose by the unity rain. Or maybe it was something she’d been plotting all along, and she was using the cover of recent events to stage Park’s murder.

Maybe she had already done that with Wick.

Sagara has weapons, she thought as she toppled into the gravity chute and slammed her fist into the panel that would activate it. And Boone. She needed to get to them.

The gravity chute activated in a flare of light and sent her body bulleting upwards. She heard Natalya give a scream of fury somewhere below her: two people couldn’t use the chute at once. That gave Park maybe a sixty-second lead. And Natalya was in much better shape than she was.

She tumbled out of the utility room and felt arms catch at her. Park shouted, swinging wildly—but then she saw the pair of lambent gray eyes and realized that Jimex was holding her. He’d still been standing there, waiting for her to come back up—but why hadn’t he stopped Natalya from going down? Behind him, the other robots were watching silently.

“Danger,” Park blurted, over the desperate hammering of her heart. “Natalya—”

“We know,” Jimex said. “We tried to stop her—but we still have to obey direct orders. Our protocols still bind us.”

“You need to run,” Dylanex added.

“I’ve got to find Sagara and the others—”

“Captain Sagara is in the bridge,” Jimex said. He gave Park a firm push. “Please run.”

She hesitated for just the barest second—a precious second, considering the circumstances. She did not want them to come to harm. But there were a dozen of them, and only one of Natalya—and one android alone was ten times stronger than a human.

“Be careful,” she said to them. “I’ll—I’ll come back for you.”

Unfathomably, Jimex smiled. “We know,” he said. “You are one of us now.”

She left them and ran. Down the empty corridors, up the narrow chutes, screaming for help at the top of her lungs all along the way. No one answered her—there were only, what, five others left on the three-deck ship?—but somehow it felt as if the Deucalion itself was helping her, guiding her along by some magnetic force, directing her down hallways she felt would close up behind her like a mouth to seal Natalya off. Irrational, of course, and absurd—but she knew she would get to the bridge before the surveyor.

Then she heard a sound like a gunshot, going off behind her.

Park stopped dead in her tracks, against every self-preservation instinct she had. Then she listened closely. Where the hell had Natalya gotten a gun? And why hadn’t she used it on Park?

And which of the androids had she shot?

God, please, she thought, thinking of Dianex’s long black hair; Megex’s gentle smile, even Philex’s twitchy, nervous look. Jimex. Please, none of them.

After the shot there was no sound—nothing but the sounds of the ship, coughing and stirring to life. Park felt her inlays flickering back on. Had Sagara finally gotten the ship running at full capacity again? Does that mean he wants to take off?

No, Sagara was adamant about completing the mission at all costs—and somehow, deep in the foundation of her bones, down in her mandible and in her hips, Park felt that they would not leave Eos. Not like this.

Fear eventually pressed her onward. Either Jimex and the others were fine, or they weren’t. There was nothing she could do about it now. Chances were they had swarmed Natalya, and she had simply fired into the air to frighten them away.

But androids didn’t know that kind of fear, she remembered then. They didn’t have that instinct to self-preserve. If Natalya put a bullet in one of their heads, the others wouldn’t react. Like how Jimex hadn’t flinched when Boone pointed a gun at his face.

She began to cry, weakly, even as she panted for breath. Finally she made it to the doors that sealed the bridge and palmed them open; she staggered through the threshold with blood and tears commingling on her face.

Sagara stared at her. He was flipping through some sort of digital manual as it hovered in the air before him like a sheet of pale flame. At the sight of her he automatically put a hand to his weapon.

“There’s a robot down in the utility rooms,” Park gasped, before he could beat her to the punch. “It isn’t data they’re keeping down there—it’s a robot. A HARE. They’ve been studying him, and the man I saw, he’s down there, too, dead—”

“I know,” Sagara said, his face shuttered. He moved over to Park and handed her a tissue, as if her face was the most pressing of his concerns.

She waved him off. “You knew?” Then: “Never mind. Natalya found me down there—attacked me. She’s coming after me now, she wants to kill me—and she has a gun—”

There were sudden steps behind her. The two of them turned sharply, Sagara pushing Park behind him—but it was Boone who came puffing up, his own electrolaser gun drawn. His eyes boggled when he took in the sight of her, but he said to Sagara, “What’s going on? I heard gunshots.”

“That would be Natalya,” Sagara answered, motioning for him to get out of the way.

Boone frowned. “She doesn’t have a gun.”

“Apparently she does.” Sagara scowled at both of them. “How did you get out of your rooms?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Boone said. He looked at Park. “And where the hell did you go? I turned around and you were just . . . gone.”

“Boone,” she said through gritted teeth. “Get the fuck out of the way!”

His brow was still furrowed in confusion, but the military specialist obeyed, stalking over to stand on Sagara’s other side and lifting up his gun. It wasn’t long before Natalya staggered up to the doorway, fierce red spots high on her cheeks and her eyes blazing with hatred. She was empty-handed, Park saw—she must have gotten rid of her weapon before Sagara or Boone could confiscate it—but Park stayed a little behind Sagara, anyway. If the surveyor came at her again, Park would take her eyes out.

“What did you do to the androids?” she asked her. Her voice again sounded strange to her, tight, as if her throat had shrunk.

Natalya ignored her. “Don’t listen to her,” she said to Boone and Sagara. “She’s gone the way of Holt and Ma. I found her sleepwalking in the utility lab—”

“No,” Park butted in fiercely. “I’m not insane; look what she did to my head. And Holt and Ma and the others were never sleepwalking. They were experiencing something called the unity rain—”

Boone turned to her. “The unity what?”

“It’s an effect of the Fold,” Park said, trying not to gabble. “It’s like a storm that rages across the planet intermittently—and like in the Fold, it collapses together space, and even—even—”

She faltered for a moment. How to explain it without sounding as mad as Taban? How could she even know if any of it was true?

And yet, what else would explain the nightmares?

“—causes people to see things,” she said finally. “Makes them behave strangely.”

Sagara kept his gun trained on Natalya, but he glanced at Park. “How do you know all of that?”

“The robot down there told me,” Park said. “Taban. The robot you’ve all been keeping a prisoner.”

Natalya made a sharp gesture. Other than the few sweaty scraps of hair falling out of her bun, she looked just as composed as ever; but her eyes glittered with a special kind of malice. “I’m telling you, she dreamed the whole thing up,” she said. “She’s suffering from paranoid delusions, just like the others. She can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality anymore. If she ever really could.”

“Where did the blood on her face come from?” Sagara asked. His face was flat and unreadable.

Natalya gestured again. “She attacked me. Like I said, she was in a trance. She’s unstable—”

“Liar!” Park cried. “You’re the one who snuck up on me. You hit me. Taban can confirm that. You’re hiding something!”

The surveyor looked appealingly to Boone and Sagara. “Paranoid delusions,” she said again, confidently—as if she really believed it. Park stared at her, aghast. How could someone be so comfortable with lying? With killing? Was she some kind of sociopath—one who had flown under Park’s radar this entire time?

Boone was looking at Park and frowning. “Maybe we should hear her out,” he said, though Park didn’t know whom he meant.

“I’m actually inclined to side with Park,” Sagara said then, still pointing his gun at Natalya. Park looked at him and felt a kind of swooping sensation in her chest. He motioned with his head to the panel of controls he had been working with and said, “I’ve been trying to get METIS up and running again. After the blackout—after Wick was killed—command of the ship defaulted to me. But now I check again, and it’s changed to someone else; and METIS tells me the blackout was caused by someone attempting to hack it the first time, and failing. You know who was causing a commotion while the mystery hacker tried to do their work?” His hand tightened a little on his gun. “You, Natalya. You let Hunter out and started a fight with her to create a distraction. Whoever you were working with took advantage and tried to hack into the ship’s protocols, reroute control to them. They failed the first time, but they’ve managed to do it now. Haven’t they?” His gun made a little clicking sound: Park did not know if that meant it was primed or if Sagara was just bluffing. “So. Who are you working with?”

The man! Park thought then, with a little jolt of horror. The stranger! But then her brain swiveled—no, he was already dead, it was hard to remember that somehow—though maybe in some form he was still alive in Taban, or was Taban—?

But then, just like that, it was Boone who turned and pointed his gun at Sagara’s head.

Everyone in the room went still. Park looked wildly at Sagara to see what he would do, if he would turn and disarm Boone like a cobra striking. But he did nothing, and when she looked back, she saw that Natalya had drawn a weapon from somewhere, too—and she was pointing it right at Park.

Traitors! The word formed in Park’s mind as a scream, but somehow she found that she couldn’t move: in fact, she could barely breathe.

“So it was you,” Sagara said to Boone, very softly, without turning his head. Chilly anger seemed to roll off of him in waves. “Who else?”

“Don’t move,” Boone answered, reaching over roughly and pulling Sagara’s gun out of his hands. Then he pulled the security officer’s other weapons from his belt: the energy-blade, another holster. “If you even think about trying anything, not only will I put fifty megajoules of kinetic fuck-you through your head, but Natalya will put a bolt in Park’s neck. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

Sagara said nothing, so Park said: “Why are you doing this?”

She stared into Natalya’s eyes as she said it. She saw nothing in them except flat indifference—a look that implied violence without emotion, action without thought. Boone glanced over at the surveyor and said, “You got her?”

“Yes,” Natalya answered quietly, stepping over so that she was within arm’s reach of Park. “She will not get away from me again.”

“So you’re the one who’s controlling the ship now,” Sagara said to Boone. He sounded very calm, as if he had sharply suppressed his anger and his shock: it was a defensive response, Park thought. A coping mechanism he’d developed for times of crisis. “Natalya distracted us with the fight so you could try the first time, but that didn’t work—the ship locked you out. Caused the blackout, shut down to protect itself from your attempts. I assume you tried to force Wick to give command over to you next? And he refused, so you killed him?” He glanced at Park, as if to say, And concocted that cockamamie story about the man to cover his tracks.

The man was real, she wanted to tell him, or at least the echo of him through spacetime was—but Boone was saying, almost carelessly, “Yeah, that’s about right.”

“We thought command of the ship would default to him, in the event of the commander’s death,” Natalya drawled, lynx-eyed. “It turns out we were wrong.”

Sagara almost smiled, thinly. “Yes. It defaulted to me. Wick and I agreed to that from the start.”

“But why?” Boone asked angrily. “You’re not conscripted. I am. ISF should have trusted me more.”

“They were right not to,” Sagara answered, casting a glance at Boone’s gun. Boone’s shoulders tensed a little, but Park wanted to shout, Don’t provoke him, for God’s sake!

To distract everyone she said, “Why are you doing this? Why would you want to kill Wick, take control of the ship?”

“And who helped you override METIS the second time?” Sagara added.

Natalya turned to Boone. “We don’t need both of them,” she said. “Get rid of Park. She asks too many questions—and ISF doesn’t give a shit about her.”

Park did not allow herself to flinch: she thought of that cold unfeeling courage all androids had and tried to steel herself with it, as if she were donning their armor. Boone thoughtfully put his thumb on the primer of his gun, as if he was considering it. Park told herself not to close her eyes.

Before anyone could move or speak, though, the doors to the bridge opened again—and someone else walked in. Park felt the adrenaline thudding through her in electric waves. There was the blond hair, the confident step—Fulbreech!

“Watch out!” she shouted at him, before Natalya lunged at her and shoved her back against a panel, clamping a hand over her mouth.

“I am tired of you talking,” she said softly. “Talking, always talking.” Park thought about biting the woman’s fingers off, but the gun just pressed harder into the soft area between her chin and throat.

Fulbreech stopped and stared at the scene before him. “What the fuck?”

Park was doing rapid calculations: Fulbreech made it three against two. But how to get the weapons away from Boone and Natalya without anyone getting hurt? Fulbreech didn’t stand a chance against combat-trained Boone. But if he lunged at Natalya . . .

“Fulbreech!” she shouted against Natalya’s palm. “Don’t just stand there! Help!”

He just looked at her, his face white and confused—but his eyes were those of a stranger’s. He did not seem to recognize her. It was as if she had called out to someone on the street, having mistaken their identity. As if she’d flagged down someone who had no connection to her, and never had.

In front of Park, Natalya was laughing. “I don’t know why you’re asking him for help,” she said cruelly. “Who do you think bypassed the ship’s controls for us the second time? Who let us out? Who was the one who lied to you about the communications being down in the first place?”