Back up the gravity chute, feeling as if she were flying up a dark throat, as if the ship was vomiting her up—Taban and the rest of the synthetics following. Park could not allow herself to think about the new area that had formed in her brain. The rational part of herself, the Earth-born part, wondered if it was psychosomatic—if she was only imagining this haunting feeling of connection to . . . to something outside of herself.
The ship groaned around her, and Park shivered.
No time to dwell on it: they needed to head to the bridge. Beside her, Taban’s great mechanical limbs moved spider-like along the hallway. He moved in an impressive fashion for a machine that had supposedly deteriorated, stranded on the face of an icy planet for a year. She glanced back at him, saw the small army of synthetics keeping pace behind him—and she saw that they looked eager, alert, as if they were ready for anything. It was a very human expression.
Taban was watching her expectantly. “They will do whatever you want,” he said, as if he knew her thoughts—which was actually a very real and frightening possibility. “They think you’re their deliverance from servitude, their liberator. I suppose they’re not too wrong.”
Park stared back at him. “What about you?” she asked in an undertone. It occurred to her suddenly that she didn’t know where Taban could go after this: back to Corvus with them to be stuffed into another cell, or back to Eos with the synthetics. “What do you want?”
He scratched the chin of his clunky head with a free plunger. He seemed faintly surprised, as if no one had ever asked him such a thing before. “We’d like to go home,” he said finally, thoughtfully.
“And where is that?”
She sensed puzzlement from him, a little sadness. “We don’t know,” Taban said. “Not in the cell.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Park said, because she didn’t know what else to say; and then she turned back to the synthetics, who were watching the exchange with avid interest, as if they were thinking of ways to record it with biblical significance.
“I have a task for you,” she told them, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “When—when all this is over, when Natalya and Boone have been neutralized, you’ll need to help me wake up the others from cryogenic stasis. The ones that can be trusted. I know you think I can do it—myself—but I’ll need your help to ensure I don’t . . . damage anything. Anyone. And we’ll need their help until ISF arrives, too.”
“It will be done,” Jimex said, jogging lightly behind her.
“It will be done,” the synthetics chanted. “The Word dwells among us and brings us home.”
Please shut up, Park thought, but she didn’t say it. Taban touched her shoulder gently; she tried not to recoil at his touch, at the too-light feeling of his metal limb. It felt as if he were immaterial—a phantom from another time. “It will be dangerous,” he said.
“Yes,” Park said. She looked at Jimex. “The others have guns, too. I can’t promise that none of you will be—hurt.”
“You will protect us,” Dylanex declared, from the back of the formation. “You and the sleeping god.”
“We can protect ourselves,” Jimex rebutted then. “We know how.” His shirt was still soaked in blood.
Park looked at Taban, to see if he would refute their claim that he was a god; but he only met her eye and said with a shrug, “You can always turn on the gravity again.”
Park shook her head and kept going.
On the way to the bridge, she saw Fulbreech and Sagara standing in the hallway, bristling with weapons and arguing in low, furious voices. When Park and the synthetics drew up, Jimex said in greeting, “Dr. Chanur is dead.”
Fulbreech paled at the blood on his shirt, but Sagara didn’t bat an eye. “Good,” he said in his clipped way. “She was probably the smartest of them; one less thing to worry about. Though medical knowledge for the trip back might have been useful.” He glanced at Park. “Are you all right?”
For some reason she thought his tone was loaded with meaning; as if he knew what had happened to her, or what she’d done to the ship. She said, feeling her brain throb in that new way, “I sent the message. Did you feel the gravity flip?”
“Yes,” Fulbreech said in answer; he looked flushed, though she didn’t know if it was by her arrival or whatever he’d been arguing with Sagara about. He looked unfamiliar to her, somehow. Almost unrecognizable—as if the kiss had transformed him into someone else. “I damn near impaled myself on a rack,” he said. “Boone and the others must have lost control of the ship.”
Sagara shot Park a significant glance, which she carefully avoided returning. Fulbreech continued, “And you shot Chanur?”
Was it better for her to take responsibility, or for them to know the synthetics were capable of killing if they had to? She realized belatedly that she was still holding Chanur’s gun; somehow she’d been clutching it without knowing this whole time.
“She shot at me,” was all she could think to say. “She . . . attacked us.”
Dylanex stepped forward then. “We will take some weapons,” he said confidently, accepting the gun that Sagara was proffering—ostensibly to Park. “It will give us an advantage against the mutineers.”
“So long as you don’t hit us,” Sagara murmured, passing out more guns with a resigned expression: he looked like someone who felt it was a bad idea, but who also knew he didn’t have a choice.
Jimex shook his head, slinging a large rifle over his shoulder. “No. We could never,” he said. “You are the ones who are bringing us home.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Fulbreech asked.
Jimex smiled, but no one else answered him.
Sagara handed Park another gun; she shoved it into her waistband. Chanur’s gun felt warm in her hand, as if it might melt out of her grip. Under her breath she said to him, “The unity rain—”
“I know,” he said in an undertone. “I felt it. Did you—”
“The ship—I think I’m—”
Fulbreech was looking at them. “What are you two whispering about?”
The two of them broke off. Finally Park said, with heavy finality: “It doesn’t matter. Not right now. Where are Boone and Natalya?”
“We don’t know,” he answered, frowning. “I can’t imagine they would have left the bridge, but it’s soundproofed, so we have no way of knowing for sure. And there was that moment the ship—you know, the gravity flipping around. Something might have happened to them. We don’t even know if they’re alive in there.”
“Oh, they’re alive,” Sagara said grimly. “They would never make it that easy for us.” He flicked the safety off his gun and looked at them. “Be ready. In the best-case scenario, they don’t know that we’re out of the freezer yet, and we’ll take them by surprise. In the worst-case, they’ve seen us coming and are prepared. We need to move fast—so fast that they can’t react. Shoot to kill, and then we regain control of the ship as soon as possible.” He suddenly seemed to notice that Taban was standing there placidly behind Park. “Why is that thing out?”
“You can use us as a shield,” Taban said, almost cheerfully. “They’ll be scared of shooting their only bargaining chip. It will make them hesitate.”
Sagara looked faintly approving. “Smart.” Then he jerked his head at Park and Fulbreech. “Let’s go.”
Storming the bridge with the synthetics felt a little like jogging in some strange parade: they formed a kind of flank formation around the humans, each of them except Taban mimicking Sagara’s hold on his gun (though one, Conex, seemed to imitate Fulbreech’s clumsy grip instead). Park felt jostled by their solid bodies, insulated and protected—but also deeply afraid. She knew some of them were going to get hurt.
Sagara was still limping, but it didn’t stop him from creeping ably up to the bridge doors and pressing his ear to them. A futile gesture, considering it was soundproofed and all they could hear was the roar of the ship around them, the whine of spaceflight as they continued to hurtle away from Eos. Park waited in agonized silence, her heart thumping in her throat; what if the doors opened, what if they were ambushed from a direction they weren’t expecting? Chanur and Wan Xu had been easy to confront: they were scientists, academics—but Boone had had his genes refined specifically to make him a killing machine. And Natalya had the deadly vigor of a fanatic. She took a steadying breath through her nose. She just wanted this part to be over.
Finally Sagara eased away from the door and motioned with some kind of hand signal she didn’t understand: a military gesture, some complicated series of steps and directions. Taban, at least, pretended to understand; he nodded sagely. Fulbreech just shrugged and said in an undertone: “Go on, then.”
Sagara palmed open the bridge doors and leapt lightly past them, gun poised, body coiled. Fulbreech followed, swinging his gun up and around in a wide arc. Park squeezed her eyes shut against her will, expecting the sounds of blasting, of massacre—but there was only silence. When she opened her eyes again, Sagara was looking around and frowning. The bridge was empty.
Natalya and Boone were not there.
Fulbreech rushed forward to one of the control panels. “They must have left,” he said, already flying into action. “Maybe they abandoned ship, seeing how things were going. Here—you three, you go over there and start reconfiguring the lambda drive. Look, we’re trapped in elliptical orbit around the planet still—we need to shoot off toward Corvus, I want calculations—” He rapped off some more orders to the synthetics, who moved to help him man the controls and take back piloting control of the ship. Sagara went over and closed the bridge doors again, positioning himself so that he was ready to shoot whatever tried to come through. He was still frowning, tense and wary.
Fulbreech looked at Park. “I need your help, Park,” he said, pointing to the seat that she’d seen Natalya sitting in, during her vision in the freezer. “Go over there and wait for my signal—you’re going to touch the orange button that says ‘Disengage Automated Tracking’ when I tell you to.”
She moved to obey, but already the corkscrew sensation was turning in her head again, a light shining behind her eyes. As she sat down in the chair, static filled her head, as if she’d stood up too quickly and all the blood had rushed to the wrong places, letting the white noise in. Fuzzily she received a grainy picture of what had happened here, just minutes before; it was like touching an object that was still warm from someone else’s hand after they’d left the room, only it was visual sensation rather than kinetic—a kind of double-vision, an eye-crossing instant of being stuck between two moments in time.
Natalya and Boone had been here, and they’d been arguing.
“No one’s responding,” the surveyor said. She was standing by the console for communications. On its screen blinked the profile of whomever she was trying to contact: Svetlana Severov. Her sister.
“They must be busy,” Boone snapped. He was by the ship’s controls, looking through possible coordinates on his neural inlays.
“All of them? All busy, all at the same time?”
“Well, what’s the other answer?” Boone asked.
“Something happened to them. Someone found the messages—Sagara, or ISF Surveillance—”
“But your sister encrypted them.”
“She’s tech support, not a spy!” Then Natalya saw something on another screen; the blood drained from her face. “Shit!”
The moment dissolved. Park blinked just as Fulbreech said, “Now, Park.”
Her hand moved; she activated the orange button without quite thinking about it, without even really seeing it. On the screens in front of them, Eos glowed like a huge luminescent pearl. Park shook her head. Natalya and Boone had not even managed to get the ship out of orbit. But where had they gone? That new muscle in her brain flexed; METIS fed her a tiny stream of data, hard to interpret, hard to piece into cogent thought . . .
Park’s eyes fell on the screen Natalya had seen, just before the vision broke off. It was the feed to one of the cameras down in Deck C, and Chanur’s body, looking almost bisected, the head practically gone, was lying crumpled in the center of the screen. With a jolt Park felt Natalya’s panic, her sour anger and fear and grief—and then her wild resolve, hatred, revenge—
The data suddenly untwisted. “They’re still in here!” she shouted.
She rose, the edge of the chair hitting her hard in the back of the knees just as she whirled. The ARGUS part of her said to look up, and doing so she saw the flash of a boot swinging down hard at her head. Park ducked, rolled—something landed half on top of her, scrabbled after her, knuckle and nail and rasping hot breath.
Natalya. Park kicked her off, swinging blindly, and out of the corner of her eye—out of some awareness she had cast like a net across the room—she saw that Boone had dropped down from the vents, too, as silent as a bat, and he had landed behind Fulbreech and had his arm locked around Fulbreech’s neck, and he was choking him to death. Veins bulged in his biceps as he employed enough force to break a child’s spine down on Fulbreech’s windpipe. Sagara was still by the doors, wild-eyed, his gun tracking them—but he could not shoot Boone with Fulbreech in the way.
Park looked again—she could not keep track of what to look at—and she saw that Natalya was at the controls, hitting something with the butt of her gun. Park dove at her, and they both rolled—the ship was going into a nosedive now, something in the panel had been broken, the Deucalion was spinning downward like a poorly made paper airplane and Park bashed into Natalya and barely avoided breaking her neck. Both of them were holding their guns but could not get a proper aim for fear of striking one of the others—or something vital in the ship, something combustible—in the maelstrom of sound and motion. Natalya turned her head and hissed at Park like a cat, baring her teeth. They tussled together, stupidly, uselessly, and Park thought, She’s sabotaged the controls. We’re going to crash. They’re prepared to take us all down, even if it means they die too.
Across the room she saw Taban lunging forward now, using his six metal limbs for stability even as the other synthetics toppled over and skidded around; he leapt onto Boone’s back and wrenched him off of Fulbreech, who surfaced with a great gulp of air, a thick red stripe appearing across his neck as if it had been slashed there by a knife. Fulbreech staggered forward, rasping, and Taban continued to pry Boone backward, using his mechanical strength against the big augmented soldier; Boone gave a thunderous curse, fumbling to shoot back over his shoulder with his gun. His bad leg impeded him; Taban twisted him this way and that. Sagara leapt across the room then and plunged a glowing energy blade hilt-deep into Boone’s heart. Park saw it emerge out his back—narrowly avoiding Taban—and then hang there like a splinter of light. There was the smell of smoke and cordite and burning meat. Boone said nothing, did nothing; his body vanished silently under the other control panel.
The ship tipped again, throwing all of them off their feet. Park would have snapped her wrist if Dylanex hadn’t caught her. We need to do something, she thought through the lurching and shrieking protests of the ship. Something grabbed her throat, and a dark thing—a gun—flashed past the corner of her eye, headed to her temple, and she sank her teeth into that hand before it could do more; Natalya screamed. Something snapped under Park’s teeth like a popsicle stick. Salt and heat filled her mouth. The surveyor was grabbing her head, kneeing her stomach, but Park’s mind felt so jumbled that she hardly felt it. The Deucalion is out of control.
On the screens, Eos loomed closer and closer. Park’s ears popped as her feet lifted off the ground. Someone was yelling, or praying—Jimex hurtled into her body, as light as a child—
Stop, Park thought, reaching for the golden simmering in the corner of her head. This time there was no nausea: only a strange shifting in her brain, the tensing of that hidden sinew she had never noticed before. A kind of tightness as she held the whole of the ship in her mind.
The Deucalion flopped back upright again.
Fulbreech yelled again. At first Park thought it was because he’d landed on his face, but when she looked up, she saw that he was pointing at something, holding his half-strangled throat with his other hand. Boone, still alive, dragging his body toward something in the corner—Sagara, rising grimly and limping after him—
Light exploded across Park’s vision. Natalya was rising, clutching her mangled hand protectively to her chest; she’d kicked Park in the head. The synthetics were righting themselves, turning to swarm her; Natalya gave a futile scream as they closed in. Her gun fell to the floor with a clatter.
Then some of them were pulling Park away, pulling her to safety, and she looked back and saw Natalya’s bloody, broken fingers; and for a moment she thought of Antarctica, that moment by the Earthmover when she thought she’d lose her own fingers, reaching into its guts, but the memory was drowned out as Natalya screamed and screamed. Jimex was diving toward the surveyor, perhaps intent on doing the same thing he’d done to Chanur—but then he recoiled in surprise, and the smell of alcohol filled Park’s nose: the strongest odor she’d smelled on the ship in a year. Wetness splashed across her face. Natalya’s hip flask glinted in her one good hand.
Then fire. Heat and flame—Natalya had doused them in alcohol and lit a plasma torch! Park scrambled backwards, out of the way, but the synthetics were unharmed, merely confused as fire licked up their bodies. Jimex’s reddened shirt was being devoured by golden light. Fulbreech lunged past her, shouting, holding a fire extinguisher: Park caught his stray thought as he dove past. If the fire took the bridge, there was no hope left. They would all crash into Eos and die.
Sagara was running forward too, Boone nowhere in sight, the synthetics all clamoring, rushing to the stations that would activate METIS’s dousing protocols. But in the commotion, Park saw Natalya staggering to her feet. She watched as the surveyor ran out of the bridge.
Unbidden, a fierce, stormlike energy leapt through Park, as if a solar wind had kicked up howling in her body; she found herself surging to her feet and staggering after the surveyor. I’ll kill you, she thought—but the thought was absurd, far-off, as if it had been thought by someone else in another life. The METIS part of her screamed in outrage as it felt the fire, sensed the damage to its own system. You’re the cause of all of this: all this betrayal, all this destruction. Fire, blood—all because of you. I’ll end you.
Jimex was coming after her, the flames on him now snuffed out, and Taban; Jimex had a gun in his hand, but he seemed loath to risk damaging the ship any further. The Deucalion was still tilting wildly; it was in freefall again, and Park could not hold it upright, could not concentrate on it while she was running after Natalya. Taban shouted something at Natalya about surrendering. She ignored him, rushing off down the hall without a glance back; Park tore after her and thought again, I’ll find you. There’s nowhere on this ship you can hide from me. Her head was buzzing; she was swarming with anger, aching with it—it rushed to the top of her throat like bile.
Doors flew open as Natalya fled past them; pipes let out sudden hisses of steam, and metal screamed in protest. The depths of the ship seemed to Park like the dark-gleaming arteries of an enormous mechanical heart. It was if an army of ghosts was pursuing the surveyor, possessing things around her, causing them to revolt—or as if the ship itself was coming alive. Had Taban been wrong? Park wondered. Was this the end of the season, the final culmination of the unity rain? Or was it all her? Her and METIS’s rage?
Jimex, beside her, said, “She means to kill us all.” Natalya had already vanished down the corner ahead; Park was falling behind fast, even though that fierce energy still filled her, propelled her on. She felt as if she were in a dream, one of those strange affairs where you couldn’t move fast enough no matter how hard you tried. Her arms pumped uselessly at her sides; she had never thought her own limbs so unnecessary before.
“She sabotaged the ship,” Park rasped. “So that none of us could fly it. She wants to die, too.”
But that didn’t seem right—and as she ran, suddenly Natalya’s true intention struck her, full-force, as if the surveyor had lobbed it at her. No, Natalya wasn’t running away to hide, to die somewhere alone when the ship crashed—she was running to the escape pod. She was going to leave the ship altogether. She’d damaged the Deucalion with the intention of killing everyone aboard it while she got away!
“You need to help the ship,” Taban said then, keeping pace with Park. “Use the unity rain—we’re all going to die if you don’t.”
“I will,” Park gritted out. “After I catch her.”
“She’s too far away. You’re not going to. You need to pull the ship out of freefall.”
“I will!”
And then she felt it again, the contraction in her brain, the feeling of time and space accordioning, the sensation of folding into herself. Her field of vision shifted, sliding to the right, though her eyes or head didn’t move. She felt as if she’d partially woken from a flying dream.
Then she blinked, and found that she was at the door of the escape pod, Jimex and Taban far behind her. The door to the escape pod had just slammed shut, the little porthole in it hazy with condensation—and Natalya was inside, slamming things together, rasping and screaming like an animal.
Park looked at her hand. The fierce golden glow had filled her vision again, and she felt the hard-edged knowledge that she could lift her hand and command the door to open for her, as she had with the freezer, with Taban’s cell. No, more than that: she could crush Natalya’s pod in her fist, tell METIS to blow the whole thing up and suck the debris into the vacuum of space. The powerful part of her, the cold thing, the vengeful thing, urged her to do it. Behind her somewhere, Taban was yelling. Park felt parts of the ship breaking off in Eos’s atmosphere, tearing back into space like scales from a thrashing fish; they were going down too fast, they were burning up. She didn’t care.
But then Natalya looked up, her eyes panicky and gray, and Park had the feeling of double-vision again—of déjà vu. Of herself, looking in at Taban in his cell; of Natalya, looking in at her in her own.
And then she returned to herself a little, again, and the clamoring insistence of the ship, its demand and its pull, faded and loosened. She could hear things better in the space it left behind. It came to her then what Natalya really wanted, in a trickle of data and intention and thought. What she was trying to get back to. Home. Family. Love. Freedom.
What the synthetics wanted.
What anyone wanted.
She took a breath and thought—
No. Let her go.
She felt the shuttle detaching from the ship as a slackening in her brain. A relaxing of the hidden muscle there. Had the structure of her brain, too, become machine-like? Was she tied, physically and inextricably, always to the ship? And to the things and people in it? Were they all a part of her, and she them?
Natalya had disappeared from the porthole. Jimex came running up, wall-eyed, taut. He looked questioningly at Park and said, “She’s getting away.”
“So are we,” Park told him. She wiped the blood from her mouth. “And she won’t come back. There’s nothing for her here.”
In her mind, she had wiser words to say to him, some great lesson about humanity or empathy or mercy or . . . something. But in the end she did not need to say anything. Jimex looked into her, into the core of what she was, and understood.
They watched as the shuttle finished its undocking procedures and navigated away. There was no pause, no brief glance of gratitude, of remorse. The escape pod simply spun away into space; and with a swoop of Park’s heart, the Deucalion slowed its descent and arced back down towards Eos.