“I know, Zucchini, you’re doing so well. Let me see you walk.” Droplets of sweat on his forehead catch the light of the headlamp, and his pallor looks as white as his beard. Despite the fear and fatigue she manages to take a few steps, the strange, inflated sleeves crinkling. Father squats and picks up Konstance’s Perambulator, and with his other hand also manages to pick up the aluminum stool from Mother’s sewing table, and carries them to the door.

“Sybil,” he says, “one of us is not feeling well.”

Konstance leans against his hip, hot and frightened, and waits for Sybil to dispute, to argue, to say anything but what she does say.

Someone will be here in a moment.

Konstance can feel the gravity of the SleepDrops pulling at her eyelids, her blood, her thoughts. Father’s wan face. Mother’s unfolded blanket. Jessi Ko saying, And if Sybil detects something wrong with you…

Oxygen at twenty-nine percent, says the hood.

As the door opens, two figures in head-to-toe biohazard suits come clomping down the corridor through the NoLight. They have lights strapped to their wrists and their suits are inflated from within so that they look frighteningly large and their faces are lost behind bronze-mirrored face shields. Behind them trail long hoses wrapped in aluminum tape.

Father rushes them with Konstance’s Perambulator still clutched to his chest and they stagger backward. “Don’t come near. Please. She’s not going to the Infirmary.” He hurries her past them down the unlit corridor, following the quivering beam of her headlamp, her feet sliding in their bioplastic booties.

Things are shored up against the walls: food trays, blankets, what might be bandages. As they hurry past the Commissary, she glances in, but the Commissary is no longer the Commissary. Where tables and benches were arranged in three rows now stand about twenty white tents, tubes and wires running out of each, the lights of medical instruments flickering here and there. In the unzipped mouth of one she glimpses the bare sole of a foot sticking out of a blanket, and then they’re around the corner.

Oxygen at twenty-six percent, says her hood.

Were those sick crew members? Was Mother in one of those tents?

They pass Lavatories 2 and 3, pass the sealed door of Farm 4—her pine sapling in there, six years old now and as tall as she is—curling down corridors toward the center of the Argos, Father breathing hard now as he urges her along, both of them slipping on the floor, the beam of her headlamp lurching. Hydro-Access, reads one door; Compartment 8, reads another, Compartment 7—she feels as though they’re following a spiral toward the center of a vortex, as though she’s being swept toward the hole at the heart of a whirlpool.