The floor buzzed underneath her feet, the reassuring vibrations of the thrusters carrying them toward CDAS. Not that their destination was at all a pleasant thought, but she preferred movement to the idle, sitting-duck feeling of drifting through space. This was their plan coming to fruition, she reminded herself, even if it didn’t look the way they had originally imagined. With her AR synced to Edison’s, she could keep tabs on the flight time and ETA. At their current level of fuel dedication and speed, they would reach CDAS in approximately forty-eight hours. Two days. A lot could change in two days. She only hoped Edison and Misato could hold on, that she wouldn’t run out of filters, and that the Foxfire wouldn’t find new and scarier ways to sway their minds.

She had started filling the time as best she could, trying to make herself useful, finding small comfort in dreaming up a solution to the Foxfire still gripping Misato and Edison. A dream it would remain unless she could get her hands on the kind of lab she had used on Earth. Engineering implantable chips was her forte, and in theory, she didn’t see why the same technology couldn’t work to combat the spread of Foxfire. Without proper tools, she could only sketch and plan so far, but it was something. Something.

A stupid, errant thought entered her head as she called up the schematic and navigated back to the spare storage room Edison had made into his bunker. The stupid thought was this, that maybe she was part of the solution to that precarious forty-eight hours. She was, after all, the only uninfected member of this ragtag crew. Maybe the untouched nature of her humanity was a weapon of sorts, something to use when the call of the Foxfire grew too irresistible. That was easy, in a way, because she liked Misato, and she liked Edison, too. It had shocked her, how cold it felt to be faced with his death, and how much relief she felt to find that he and Misato were relatively unscathed.

Relatively. There was no telling what was happening on the inside, Rosalyn reminded herself, a fact that she would need to pin on her task bar just in case the whiskey stirred up dangerous thoughts.

When she reached the storage area, she was surprised to find no sign of Edison. There was even less sign of Foxfire. She noted little traces of dirt on the floor, flecks of something grayish, but he had managed to scrape the ceiling and bunk area clean. An extendable sweeper and an automated cleaning drone sat just inside the open doors. The growth of Foxfire along the ceiling crept up to those doors but went no farther. Whether it was symbolic or practical, it made her feel more welcome. Safer.

Rosalyn poked her head inside, peering around. Nobody.

“Hello?” she called. “I’m here for the whiskey party?”

Nothing.