Rosalyn couldn’t imagine anything more unnerving than a thousand sizzling voices chanting a child’s rhyme at her, but it kept on, louder and louder, chasing them into the rented lab. Two hallways opened up around a shared wall and desk, and Rosalyn chose the right fork, which seemed less choked with singing vines.

As they went, as the song followed them, Edison squeezed her hand harder and harder, until she couldn’t help but wince.

“Stay with me,” she told him again. “Don’t forget the plan. Misato. Hard drive. Warning. Then we run.”

He grunted, nodded, sweat pouring down his face. It hurt to look at him, to see him struggling against the voices. If it was that bad on the outside, she dreaded to think what he heard in his own mind.

The narrower hall opened up into a familiar sort of space for Rosalyn, a lab similar to the one she had spent countless hours in at Belrose. Even the layout echoed the labs at her old job, a coincidence that worried her more and more as they navigated between the evenly spaced rows of desks, piled with equipment for experimenting and recording. The little pipettes looked the same. The trays. The mugs.

Everything could have been picked up from their labs in Montreal and put down there, on a distant station overrun and destroyed. Rosalyn felt her hand go numb, and then her lips, her oxygen and Edison a distant thought as she raced up the alley between the desks and to where Misato knelt as if praying to the woman seated at a central, lower desk, shimmering and blue, perfectly preserved.

She might have been a statue, still but completely lifelike, a paler blue light emanating from her chest, beating slowly, a bright glow of a pulse. The children’s rhyme filtered through the blue-tinted lab, the vaulted ceiling and kneeling Misato giving it all the strange, cold reverence of a church.

“I . . . I know her,” Rosalyn whispered. Was she hallucinating? Had Foxfire taken her? How was it possible that she knew this woman, the clear, obvious heart of the infestation? The tendrils of blue that grew to overtake the lab and then the station sprang out from her fingertips, spiraling down from the desk to spread and spread.

Edison inched up behind her, then leaned hard against Rosalyn’s shoulder for support.

“She looks just like the woman from my dreams,” he said.