“You can sense that, huh?” she asked. It would be fascinating if it weren’t so terrifying. That racket didn’t sound friendly. Rayan had to be an anomaly. The rest of the crew would probably murder her on sight if this Foxfire stuff had totally taken control of them. “Or just an educated guess?”

“Bit of both. What are you looking for?”

“This.” Rosalyn stood and turned to face him, brandishing a collapsible fire extinguisher. It wasn’t all that big, but the blast packed a punch, and if she aimed it right, the powder had a chance of blinding an attacker. She sighed and pulled the pieces apart, reassembling them into a functioning extinguisher. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Rayan shaking his head.

“It’s no good,” he whispered fiercely. “If I can see you, so can he. He’ll know what’s coming. When we’re this close to each other, it’s almost like my mind, my eyes, are his.”

She refused to put down the extinguisher, choosing instead to take a few steps toward Rayan. Maybe he could see the wild panic in her eyes, and maybe he could see her chest pumping hard under the suit, but she tried her best to give him a straight look.

“No bullshit,” Rosalyn said, hazarding a hand on his shoulder. “You can help me. We can help each other. Please, you could be my eyes right now. You could help me get out of this. If he can see through you, then the reverse is true, right?”

JAX whirred softly, feet clacking as he took a few steps toward the door and spun to face them. “Manual lock integrity at twenty percent.”

“Rayan . . .” Rosalyn spoke slowly, wincing each time the door was slammed into. “I know a thing or two about xenobiological samples, we used them all the time at my job,” she told him. “I studied it for a long, long time. It was my whole life before I went into salvaging. Maybe we can, I don’t know, figure something out together. If you get me back to the Salvager 6, we could work on this, just you and me. Maybe there’s a way to reverse things, a cure, if you figured out a vaccine—”

“It’s not a vaccine,” Rayan stated flatly. He closed his eyes. “Basically just garlic.”

“What?”

“Manual lock integrity at five percent and failing,” JAX interjected.

Bang, bang, bang.

They both glanced at the shivering door.

“Sulfur compounds,” he went on. “I was trying things on samples, and something about the allicin must be toxic to the spores. An organosulfur compound from Allium sativum. Garlic. It wouldn’t protect someone for forever; they would probably need ongoing injections.”