“I mean it’s confused. When I look at you the voice goes silent, then so loud I can hardly think, but it’s mostly nonsense. Noise. Like when you turn a speaker up too loud and everything crackles around the edges. And when the Foxfire is quiet, I want to trust you, but I know that’s not me feeling that . . . Maybe it’s because you’re the only one outside the cluster, but none of it makes any sense. It’s like I know you.”

“All you need to know about me is that I’ll do whatever it takes to survive,” she shot back. Then, softer: “And you don’t know me.”

“No,” the captain said, blank. “No, I suppose I don’t know you, so why do I feel like she does?”

She let that sink in for a moment, all of what he had said about the voices and the noise, and especially the strange reaction to her in particular. God, if only she could sit down and take some notes, try to piece together the nature of this thing’s biology. All living creatures had an imperative to live and flourish; this was simply Foxfire’s way of doing it, she knew, even if it felt invasive and sinister. Mother Nature was not exactly concerned with warm fuzzies.

“She?” Rosalyn asked.

“It thinks it’s our mother,” the captain said. “We’re her children. I don’t even know if it’s really that sentient or if it just knows humans tend to listen to their mothers. A back door. A way to win our trust.”

She shuddered. “God, this Foxfire stuff, it thinks it can control me just like it’s trying to control you, right? It’s a symbiotic relationship until it has total dominance over a host, so can’t you tell exactly what it wants?” she asked. “We could use that, you know. If you wanted to work with me. If you wanted help. Maybe we could outsmart it somehow.”

“It’s not a two-way street all the time, Rosalyn,” Edison replied. He gestured back and forth, trying to clarify. “It’s like whispers down a hallway. Voices in another room. My guess? She—we—needs your credentials for something. We’ve been locked out of the MSC comm systems and databases. The hail system works but that’s about it. This low on juice, we’re dead in the water out here, especially after we linked up with the Salvager. We’re not even on autopilot toward campus anymore.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Rosalyn replied, shaking her head. “Your credentials shouldn’t get locked out, even if HQ thought you were all dead. There’s a grace period before your access goes dark.”

Edison shrugged. “Maybe they figured us out, maybe they knew something was wrong.”