“All right, don’t make me regret this.” Edison let him go, watching the biologist stumble away, his clothes rumpled and still bloody, his thick black hair sticking up in every direction, revealing the grisly wound below. He wondered if they all appeared that haggard and dirty. Human needs, human instincts, had become distant desires, an occasional itch that he was too distracted to scratch. Showers. Food. Contact. It was like the alien thing inside him was slowly setting aside everything that made him a man and discarding it.

“I’m sorry,” Rayan whispered, huddling in the middle of the engineering room with both arms wrapped around his middle. He shivered as if freezing cold, avoiding eye contact.

“Forget it,” Misato said as she hurried to the door panel. “You can apologize later. We locked ourselves inside here, and Piero has access to the cockpit. To JAX. With the Foxfire controlling him like that . . .”

“I know.” Edison pinched the bridge of his nose, wishing fruitlessly for his headache to subside. At least the beast in his head had calmed for the moment. “Not my finest idea.”

Rayan perked up, but his face was streaked with tears. With a few faltering steps toward the door, he raised his hand and closed his eyes. As he did, a crisp, mechanical female voice spoke across the intercom system.

“Emergency broadcast parameters met. Fire damage detected. Foreign matter present in crew-critical quadrants . . .”

“He’s going to send an emergency hail,” Rayan whispered, shaking his head. “He wants to lure more ships here. He wants to expand the cluster.”

19

She woke to a deep slicing sensation in her stomach.

Hunger. When was the last time she had eaten something? Rosalyn blinked in the cool semidarkness. She didn’t recognize where she was at first, and sat up, fast, too fast, her vision spinning from the sudden rush of blood. Whatever she was lying prone on was quite soft and accommodating, padded and slick with some kind of plastic coating. Her eyes adjusted gradually, and she instinctively reached for her face, breathing a sigh of relief when she felt the protective bubble shielding her from the ship’s compromised atmosphere.

“You’re safe, chickadee.”

Rosalyn started, twisting sharply to the right. She hadn’t noticed the small old woman sitting next to her, hands folded around a full white mug. The last crew member, Misato Iwasa. Her AR display fragmented into a few pale squares, forming boundaries around the various parts of her face and body to identify her. One square highlighted her delicate mouth and the mole next to it, another what would have been brightly inquisitive brown eyes. At least, that was what was shown in the dossier picture that popped up in the upper right-hand corner of her display.