“How did you end up here?” Xiomara asked. “Is this where it was telling you to go?”

Ariana looked quickly toward the window, looked away again, as though something about seeing Earth there, so fragile and far away, was unbearable to her. “I don’t know. I don’t know why it came here. I don’t know why it does anything. There are no reasons. There are only impulses. Impulses I can’t control.”

“But what does it want?” Xiomara said.

“You mean, what do the people who designed it want,” Baqir said. “Isn’t that the real question? Whoever was working with Dr. Lago, or whoever he stole it from, whoever created this thing, they did so for a reason.”

How quickly we had begun referencing the will of this thing we had seen rippling beneath Ariana’s skin. We had shifted from viewing it as a senseless pathogen to speaking of it as a sentient creature with wants and desires of its own. But it was a designed thing. A built thing. A thing created for a purpose. It could slither into a woman’s mind and take away her control of her own body, her language, her will, but it did so because somebody had designed it that way. It was impossible to comprehend, that so much violence, so much blood and fear, could have been in service of a goal, unless that goal was mayhem.

Baqir let out a frustrated breath. “If it’s even supposed to do anything. This could be a test. Dr. Lago could have stolen something unfinished, or something that was supposed to be monitored or controlled. It could be malfunctioning. We don’t know.”

Ariana’s expression was thoughtful. “It was just like . . . you know how when you’re worried about something, something you can’t avoid, and it keeps running through your head over and over again, every single step you take to get there? It was like that. Everything it made me do was like a step toward the end.”

“What was at the end?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Ariana said, but she glanced toward Earth again. “It wasn’t like I was thinking anything. It was just . . . like a fractal, sort of, but it was everywhere around me, and there was this circle near the middle that felt like—I don’t know. It was pulling me in. I can’t explain it. It was—I don’t even remember moving through most of the ship, because that’s the only thing that made sense. Get to the circle. Why the fuck could it control me so easily if I couldn’t even figure out what it wants?”

“It had an advantage,” Baqir said. “Trial and error with hundreds of people.”