“We don’t know that,” Xiomara said. “We don’t know anything for sure, which is why we need help. Jas knows how to get us off the ship. And surely SPEC must be getting closer by now.”

But I was thinking about the shape of House of Wisdom. The levels, the laboratories, the corridors and maintenance tunnels. I had once known the schematics by heart. The division of space on every level and the hidden places between. I saw the maintenance tunnels, the vast, breathing breadth of my father’s agricultural labs, the cozy living quarters, the cool distant bay of my mother’s workshop.

There was one large circle in the ship. A bull’s-eye at its heart.

“I think—” I began, and they all looked at me. I cleared my throat. “I think it wanted you to get to the bridge.”

•   •   •

We made our way to the bridge as quickly as we could, checking the location of our captors every few minutes. Before we left the garden they were on Level 8, in the Deep Space Archaeology lab, and by the time we reached Level 10, Panya and Dag were arguing about whether to try to open a locked passage on Level 9 or search for another. We had beat them.

The bridge was as cold as the rest of the ship, but the light was different, the low dormancy red mingling with quick flashes of blue, steady glowing green, pulsing bright white. A faint hum surrounded us.

There was a famous photograph of Captain Ngahere, taken not long after she assumed command of House of Wisdom. In it she was standing on the center of the bridge, right in front of what appeared to be a giant window looking down upon the red face of Mars. She was turned halfway away from the view, shown in profile, her expression pensive. There was nobody else in the frame, although there must have been half a dozen bridge crew just out of sight. She looked to be alone, and quiet, and so very serious. Exactly the sort of person you wanted to be your commander. It wasn’t a true window, that wall-spanning view of Mars behind her. The bridge was at the center of the ship, a protected nerve center well away from the vulnerable hull, and the only views it had to the outside were transmitted via camera and sensor to a series of screens. Even so, the majority of seats and workstations on the open half of the bridge, including the captain’s chair, were oriented in a half circle facing one direction, like an audience in a theater. People always want to feel like they’re moving toward something.