It was not Panya or Dag who noticed me first. It was the woman who had killed Henke. The one who had taken his weapon and fled. Ariana.

“What is she doing here?” Malachi said, his voice ringing with the same surprise I felt.

Panya and Dag both turned to face us. Dag was guarding the hostages, his weapon raised.

Panya was seated at a terminal. When she looked up, her expression brightened. “Oh! I am so glad to see you!”

I stared at her in disbelief. “You’re glad to see us?”

“What is she doing here?” Malachi said again, pointing at Ariana. “She’s infected. She can’t be here.”

She didn’t look infected. She looked scared, and a bit angry, but perfectly in control. She no longer had Henke’s gun. She and the other hostages had their backs to a glass wall on the far side of the bridge. Bhattacharya’s friend, Nassar, was badly hurt; his prosthetic arm had been twisted at a horrible angle, and there was blood from his shoulder soaking the collar of his shirt.

Behind the glass wall there were ten, fifteen, twenty corpses, all shoved haphazardly into a room too small to hold them. It was a puzzle-tangle of limbs and faces. I could not bear to look at it. I could not look away.

Panya laughed. “Don’t be so gullible. She was never infected. It was a ruse to help them escape.”

“It wasn’t,” Ariana said. “We’ve already told them. I was infected.”

“We know. We’ve learned more about the virus,” Malachi said.

“We can show you,” I said, aware of the desperate whine in my voice. “There’s a message from one of the scientists. Panya, Dag, please listen. She’s infected. It was in the blood. It’s always been in the blood.”

“She seems fine to me,” Dag said.

“Because we incapacitated the parasite,” Bhattacharya said. “We don’t know if it’s permanent.”

“Convenient, isn’t it?” Panya said. She held up a black weapon—not a gun, but a nonlethal suppression weapon, not something we had brought aboard. “They claim to have used this. But these are all over the ship and they didn’t help anybody before, did they? Come here, Malachi. We need your help.”

“We’re not going to help you,” I said, incredulous. “You tried to kill us!”

Before he could answer, Panya sent the suppression weapon spinning away across the bridge and took her gun from her holster. She pointed it at me. “Zahra, you’re being hysterical. You know that transgressions against the good of the family must be punished. Malachi will turn off the security web so Homestead can approach safely.”

I was so angry I was trembling. “But if they can incapacitate the—did you call it a parasite? Not a virus?”

“They’re talking nonsense,” Dag said. “Don’t listen to them.”