Zahra looked at me for a long moment, her expression hidden by the blinding beam of her headlamp. “Very well. Show us.”

•   •   •

The dead were everywhere.

In my nightmares I had always seen them as they were on the day of the massacre: screaming, clawing at imaginary enemies, flushed with panic, damp with sweat, chins smeared with spittle, and so much blood, all the blood hot and red, every spray and smear creating an obstacle my mother went to great lengths to avoid. When the medical staff stopped making announcements and nobody knew what to do, those who avoided infection quickly determined that blood, not air, was the most likely carrier. With people injuring themselves so savagely, so violently, there was plenty of blood.

All that blood was now dried to dark stains, nearly black in the low red light. The corpses were waxy and pale, shriveled beyond recognition. More than once I felt a shiver of unease, a wash of unreality, that I should be here, again, moving through my nightmares. More than once I closed my eyes and tried to will myself away: to Armstrong City, where we were meant to be been joining a welcoming reception for the Leung fellows; to the Takashi Lunar Telescope array, where I had twenty-six hours of time booked to gaze at the ancient, redshifted blaze of galaxies from billions of years ago; to safety, to light, to anywhere, anywhere at all, but here. The silence around us was complete.

Our passage through the cargo sublevels was slow. Malachi could open some of the doors but not others; his hacking skills, it seemed, were not infallible. At first our captors spoke a lot, arguing about their mission, their plan, the supplies they had lost on the shuttle, the three hundred people heading toward us. They seemed to believe there was a hidden SPEC ship stalking them from the darkness of space, and I could not tell if their fear was valid or delusional. They grew quieter with every corpse we encountered. I wanted to throw my arms wide and shout at them: Is this what you expected? This darkness filled with death, this massive crypt of shriveled and mummified memories, is this what you wanted? Is this the home you imagined for your children? I didn’t ask. I did not care to hear their answers.

As captives we said little. The others followed my example. Henke and Dag kept their weapons in hand, and I was not going to risk angering them. I trusted neither Dag’s calm adherence to a parody of SPEC routine nor Henke’s frustrated snarls. A man who barely reacted to the explosion of a shuttle and the death of his comrades was as bad as one whose reaction swung from delight to rage without obvious cause.