“You said the virus made everybody violent,” I said to Bhattacharya. “But at this point we’ve seen more corpses who died without wounds than with them.” I had no idea if that was true; I had not been counting. But I didn’t care. He was still lying to us, and I was tired of it. I was tired of opening every door and rounding every corner to discover more lies. “Did these people suffocate too? Like the ones in the garden?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I have no idea.”

“Why didn’t they evacuate? If they were still thinking clearly, why didn’t they escape?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “Maybe they couldn’t.”

“You were here during the outbreak.” I tried to keep my voice calm, to hide the frustration and fear I was feeling, had been feeling since I first came into the ship. “Did you see anybody die like this? Without injuries?”

“No,” he said, but there was a crack in the middle of the word. He was silent for a moment. I wished I could better read his expression behind the faceplate. I could not tell if he was trying to remember or trying to lie. “But I wasn’t here at the end. I didn’t see everything. And . . .”

“What?”

“In her last transmission, Captain Ngahere said there were two stages of the infection. Panic, then calm. So it’s possible, I guess. I don’t know.”

I had listened to Captain Ngahere’s final transmission a hundred times or more, sinking into every fearful hitch in her voice, every pause, every sigh. I had carried the wail of the ship’s medical alarms into my dreams. “She didn’t say that.”

“Yes, she did. In the full transmission, she says that.”

“We’ve heard the full transmission.”

Bhattacharya shook his head. “The one released to the public was incomplete.”

“We’ve heard more than what was made public,” I said. Even as I said it, doubt wormed into my mind. “Malachi. Tell him.”

Malachi glanced up from the workstation. “We know more than the public, yes, but it’s always been possible that we don’t know everything. You know that. I warned Adam.”

Malachi had been clear from the start that if SPEC suspected even for a second that an outside hacker was mining their restricted files, the whole plan would fail. Adam had never been concerned. The coup of discovering the loophole in the security drones was our greatest triumph—that information was so carefully guarded we assumed we had stripped bare all of SPEC’s biggest lies.

But we had not known the true nature of the virus. We may not have known the full extent of Captain Ngahere’s final words. My mind spun with the dizzying possibilities of everything else we might not know.