I choked back a sudden laugh, although there was nothing funny about it. A trick. An infiltrator. It was a ridiculous idea. She was a postgraduate student. The names and backgrounds of all the Leung fellows were public knowledge. There was no way she could be SPEC—but I knew nothing about her, nothing about her background. If her fear had been an act, it was a convincing one. She was not the one I had expected to try to flee.

My heart thumping rapidly, I looked around again.

There were no side rooms. There were no floor or ceiling hatches. The door to the corridor was on one side. The door to the computer core was on the other—closed now.

We had not checked if it was locked.

Not a trick. A distraction.

“Panya!” I shouted. “Dag! Shut the fuck up!”

The silence was abrupt. I heard the rasp of Malachi’s breathing. I recognized the way he sniffed, inhaled, exhaled, sniffed again.

“They’re gone,” I said. I was going to throw up. I couldn’t breathe. Henke’s blood was forming larger and larger globules in the air.

Panya appeared in the doorway. “What?”

“Quiet,” I said.

There: a sharp breath.

A crackle. A click. Silence. The space suit radios had switched off.

The hostages were gone.

Fragment

[data corruption] keep everybody in our tents, but nobody is saying why [data corruption] only two from the archaeology field team came back. They lost the others in the ruins when [data corruption] I should go see if they need volunteers for the search party. They haven’t even begun to map the complex. They’ll need the aerial data. I keep looking at it, wondering if we could have [data corruption] The medical shelter is all lit up. Nobody’s getting much sleep. We all need sleep. We all [data corruption]

—FRAGMENT 3, MOURNFUL EVENING SONG VIA UC33-X

JAS

Xiomara was yelling through her helmet. She was right behind me, following so close I kicked her twice, but with the radios off her voice was muffled. I looked back only to be certain she and Baqir were following. I didn’t stop.

We had to get far enough from the computing core that our captors couldn’t follow. They were chasing Ariana. I listened to their arguments and accusations long enough to learn they thought she was an embedded SPEC agent, or causing a distraction to help us escape, or any number of other outlandish possibilities, but I knew the truth. I had seen that desperate flailing and scratching before, the frantic shedding of a protective suit, the instantaneous snap from confused to distraught. I had heard those panicked pleas before. The hallucinations always began the same way. There was something inside. There was something moving. The echoes of those cries had never faded from my memory. Ariana was infected.