I nodded. “Yeah. There is. But I don’t know if we can even access the system.”

“Where is it?” Baqir asked.

“We have to try,” Xiomara said.

We were close. Somewhere inside, beneath all the scar tissue and denial, I had known we were close. I had explored this route between levels hundreds of times. It had been my playhouse, my secret fort, my territory.

Level 7. Starboard. Room 23. My childhood home. The quarters where my parents had raised me. Where we’d played silly games after dinner, where they’d argued about whether to send me back to Earth for school, where my father taught me to read and my mother gave me broken bits of machinery to take apart. Where we had lived for eight years. Together, a family, and happy, most days.

Where my father had died, and still remained.

•   •   •

The code on the door had never changed. Every time House of Wisdom’s security staff sent around a reminder to change the passcodes on personal quarters, my mother had laughed and said any new combination would slip through my father’s mind like water through a net. There was no need to worry. The ship was safe. Everybody ignored the reminders anyway.

I had not forgotten: 2-9-9-7-9-2-4-5-8. My fingers shook as I tapped it in. 299,792,458 meters per second. The speed of light in a vacuum.

There was no medical quarantine preventing our access. Malachi must have been able to turn it off—and he had turned it off shipwide, not only on the levels they were moving through. He should have been able to trap both us and Ariana wherever he wanted, corral us like animals, but he hadn’t thought to do so.

The door opened. The room was dark. I fumbled for the panel to switch on the lights. They came on dim, more than half the fixtures remaining dark, but at least the glow wasn’t red. The faint hiss of the environmental controls surrounded us: the air was circulating and warming from its stale deep freeze. That was another thing Malachi had claimed he had not been able to fix.

I removed my helmet again, then my gloves, mindful of every surface I touched. There was an arc of blood on the wall beside the closed bathroom door, a smear over the handle, fingerprints smudged across the latch. I remembered lunging for that door, screaming when my mother pulled me away.