“How did she find us?” Baqir said. He was holding on to both of us now, one hand on my wrist and the other on hers. “If she followed us, they could have too.”

The bathroom door rattled. Ariana turned her head sharply to look directly at the wall. She stared intently for a long moment, as though she could see through the barrier to the noise beyond. Then she moved her hand, the one that wasn’t holding the gun, raised it in front of her body and curled her fingers, grasping at something in the air. She turned her wrist and moved her hand to the side—

I felt a thunderclap of understanding.

She was miming opening the door.

She was doing what the thing in the bathroom would be doing, if its flesh were pliable rather than half-frozen. She pushed the invisible door to the side; the noises from the bathroom echoed her motion. She tilted her head, watching.

“Ari?” Xiomara said, her voice ragged with fear. “Can’t you hear me?”

Ariana’s face was utterly devoid of emotion. It was as though the muscles that lifted smiles and turned frowns and furrowed brows had frozen in place, and there was nothing but a veneer of skin, empty of input from her brain. Her mouth was open and slack.

“Ariana, please, say something. You’re sick, okay? We can help you. We have to.” Xiomara looked at me and Baqir. “Please, she’s not attacking anybody right now. She’s not hurting herself. She’s calm. We can help her.”

The hope in Xiomara’s voice carved a fissure in my chest. Every instinct in my body, every memory I carried, they were telling me to turn and run. Ariana’s stillness would not protect us from terrible, bloody, deadly violence. But those instincts knocked up against the truth of what Xiomara was saying: Ariana was not attacking. She had followed us here. This was, perhaps, the second phase of the virus, the one I had never witnessed. I had only seen them go mad, lash out, harm themselves and others in delusional fits. I had not seen them follow people through a dark ship to float silently, eerily in a corridor. Xiomara might be right. Ariana had passed through the panicked, violent onset of the infection without dying. We might be able to save her.

Then she spoke.

“Vinod, what are you doing with that knife?” Ariana said.

“What?” Xiomara said, startled. “What did she say?”

I could not answer. The blood in my veins had gone cold.

There was no recording of my father’s death. There was no visual or audio surveillance in the personal quarters. There had been no witnesses to my father’s final moments aside from my mother and me.

Ariana spoke again: “Vinod, what are you doing with that knife?”