“Maybe if you’d just told us…” Matchell said, her heart not in it.

“So who’s at the helm, then?” broke in Dr. Khan. “I thought this was your giant scorpion monster.”

Stig’s eyes swivelled as he continued trying to avoid looking at any of them. “We found others,” he said, but then corrected himself. “They found us. When we had made nuisance enough of ourselves, they came to us. The cold place, that is one you know, but this…”

“A living ship,” Mal put in. “That’s right, isn’t it? A spaceship, maybe?”

“Space, and other things.” Stig shuffled, evasive.

“So who’s captain?”

Lee watched Stig try to form an explanation, and find himself unequal to the task. At last he slumped, and gestured at one of the walls, indistinguishable from the others. “Fine. We’ll go. I’ll show you. Then you’ll know, and you won’t like it. You’ll wish you hadn’t asked.” He scowled like a reprimanded child.

Julian started, “If Pryor’s going then—”

“All of you that want!” Stig threw a hand in Sabreur’s face to forestall the words. “Why not?” And he stomped off towards the wall, moving with enough momentum that Lee expected him to break his nose.

Instead, a seam drew itself from floor to ceiling, with a flurrying, scrabbling bustle of half-seen bodies or limbs. They clawed away the substance of the wall until there was a gap large enough for Stig to step through.

I do hope, she thought timorously, that it is not ants. I do not want to be stuck in a spaceship full of ants. Cryptozoology had its limits. When they passed through the newly moulded portal, however, there was no sign of the door-makers. In retrospect, what she’d seen had seemed more like a multitude of busy fingers than individual creatures, and she wasn’t sure if that was better or worse.

The corridor they stepped into was still being built. Lee had a sudden moment of vertigo, seeing its end recede as if being tunnelled into the hard, shelly substrate by invisible miners. The resulting passageway was ribbed, unpleasantly organic-looking, and shiny wet where it was freshly cut—but drying to a dull sheen within seconds.

“So where’s the crew?” Mal asked.

They were all hanging about the doorway, even the rats, wary of this new space.

Stig just grunted.

“We’re in quarantine or something—they don’t want to share space with us?” she pressed. They were daring the corridor now, skidding and stepping over the awkwardly ridged floor. “Only,” Mal went on, “this making corridors up as needed is grand, but the crew must have their own suite somewhere?”

Stig gave another grunt, hunching his shoulders.

“If we’re going to speak over the phone or something,” Sabreur said gamely, “why get us to walk somewhere?”

“Command node,” Stig muttered into his beard. “Have to be where there’s complex functioning.”