Right now, she was monitoring “local traffic”—the current pipeline the Ice Mind was using to communicate with those around her. It had an automatic algorithm to identify the most efficient breach between timelines, and this would grant it access to wherever or whoever it needed. As those breaches were growing wider and more numerous by the hour, that meant it could channel a lot of information. Much of it was going to the various trilobite ship entities, but Alison knew that the Cousins’ science chief, Murther, was tapping the line for her own communications. She was speaking to the body scientific back home. The rat translator, Ertil, was also maintaining contact with someone through his implant. Probably he didn’t get headaches. Or if he did, they were subsumed into the bigger headaches caused by vastly invasive cybernetic brain surgery.

And then there was Daniel Rove. She hadn’t picked up on him initially, with everything else going on, but she was on to him now. He had his own channel to the Ice Mind, using it to communicate with someone or something back on their Earth. When she’d tried to investigate, she’d met access issues for the first time. It wasn’t that the Ice Mind stood in her way, but someone had more privileges than her and evaded her enquiries effortlessly. Knowing it was someone on Rove’s team, Alison had a good idea who that might be. But there was nothing she could do about it, except keep tabs on Rove. She couldn’t perceive his exact words, but she could chart the rhythm and shape of his activity, and what sort of analyst would she be if she couldn’t make something of that?

She broke the link, bracing herself, and the stab of pain came right on schedule, skewering her frontal lobes. She went to get painkillers from Cam, who seemed to have taken on a good working knowledge of human pharmaceuticals along with everything else. After that, she found Julian talking to Stig, of all people.

She paused a moment, considering how things stood between them. She had thought, earlier, that he was going to finally breach the wall between them. The one they had never spoken about, because to even acknowledge it might bring it down. She had always known she would carefully rebuff any overtures—saving him from hating himself later. And yet, when she had felt him just a breath away, she’d thought, To hell with the consequences. That had shocked her as much as any of the madness they’d been living through.