There was a high-pitched, whistling shriek, and the sound of pattering footsteps retreating. Indigo returned, impassive, and sat back where he had been earlier.

“Uh, we could play a different game,” I said. I dared a glimpse over my shoulder and didn’t see any tiny corpses huddled on the lower platform, so he’d probably just scared it off. “Maybe… Does anyone have a deck of cards?”

Tamara stirred the bowl on the campstove. “Why would I have a deck of cards?”

“I don’t know. For fun?”

She just gave me an incredulous look. There was such an absolute void of anything whimsical or light in Lantern-Eyes that I suspected she’d never been a child. She’d probably sprung fully formed from a mass of Republican weaponry, wearing a Republican flag. I knew about the Republican officers’ families. They started training their kids early, in their big Terra Novan houses; reciting the anthem every morning and writing essays on how the Republic is the best and most important because they are the only truly free humans in the universe. That was how you got the Senator; that was how you got the Republican ships flying away from Kystrom one bright sunny morning and abandoning us lesser people to our fate.

The bowl was steaming now. Tamara pulled it off the heat and offered it to her right without looking; Indigo took it in silence. The second bowl appeared in front of me. “Eat,” Lantern-Eyes said.

“This is the most boring treasure hunt I’ve ever been on,” I said, taking the bowl and spoon.

“Have you been on very many?” she asked, and I knew a leading question from a cop when I heard one, thank you sir. “This isn’t a fun trip, Sean. Did you expect to come here and have a fun time, and leave a couple billion terraques richer?”

More like I’d been forced here at gunpoint, knowing failure was my death and the death of the only other human alive who had known me before everyone I’d loved had died. “Something like that,” I said. The bowl Lantern-Eyes had handed me was full of a lumpy brown mass that was probably some kind of oatmeal but reminded me, horrifyingly, of the flesh-eating coral I’d seen not so long ago on this very ship.

“Why are you here?” Lantern-Eyes asked.

Definitely a cop starting an interrogation. “Money? And fun.”

“Someone must have given you these coordinates.”

“I heard the SOS,” I said.

“Someone must have pointed you where to look to find the SOS,” Lantern-Eyes said.

“Just got lucky,” I said. Indigo was still staring into space, eating mechanically. “You have anything you want to add, Indigo? You can be good cop.”

“He doesn’t care,” Lantern-Eyes said.

“Maybe he’s sick of your voice,” I suggested, in the weaselly tone that had never failed to piss Brigid off.

“Do you even hear yourself?” she demanded. “What are you talking to me like?”

Indigo set his bowl aside suddenly. “I will take first watch,” he said. “Who would prefer to take second?”