Perhaps if the strange woman were seated, less threatening, Leah would put that gun away. I pressed down on the woman’s shoulders. She obeyed after a moment of resistance, sinking towards the floor with me. She wore some sort of frayed uniform, extensively patched and unrecognizable. Beneath the rough, sturdy material of her clothes, I could feel surprisingly strong muscles move in her shoulders and upper arms.

The woman had huge pale eyes, lighter than her skin, an almost amber color like the jack-o-lanterns we had lit every year on Kystrom. Those jack-o-lantern eyes looked past me once I was seated, tracking the others in the room.

“You said this place was abandoned,” Leah said; from the tension in her voice I bet she hadn’t lowered her gun.

“It was supposed to be.” Quint’s voice had gone high. “She’s obviously crazy. Shoot her.”

I would expect Leah or Benny to be a little trigger-happy, but I hadn’t seen that coming from office-worker Quint. “Hey, whoa, no! You can’t just shoot her,” I said. “She hasn’t done anything! Maybe she knows something that could help us.”

I turned back to the woman with the jack-o-lantern eyes. “My name is Sean,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“She’s probably some pirate who got stranded here and lost her mind.” Quint started pacing the floor behind me, quick nervous steps. I could track her movement by the angle of the strange woman’s gaze over my shoulder. “Look at her, she’s crazy.”

And yet, Lantern-Eyes didn’t smell like a crazy person. There was no miasma of ill-keeping, like I’d smelled on the sad, broken people living on the streets after Kystrom—on myself, even. Even the dirt on her cheeks looked like a recent application, not something caked in to the skin.

Yet it was clear she had been on this ship for some time. And the distress signal was still being broadcast. There had been humans on this ship, a long time ago; this ship, where its inhabitants had been studying how to make a person immortal.

“Why are you so gung-ho?” Leah demanded.

“Isn’t that why you were hired?” Quint snapped. “To shoot things?”

“I wasn’t hired,” Leah said. “And I shoot who I want.”

I firmed my grip on the strange woman’s shoulders, set my back to the building argument, and smiled at the woman with the jack-o-lantern eyes. “If you don’t tell me your name, I’ll have to give you one,” I told her. “Um… how about Lantern-Eyes?”

Lantern-Eyes frowned.

I switched to the Barcolaine dialect of Sister; it was the second most common dialect in the Sister Systems. “Can you understand what I’m saying?”

“If you know something and you’re not telling us,” Benny said to Quint behind me, “then it’ll be all our asses on the line.” He spoke in the same dark way he’d spoken to the cop right before we’d been arrested, the cop he’d been ready to kill.

“I’ve told you everything I know,” Quint said.

Lantern-Eyes’ attention darted from place to place over my shoulder, attentive but silent. I wondered how much of what we were saying she could understand. I wondered how long she’d been on this ship.