There was nowhere to sit, so I took a place on the floor, leaning my back against the wall. It was easy, once I was there, to shut my eyes, too.

Something grabbed my wrist, lifted it, and shoved something against my palm until my fingers closed reflexively around it. I looked up to see that Lantern-Eyes had handed me a bottle of water. She sat back once I held it and began to unfold some complicated little device.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Campstove, for your promised food. Drink the water.”

I was still holding the bottle in the air in front of me, where she’d dragged my hand. I lifted my dented little tin. “I have a water bottle.”

“What the hell is that?” she asked.

“Uh, canteen?”

“Did that work?”

“It worked okay. I had to improvise,” I said.

“How did you end up on an expedition without a water bottle?” the lieutenant asked.

“I had one. I just wasn’t expecting to be attacked by Ministers, then spaced.”

She shook her head. “Drink your water,” she said. “And throw out that thing.”

Just to annoy her, I put the dented tin back in my jacket pocket. Then I uncapped the bottle she’d handed me and downed it in one go.

When I had caught my breath, the water bottle braced against one thigh, I looked at the lieutenant. The little campstove was glowing gently with heat, and she was setting a battered bowl at the top of it and pouring some rations in.

I said, “The scientists on this ship made the manikins and the Ministers from their own DNA. They’re human.”

“They’re not.” Lantern-Eyes replied with a calm that made me suspect she had sat here in the darkness before, pondering the very same questions I was asking now. “They can’t interbreed with humans, for one.”

“They can’t interbreed with themselves,” I pointed out. “They make and use tools. Isn’t that human?”

“Crows and dolphins make and use tools.”

“Crows and dolphins are intelligent,” I said. There was a certain exhilaration to debating with Lantern-Eyes, like what I imagined crossing swords was like. I wouldn’t have suspected from our wordless introduction that she would be so quick in conversation. “The Ministers—”

“No one is debating that Ministers aren’t intelligent,” Lantern-Eyes said. “Unfortunately.”

“And the manikins?”

“They’re no more intelligent than the average crow. They understand cause and effect and they can hold a grudge for centuries, but they don’t have a concept of ‘the other’—they can’t extend their empathy to see from my point of view. They can only react to me; they can’t plan ahead or take my actions into account. Which is very different from human or Minister consciousness. Besides, both Ministers and manikins have got a lot more chromosomes, an entirely different circulatory system, they… No matter how you define human, they’re not it.”

That was too many large technical words in sequence. She’d left me behind. “You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”