“Why is the baby growing so fast in me?” Waela asked. The hiccup of terror leered in her mind, vanished.

“We don’t know,” Hali said.

“There’s something wrong. I know it.” The words came out flat, absolutely devoid of emotion.

Hali studied the instruments of her pribox, looked at Waela’s eyes, her skin. “We can’t explain this, but I can assure you that everything except the speed of it is normal. Your body has done months of work in only a few hours.”

“Why? Is the baby . . .”

“Everything we scan shows the baby is normal.”

“But it can’t be normal to . . .”

“Ship says you’re being fed everything you need.” Hali indicated the tube into the shiptit.

“Ship says!” Waela looked down at the linkage between her hand and the pribox.

Hali keyed a cardiac scan. “Heart normal, blood pressure normal, blood chemistry normal. Everything normal.”

“It is not!”

Waela panted with the exertion required to put emotion into her voice. Something did not want her excited, upset or frustrated.

“This child is growing at a rate of about twenty-three hours for every hour of the gestation,” Hali said. “That is the only abnormal thing about this.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know.”

Tears welled up in Waela’s eyes, slipped down her cheeks.

“I trust Ship,” Hali said.

“I don’t know what to trust.”

Without conscious volition, Waela turned to the shiptit, drank in long sucking gulps. The tears stopped while she drank. She watched Hali at the same time, how purposefully the young woman moved, changing the settings on the pribox. What a strange creature, this Hali Ekel—shipcut hair as black as Panille’s, that odd ring in her nostril.

So mature for one so young.

That was the real oddity about Hali Ekel. She said she had never been groundside. Life was not rendered down to raw survival here the way it was groundside. There was time here for softer things, more sophisticated dalliances. Ship’s records at your fingertips. But Hali Ekel had groundside eyes.

Waela stopped drinking, her hunger satisfied. She turned and stared directly at Hali.

Could I tell her about Kerro’s voice in my head?

“You scattered the graphs there,” Hali said. “What were you thinking?”

Waela felt a warm flush spread up her neck.

“You were thinking about Kerro,” Hali said.

Waela nodded. She still felt a tightening of her throat when she tried to talk about him.

“Why do you say hylighters took him?” Hali asked. “Groundside says he’s dead.”

“The hylighters rescued us,” Waela said. “Why should they turn around and kill him?”

Waela closed her eyes as Hali remained silent and watchful. You see, Hali, I hear Kerro’s voice in my head. No, Hali, I’m not insane. I really hear him.

“What does it mean to run the P?” Hali asked.

Waela’s eyes snapped open. “What?”