He was tall and slender, with black stubble on his face. Short black hair, and a face Callie was prepared to admit was pretty. Based on Elena’s description, this was Sebastien, and not Uzoma, which was maybe good, because Sebastien had sent Elena away to safety, and Uzoma had gone full robot-zombie.

Sebastien pivoted from the machine and squatted down on his heels to tap at one of the screens waiting at Liar height. The back of his head was covered by the silvery disk of a brain-spider, its legs digging into his skull. Callie didn’t make a sound, but it took a force of will. Blood was crusted around the spider, and dried down the back of his neck, staining the collar of his Anjou jumpsuit.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“You can come in,” Sebastien called. “Have a drink. It’s disgusting, like drinking soy yogurt spiked with mold, but the station thinks it will sustain human life. There are tanks and tanks of raw materials back there, biological and industrial and otherwise, and fabrication machines all over the place. I dragged one of the biomass converters here for convenience. Had a bot drag it in, anyway.”

He rose and turned around, looking toward the open door. Callie didn’t move. Occasionally, when she was sitting alone in a room she knew to be empty, she would have a moment of doubt, and say calmly and clearly: “I know you’re there. Come on out.” Just in case. She thought it was probably a rare personality quirk, but she was prepared to believe Sebastien shared it, and was just taking a shot in the dark.

“I can’t see you,” he said. His eyes were glowing. “I assume you have some kind of stealth technology? But I see on this panel that a door opened in the storage warehouse, and there’s no reason that should happen, unless someone was trying to sneak in. I knew someone had breached the station from outside, and I was prepared to ignore it, even though you somehow tripped an annoying security protocol it took me ten minutes to turn off. That alarm was deafening. But now you’re here, and I left the door open all invitingly, so you may as well come inside and reveal yourself. But please don’t try anything violent – I set up a dead-man’s switch. If I don’t hit a certain button every few minutes, the station will blow itself up. Or implode, maybe. My implant helps with the translation, and overall I’m quite fluent in station-speak, but there are a few cognates I stumble over.”