Park didn’t answer for a long time. They walked in silence for a while, letting something hang in the air between them, sloshing uneasily. Park kept her eyes away from the walls this time, though her brain beat so hotly with anger and embarrassment that she thought it might burn away any illusions she’d seen earlier. Finally she said, “I don’t understand.”

Fulbreech tried to lengthen his stride to catch up to her, but Park only sped up in response. “Most of the people on this crew are colony-born, or conscripted,” he said, his voice a little strained from the effort to keep up. “They don’t put that in our files.”

No, Park thought. They didn’t. She’d had to guess, or infer from what other people said when they thought she wasn’t listening. But she didn’t know where he was going with this line of thought, and pursed her lips against the idea that he was trying to distract her from what had just happened. But Fulbreech persisted: “On missions like this, ISF prefers to use people from the colony pools only. But there was such a rush that they had to bring people from Earth. People who aren’t conscripted. You see?”

“No,” Park said flatly.

Behind her, Fulbreech sighed. “ISF likes control,” he said, enunciating clearly, as if she were foreign, or slow. “There was a mission last year where a battleship was deployed to Halla to take out a terrorist base. The conscripted gunmen on board knew that. But the non-conscripted were told that they were going to Mars—just to prevent them from leaking it to the terrorists. Some of them were from Halla, and never knew they’d bombed it until they got home.”

Park turned and stared at him. But before she could ask more, Fulbreech resumed walking again, making it clear that he wasn’t going to say more. Now it was Park’s turn to follow him; she dogged his footsteps in a daze. She needed sleep; she couldn’t quite process what he was telling her. Was he saying that the expedition members—the ones who were compelled into service to the ISF—were forced to hide the very nature of their mission itself? That the secrets ran deeper than the mysterious side projects, the details of Eos—that their very purpose for being there was presented differently to each side?

But ISF hired me to monitor the situation, she thought. To report back on it. What point would there be to that if they wouldn’t let her know everything?

Fulbreech’s hand bumped into hers. Park snatched her arm back as if she had been bitten; Fulbreech pretended not to notice. Overhead there was a plinking sound. It made Park think of the sound that had filled New Diego when hail clattered against the biodome.