So she’d only slept three hours. “Why are you in here?” Park asked him. When had she even seen Jimex last? That was right—she’d left him deactivated in her office before she went off to explore the utility rooms. Had he noticed the time and gone looking for her?

Jimex’s eyes glinted like silver coins in the gloom. “There is an anomaly,” he told her, still in that strange, reverent way. “Officer Hanover is in the bridge.”

Groggily her mind groped toward his meaning. “Hunter? Is she with anyone?”

Jimex shook his head. “She’s alone. And she’s—behaving strangely. Like Dr. Holt was.”

That made Park sit up. “What do you mean?” she asked sharply, tossing aside her blanket. Her body stung from the sudden cold. “You mean she’s sleepwalking?”

Jimex opened his hands a little: the android version of a shrug, a signal of uncertainty. “Not exactly,” he answered. “She seems conscious and lucid. Her biometrics state that she’s awake. But she’s not herself. The synthetics in the bridge sensed it and tried to bar her from using the ship’s controls, but they’re not sure what else to do. They can’t restrain her without injuring her, if she fights back. They debated going to alert Sergeant Boone, since he’s her superior, but I told them we should consult you first.”

“Why?”

He stared at her. “I don’t want Officer Hanover to get hurt,” the android said. “Like Dr. Holt was.”

Park shook her head and shoved her deckboots on. No time to think about the implications of that logic now; no time to wonder what exactly she had created with Jimex, or he with the other robots. Shit, she thought. The treadmill was starting again.

“Show me,” she told him.

So down the silent corridors they crept, Jimex gliding in front like a slender ghost, Park scurrying after him, twitching at shadows. She kept expecting Sagara to loom up out of the darkness here; Boone’s sparking green gunlight shining in a corner there. But the entire ship was still asleep, it seemed, or else its inhabitants were preoccupied elsewhere. There didn’t need to be anybody in the bridge at this time of night, docked as they were again on the planet’s surface.

The bridge was where Park had caught her first glimpse of Eos during their approach, an eternity ago. It housed the massive nexus of systems and relays controlling the Deucalion, including METIS. And METIS was what their neural inlays were plugged into. Park flinched at the idea of someone—a person not in their right mind—messing around with the computer that governed their navigation, communications . . . life support systems. She had to quell a brief and chilly surge of fear as she imagined the sudden sparking in her brain, her neural implants shorting out. She quickened her pace and prayed that Hunter hadn’t damaged anything.