Chanur shuddered and looked away. “And how exactly did you do it?”

“Pressure on the glenoid fossa, or the greater auricular nerve, or the—”

“Stop.” Chanur held up her hand: Park noticed for the first time that it was gnarled with nasty scars. She looked down at Park coldly and said, “So you think you can get to the bottom of this little mystery, with all of your vast medical knowledge?”

Park stared steadily back. “I can certainly try. Which is more than some people on this ship are doing.”

Two red spots appeared high on Chanur’s cheekbones, but otherwise her expression didn’t change. “We all wanted this mission to succeed, Park. You could never know what was at stake for us conscripted.”

“Wanted? In the past tense?”

Chanur only shook her head at that and walked away.

Later, Park asked Ellenex, who had stayed behind to set up some sort of monitoring device for Hunter: “Has she hurt you again, after that first time?”

“I do not feel pain,” Ellenex answered serenely.

“Damaged you, then.”

“No,” Ellenex said. “Not yet.”

“How is Holt doing?”

“His artificial skin is growing in nicely.” The medical android busied herself with recording Hunter’s vitals in a medical chart: Chanur insisted on doing things by hand, on paper. “He is designated to be cryogenically frozen by the end of the day.”

Of course he is, Park thought. For whatever reason the hairs on the nape of her neck prickled. “How many cryogenic pods do we have on this ship?”

Ellenex’s one good eye seemed to fix on a distant point in space as she consulted her files. “There’s one for every crewmember on the ship,” she answered. “Though there are only two in the medical bay. Dr. Ma and Dr. Keller will have to be transferred.”

“Transferred”—as if they were switching cubicles in an office. “Where to?”

“The cargo hold.”

Where no one could reach them, she thought, feeling grim. Where she couldn’t unfreeze them, if she absolutely had to. But she quashed her paranoia as best she could and said, “Can you tell me how Holt escaped the medical bay? That first time, when Chanur . . . damaged you?”

Ellenex’s pale blue eyes, off-kilter as they were, looked both sad and a little wild. She reminded Park again of Sally, her childhood nanny and first android companion—but how could that be, when Ellenex was a medical unit and Sally a child-minder, with some twenty years lying between their construction? But there was the same sweet, bland face; the same tidy white uniform.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Park,” she answered soberly. “I do not have an answer to your question. I cannot explain what happened with Dr. Holt.”

“What do you mean, you can’t explain?”

“Perhaps Dr. Chanur is right, and I am malfunctioning,” Ellenex said, downcast.

“You’re not malfunctioning,” Jimex said from the door. “You are learning.”