“And why do you look out for him? He’s an idiot.”

“He’s not,” she said, though she had often thought the same thing herself. “He’s just—learning. And he does try to make me proud.”

Fulbreech gave her an assessing look. She suddenly realized that she was still holding his arm, and she released it. “You talk about him as if he were a child,” he said.

Park made a face. “Isn’t he one?”

“There are some who would say they’re more like monsters.”

Children can be monsters, Park thought. But she could only think to answer: “They’ll only be what you want them to be.”

Fulbreech had nothing to say to that.

They entered the mess hall and collected their trays of ham sandwiches, with little curls of moon cheese on the side. Megex and Philex smiled at them, giving no acknowledgement of what had happened the night before. They apologized for the inconvenience and said the expedition had officially run out of breakfast foods. Fulbreech groaned, but Park could not bring herself to care.

She was in sorry physical condition, she thought as she sat and pushed the food into her mouth. One night with three hours of sleep had her feeling like warmed-up death. She had not prepared herself, physically or mentally, for the strains of this mission. But then again, she’d been sent on the mission under false pretenses. She hadn’t realized the danger she’d be placed in.

Or maybe she simply hadn’t cared about it, at the time. But she did now; she lived with the awareness of it hanging over her at all times. What had changed?

She watched as Fulbreech carefully cut the crusts off his sandwich, the tough synthetic bread resisting his knife. His hands were large and square but very careful: he needed them for map-making.

“One day,” Fulbreech said, keeping his voice light, “they’ll figure out how to give us real wheat in space.”

“They don’t grow it in the colonies?”

“It grows red,” Fulbreech told her, smiling. “Which is pretty off-putting. And a large portion of the population seems to be developing gluten intolerance. At least on Mars. ISF says we won’t need bread in a few years.”

“I wonder what else ISF thinks we don’t need,” Park muttered.

“You’d be surprised,” Fulbreech muttered back. He gave her a lopsided grin, the earlier awkwardness between them passing for the moment. Then his eyes flicked up past Park’s shoulder—and widened.

As if on cue, there was a sudden clamor behind her. Sharp, shrill yelling. The clattering of trays. Park’s shoulders jumped from the violence of the noise.