“No,” Park said, trying to shake off her sudden stupor. “The androids said she didn’t. They were sure. I don’t know what Natalya’s talking about.” She took a step. “But I should intervene now.” Infighting was the biggest thing to avoid on a long space voyage—it could permanently alter the working atmosphere of the ship—and it was her duty as the resident psychologist to take the conflict out of sight. Resolve it as best she could. This was how closed groups fell apart: the marooned, the shipwrecked, the besieged and the trapped. The groups that required close coordination to operate and survive. Resentment crept in, then anger, dissension. Teams splintered; grudges formed. Park had even heard about one stranded unit of soldiers resorting to cannibalism among their ranks—even though they’d been found with some of their regular rations still intact.

But suddenly she felt an immense weariness. Couldn’t she have one day, one lunch with Fulbreech, where things didn’t fall apart?

“Where are the robots?” Fulbreech asked, his voice dim and very far away.

“I don’t know,” Park answered. “I told three of them to—”

Then she saw it. At first she thought it was a trick of her peripheral, an illusion due to not focusing clearly on anything but Natalya and Hunter’s bodies, which seemed poised to collide together like two cannonballs in the air. But when she turned to look properly, to assure herself she was imagining things, Park’s gut tensed. A kind of coldness radiated upwards from her lungs.

There was a man standing in the doorway of the mess hall, watching the fight. He was tall, with white-blond hair; when he saw Park looking at him, he turned on his heel and walked away, briskly but unconcernedly, with his fists in his pockets. Park felt the blood leaving her hands. She had never seen the man before. She who had personally examined each of the other twelve crewmembers aboard the Deucalion. She had never seen him in her life. He was a stranger.

There was a stranger on the ship.

Impossible, she thought. But then, what was impossible anymore? Here they were, in the farthest reaches of the next galaxy, studying an alien planet that crinkled space and time together like an accordion. People were becoming infected with nightmares left and right—or they were being frozen, their cells suspended, static in time, while the ISF watched coldly from afar. While Park stayed rooted in place, subatomic radiation and confusion shrinking her cortical cells like flowers shriveling in heat. And there was a stranger walking around, unnoticed and sinister and free.

Beyond her line of sight, there was a scream. Natalya had hit Valentina and drawn blood.

Wan Xu was right, Park thought, feeling a sea-change in her own blood as the others began to run forward, shouting. This was a closed system. There were no more known variables.

Everything was different here.

14.

[Hi: