“You know. He’s such a hardass about everything. He thought she went down there to cause the blackout. You saw how pissed he was when he found out she was gone. So why hasn’t he frozen her, like everyone else who did something stupid and broke the rules? Like Holt?” A meaningful pause. “Park got to him.”

Fulbreech, too, was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know. He still seems pretty pissed off. And where the hell is Wick?”

“Busy.”

“And you—you’re too busy to investigate this?”

“You’re damn right I am,” Boone said. “I’m not going to go chasing ghosts all over the ship just because the shrink thought she saw something. She’s losing it. Have you seen her? She looks like she’d get spooked by anything that’s not a clunker.”

“There’s something you need to understand about Park,” Fulbreech said then. There was a quality to his voice that Park couldn’t identify: she couldn’t tell if he was speaking fiercely or with great reverence. “She’s different from you and me.”

“Yeah,” Boone retorted. “She’s from Earth, for one thing. She’s not really ISF, for another. And she also seems to lack a human heart.”

“No,” Fulbreech insisted. “I mean she sees things. Really sees them. It’s in your best interest to try and understand.”

The two men were silent after that. Park thought she could see their outlines, gray against the curtained partition. She was afraid to breathe, for fear that they would hear her and come in. After a while Boone said, “Whatever. It’s neither here nor there. With Hunter about to get fridged, I don’t have the time or resources for this shit.”

“So they decided to freeze her after all?” There was sympathy in Fulbreech’s voice. Typical of him, Park thought. Nice even to guys like Boone.

“Seems like it,” Boone growled. For a moment Park thought she could hear genuine distress in his voice. “I don’t get why Severov keeps pushing for it. Saying she fucked around with the controls. I mean, METIS.” He snorted. “As if. One of my guys.”

“She’s scared of whatever’s happening,” Fulbreech said. “She wants it contained, no matter who it is. Her entire biodome got taken out by some kind of sickness when she was a kid. And what with everything that’s been going on . . .”

“If that’s the case, then why isn’t your little girlfriend in quarantine?”

“She’s not a danger to anyone,” Fulbreech said, his voice now cold.

“Neither is Hunter,” Boone said. “And at least she’s not seeing things that aren’t there.”