Later, locked into the room she had once shared with Elly, Hunter, and Natalya, Park sat down on her cot to organize her thoughts.

It all started with the nightmares, she thought. Those had started the day they landed on Eos. First it had been Holt; then later that night, Elly Ma. Then at some point (supposedly), Keller. None of them had gone outside, so that ruled out direct exposure to Eos as a factor. It seemed unlikely that there was contamination from something brought inside: there were the decontamination protocols, the sterilizing procedures. The ship’s state-of-the-art filtration and monitoring systems. And Fulbreech had said they hadn’t taken any samples into the ship.

And none of them had encountered—to the best of her knowledge—the stranger.

Then Holt had sleepwalked, tried to get to the door guarding the research on the Fold. She supposed that could be explained by his latent curiosity, or his anxiety and guilt over keeping such a secret.

And then Hunter had sleepwalked—or something—perhaps even interfered with the ship’s controls; but perhaps that could be explained by her fear, witnessing everything that was happening to Holt and Ma and Keller. She had always expressed a dire aversion to the idea of being frozen. The growing panic that was seeding in the ship could have affected her, manifested as an unconscious behavior. Perhaps she’d simply wanted to escape.

But what did any of it have to do with the stranger? He couldn’t have induced the nightmares, surely—but he could have had something to do with Reimi’s mysterious, unexplained illness. Could he have poisoned her? Gotten rid of her, and then Wick?

But why?

At least Reimi was obvious, Park thought. She was responsible for maintaining the ship’s android crew, its governing computer. She was the only one who could have fixed the communication systems after they went down from the storm—something a murderer wouldn’t want, of course, since the crew could have called home for help. They would have gotten backup when the murders started—maybe even before then. No, a killer—or a saboteur, or a spy, or whatever kind of enemy this was—would have wanted to cut them off, leave them isolated and vulnerable to whatever he was planning.

Maybe the stranger had even been the one to take out the communications in the first place, Park thought with a chill. Then taken down Reimi so no one would be the wiser. And then the lights, and the inlays. Left them all blind and deaf.

But why kill Wick? And incapacitate the others, if the stranger was somehow responsible for those incidents too? What could he be after?

What if he was after them all?