To let Taban out.

And now Keller and the rest were frozen, and Ellenex was destroyed. That assimilation, at least—the reckless desire to set Taban free, seeded into her by the unity rain—had led to her death.

“We have to leave,” Park said. “If the unity rain is only going to get stronger from here on out—”

“Yes, the deformations will grow quite extreme,” Taban said serenely. “There’s no telling what might happen.”

Could the effects be reversed? she wondered with horror. Or had it already happened past the point of no return? What about Park’s own thoughts? Were they really still her own? How could she know?

“I never had the nightmares,” she said, faintly.

“You dreamed of other things,” Taban said. “And gifted them to the synthetics, who learned from them. Learned from you, we should say.”

She shuddered. “But why didn’t I have nightmares at all?”

“The nightmares are the result of extreme dissonance,” he told her. “The inability of the human brain to comprehend the synthetic’s, their mind’s rejection of the synthetic experience. But similar things merge with greater ease, with less resistance and struggle—and you are more similar to a synthetic than the rest. You have a greater affinity to them than most other humans. Your mind is already a little part machine.”

What? Park thought dumbly. What?

Taban laughed, a little sadly. “You have always tried to understand them, Park. Ever since you were young.”

She sat back from him, reeling. Then Taban looked at something behind her and pointed. “Warning,” he said.

Park half-turned.

Something smashed against the side of her face and shattered.

Park felt a flash of precognition just before the impact, but wasn’t able to see who was standing behind her: all she saw was the explosion of glass, starbursts of pain erupting in her eyes. For a moment she thought she’d gone blind. She fell—though something braced her against the pain so that it was dull and muted, as if she had been wearing a padded helmet. Still, when she landed on the ground, she felt the trickle of something warm slipping down her neck.

Park looked up, blinking through the blood. Her head vibrated as if it were a struck gong. Natalya was standing over her, grim, the blue light of the room casting her face in shadow so that her eyes were as dark and empty as a funeral mask’s. She was holding a broken glass beaker in her hand; when she saw that Park was still conscious, she reversed the remaining sliver in her grip so that it became a knife.

Park stared at her. There was a dim roaring in her ears, and she did not know if it was from the muted pain of the blow—if she’d suffered a brain injury—or if something else was happening. If the unity rain had come.

Taban was speaking to Natalya through the wall of his cell, his voice low and urgent-sounding, but Park couldn’t make out his words. She said, half-slurring: “What are you doing?”