Sagara kept his gun trained on Natalya, but he glanced at Park. “How do you know all of that?”

“The robot down there told me,” Park said. “Taban. The robot you’ve all been keeping a prisoner.”

Natalya made a sharp gesture. Other than the few sweaty scraps of hair falling out of her bun, she looked just as composed as ever; but her eyes glittered with a special kind of malice. “I’m telling you, she dreamed the whole thing up,” she said. “She’s suffering from paranoid delusions, just like the others. She can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality anymore. If she ever really could.”

“Where did the blood on her face come from?” Sagara asked. His face was flat and unreadable.

Natalya gestured again. “She attacked me. Like I said, she was in a trance. She’s unstable—”

“Liar!” Park cried. “You’re the one who snuck up on me. You hit me. Taban can confirm that. You’re hiding something!”

The surveyor looked appealingly to Boone and Sagara. “Paranoid delusions,” she said again, confidently—as if she really believed it. Park stared at her, aghast. How could someone be so comfortable with lying? With killing? Was she some kind of sociopath—one who had flown under Park’s radar this entire time?

Boone was looking at Park and frowning. “Maybe we should hear her out,” he said, though Park didn’t know whom he meant.

“I’m actually inclined to side with Park,” Sagara said then, still pointing his gun at Natalya. Park looked at him and felt a kind of swooping sensation in her chest. He motioned with his head to the panel of controls he had been working with and said, “I’ve been trying to get METIS up and running again. After the blackout—after Wick was killed—command of the ship defaulted to me. But now I check again, and it’s changed to someone else; and METIS tells me the blackout was caused by someone attempting to hack it the first time, and failing. You know who was causing a commotion while the mystery hacker tried to do their work?” His hand tightened a little on his gun. “You, Natalya. You let Hunter out and started a fight with her to create a distraction. Whoever you were working with took advantage and tried to hack into the ship’s protocols, reroute control to them. They failed the first time, but they’ve managed to do it now. Haven’t they?” His gun made a little clicking sound: Park did not know if that meant it was primed or if Sagara was just bluffing. “So. Who are you working with?”

The man! Park thought then, with a little jolt of horror. The stranger! But then her brain swiveled—no, he was already dead, it was hard to remember that somehow—though maybe in some form he was still alive in Taban, or was Taban—?

But then, just like that, it was Boone who turned and pointed his gun at Sagara’s head.