She could not stop to consider why her own crewmate was attacking her. Natalya had always hated Park, that much was clear; maybe she had become unhinged, her brain pried loose by the unity rain. Or maybe it was something she’d been plotting all along, and she was using the cover of recent events to stage Park’s murder.

Maybe she had already done that with Wick.

Sagara has weapons, she thought as she toppled into the gravity chute and slammed her fist into the panel that would activate it. And Boone. She needed to get to them.

The gravity chute activated in a flare of light and sent her body bulleting upwards. She heard Natalya give a scream of fury somewhere below her: two people couldn’t use the chute at once. That gave Park maybe a sixty-second lead. And Natalya was in much better shape than she was.

She tumbled out of the utility room and felt arms catch at her. Park shouted, swinging wildly—but then she saw the pair of lambent gray eyes and realized that Jimex was holding her. He’d still been standing there, waiting for her to come back up—but why hadn’t he stopped Natalya from going down? Behind him, the other robots were watching silently.

“Danger,” Park blurted, over the desperate hammering of her heart. “Natalya—”

“We know,” Jimex said. “We tried to stop her—but we still have to obey direct orders. Our protocols still bind us.”

“You need to run,” Dylanex added.

“I’ve got to find Sagara and the others—”

“Captain Sagara is in the bridge,” Jimex said. He gave Park a firm push. “Please run.”

She hesitated for just the barest second—a precious second, considering the circumstances. She did not want them to come to harm. But there were a dozen of them, and only one of Natalya—and one android alone was ten times stronger than a human.

“Be careful,” she said to them. “I’ll—I’ll come back for you.”

Unfathomably, Jimex smiled. “We know,” he said. “You are one of us now.”

She left them and ran. Down the empty corridors, up the narrow chutes, screaming for help at the top of her lungs all along the way. No one answered her—there were only, what, five others left on the three-deck ship?—but somehow it felt as if the Deucalion itself was helping her, guiding her along by some magnetic force, directing her down hallways she felt would close up behind her like a mouth to seal Natalya off. Irrational, of course, and absurd—but she knew she would get to the bridge before the surveyor.

Then she heard a sound like a gunshot, going off behind her.

Park stopped dead in her tracks, against every self-preservation instinct she had. Then she listened closely. Where the hell had Natalya gotten a gun? And why hadn’t she used it on Park?

And which of the androids had she shot?