“You talk as if we’re on opposing sides,” Sagara drawled. “We’re not enemies. I am not a soldier, Park.”

“What are you, then?” Now her voice did sound faint.

He gazed at her unblinkingly. “I’m an officer of the ISF’s Security Corps.”

“The difference being?”

The corner of his mouth twitched; Park read it as part irritation, part amusement. “The primary mission of soldiers like Boone is to eliminate the enemy,” Sagara said. “My primary mission is to protect what the ISF wants safe.”

“Meaning us,” Park prompted.

But Sagara said nothing in response to that.

—

At lunch, Park went to the usual dispensary line, feeling the absence of Keller as if she had lost her favorite coat. She felt cold, uneasy, vulnerable. The domestic android, Megex, seemed to notice her discomfort from behind the counter and said, “Would you like a juice bulb?”

“Thank you,” Park said gratefully as the brown-haired android placed it on her tray.

“Fuck,” Megex said in return, very calmly. “Shit, damn, ass, bastard, cock.”

Park stared.

“It’s a Reimi thing,” someone said from behind her then. Park turned and saw her bunkmate Elly Ma standing there, looking pitying. Whether the pity was for Megex or for Park, it wasn’t clear. “Without Reimi around to do maintenance, little bugs are popping up all over the place. This thing won’t stop swearing.”

Park looked again at Megex. “She’s malfunctioning?” She’d never heard of a bug like that before, but she wasn’t familiar with Megex’s model or build. “But a domestic android shouldn’t have a database of swear words to pull from at all. So why would a bug cause her to say them out of nowhere?” To Megex she said, “Query: run a systems check.”

“I am in the middle of an operation,” Megex answered politely, looking down the line of people waiting to be served their food. “Fucker.”

Park laughed, despite herself: it was so bland, so innocent, that it made something like delight bubble up inside of her.

Elly, on the other hand, looked positively disturbed. She was a shy, mousy woman, a member of the group that Park referred to as the “First Name Club”: the handful of women (consisting of her bunkmates and Reimi) who’d insisted on being called by their first names rather than their last, shirking protocol and the usual conventions. The reasons for this were beyond her: she’d hypothesized performative submissiveness or familiarity, or perhaps a signal of sexual availability and enticement, but Keller had called her a “classic overthinker” and left it at that.

But now, without the shield of her more extraverted friend Reimi, Elly looked fretful, uneasy; as if she wished she could hide, perhaps behind the formality of her last name again.

“Maybe it’s another prank someone’s playing,” the climatologist said with concern, glancing again at Megex, who’d ceased cussing for the moment. “Maybe someone is going around and teaching all the bots curse words.” She shook her head. “What a way to blow off steam.”