The two women took them to the freezer the crew used to store perishable foods: a tiny, narrow space no bigger than a standard closet. When they reached the door with the little porthole, Park felt a heart-jerking moment of vertigo, a kind of double-vision. She paused, but then Chanur opened the door and shoved her so hard that she buckled under Sagara’s weight. She landed on top of him in a heap, heard him give a strangled yell of pain; he sat up immediately and glared at Chanur. Stone-faced, the doctor fished something out of her pocket and tossed it at his feet.

“We could get hypothermia,” Park said to her, trying to ease her weight off of Sagara—but there wasn’t enough room. “He could die in here.”

“You could both die,” Chanur answered, heavy-lidded and indifferent. “The specimen’s the most important thing. The rest of you are just an afterthought.”

“You trained for this, Park,” Natalya said then, her eyes alight with mockery—that special malice she seemed to have only for Park. “It’s just like Antarctica. Remember?”

Then she slammed the door in Park’s face.

Park turned to Sagara in the dark. “Let me see your leg,” she said to him.

“You should test the door,” the security officer croaked instead. But of course, Chanur was already locking it.

Park only looked up once as she was tending to him, back up at the porthole; and she saw that Natalya was still standing there, staring at her through the window like she was looking into the exhibit of an animal—or the windows of a madhouse. The faint pale light made her look like an inhuman shadow, a ghost haunting the doorway. It occurred to Park that she looked like a distorted reflection of who Park had been, standing and looking in at another cell, another prisoner, just the hour before.

Time is folded together here, Park thought. We are all just reflections of each other.

Images on the surface of a mirror that had been splintered apart.

—

It turned out that Chanur had been bluffing, after all, perhaps out of spite—she clearly cared about whether Sagara lived or died, because she’d left them with a single injection of Regenext: a kind of medical gel that sped up the body’s regenerative cell process. It wouldn’t knit together all of Sagara’s wound—he would still have to hobble—or even dull the pain, but it would at least stop the bleeding.

Sagara shook his head when Park tried to give it to him. “You should take it,” he said. He jerked his chin toward her head: the wound from Natalya’s blow had congealed into a terrible mess at the back of her skull.