Park shook her head at him in turn. “This is no time to be a martyr,” she said, checking his wound one last time. The railgun’s projectile had cleanly pierced the outer part of his left thigh, missing any major blood vessels. And there was an exit wound, which meant the projectile wouldn’t still be lodged inside of him when the Regenext started regrowing the damaged tissue. She uncapped the injection before Sagara could protest and added, “You’re the better fighter of the two of us—even injured. I need you in good shape if we’re going to get out of here.”

He hissed through his teeth when she plunged the syringe into his thigh. “Give the needle to me afterwards, then,” he said after a moment. Then he glanced up at the door; Natalya had vanished, apparently abandoning her post to tend to her own injuries—or schemes.

Park re-capped the syringe and handed it over. “I’m surprised Chanur left us with a weapon.”

Sagara deftly tucked it up into his sleeve. “She wasn’t thinking,” he answered. “None of them are. Amateurs, all of them—they’re not used to thinking of everyone as a potential enemy.”

She tried to smile at him, but the expression felt ill-fitting on her face, like secondhand makeup. It was the wrong shade, the wrong tone. “Not like you,” she said.

Sagara looked at her, but he didn’t smile back. “No,” he said, with something like sympathy in his tone. “Not like me.”

Park tried not to flinch. She knew he was thinking about her and Fulbreech—about Fulbreech’s betrayal. She couldn’t think about it. Barely believed it, even. How could he—guileless, easy-to-read Fulbreech—have been deceiving her all along? How could he have gotten such a thing past her? She remembered the argument he’d had with Natalya in the cafeteria, back on their first day on the planet: had she and Boone converted him to their cause then? Or had he been in their ranks all this time, since they’d left Earth, directed to befriend and beguile Park and keep her from noticing anything as the ISF’s orbiter?

The thought hurt more than the steady throbbing at the back of her skull, the cuts and bruises scoring her body. That his smiles had been false, his gestures orchestrated for reasons far more political than attraction. She felt as if she had swallowed a cigarette. As if it was traveling somewhere in her body, still alight and burning. As if she’d never be able to cough it out.

Sagara slid back until he could sit against the nearest wall; Park followed suit with the opposite wall, so that only their legs were touching, their boots touching each other’s thighs. Sagara leaned his head back so that his eyes only glinted at Park from under his eyelids, like the dark flashes of iridium satellites in the night sky.