That sobered Park significantly. She’d had enough of pranks on this ship.

She took her tray and went to her usual table, sitting by herself. Keller was still nowhere to be found—busy working on her “special project,” no doubt—and anyway Park wanted to be alone with her thoughts. Again, the mess hall seemed a little too warm, too humid; her chikin salad, with its precious greens, wilted and shriveled in the heat. Park stared down at it in dismay. Bad for morale, she mused, pushing the limp sprouts around on her plate. Surely they could afford better. Or maybe not—maybe this was what all spaceflight passengers were subjected to. They left details like that out of the colony documentaries she’d watched. She looked around at the low lighting of the ship; at the hot, swampy, white little room. At herself sitting alone in a crowd of people. Yes, it seemed they’d left a lot of things out.

The other crewmembers seemed to be in a foul mood, eating their meals in a tense and simmering silence. Forks scraped restlessly against plates. There was a pressure-cooker atmosphere clamped over the mess hall: something must have happened on that morning’s expedition. Wan Xu had obviously known about it, tried to conceal it from her. But what was it? And did it have anything to do with Keller being reassigned?

Or maybe these others didn’t know, themselves. Park felt the torque of frustration low in her gut. She had the constant feeling that there were things she wasn’t privy to, winging overhead. Currents of unspoken knowledge moving through the ship, moving through her. Maybe it was because she wasn’t conscripted, and nearly all of the others were. Or maybe it was because of her position as the ISF’s orbiter—no one was going to confide in their bosses’ “spy.”

But she had to admit that some of the fault also lay with her personality. People found Park spooky, she knew that; they thought she had some uncanny ability to know their thoughts, that she was liable to extract secrets from their minds the way she could separate yolks from cracked eggs. Ridiculous, of course, but she had forced herself to scale back when conversing with them, only listening rather than preempting their responses. People didn’t like it when you could guess their thoughts before they were ready to articulate them.

But by the time she’d recalibrated, the damage had already been done. Along with being a snitch, the crew thought Park was some kind of psychic. A sorceress ready to entangle them in some dark and unknown art. Or maybe even a robot herself; maybe that was why they thought she was in cahoots with Jimex.