“So,” he said.

She sighed, tucked her hands between her thighs. The freezer was cold, but not as frigid as she’d been expecting. “So.”

He nodded at her. “Why don’t you start?”

He made it sound so easy—as if there were a definitive origin point, one starting domino that had toppled all the others. She’d thought that, even, but Taban had said that was wrong. An ongoing environmental effect, he’d said. And how to describe that environment succinctly? Where could you start? The crew’s arrival to Eos? Taban—the original one—landing on this cursed planet to begin with? The formation of the Fold? The creation of the ISF and the conditions under which it would force people to rebel?

Or the creation of androids and space travel itself—all of it hurtling with terrible inevitability toward this final perilous frontier?

“You start,” Park said wearily, wanting to knead her temples—and then afraid to touch her head, as if it might fall apart like a broken melon. “I need to organize my thoughts. You knew about Taban all this time?”

Sagara looked at her, unembarrassed. “You mean the robot?”

“Of course I mean the robot.”

“I knew about the human,” Sagara said, with a hint of his old sarcasm. “He was the real reason why the crew was gathered to conduct this mission: an ISF merchant vessel received an emergency call from the human, along with some videos of what he had been experiencing. The merchant vessel bounced it back to ISF Corvus, who sent it to Earth, and then we were recruited—to rescue him, and to investigate his claims about the phenomena on the planet.”

Park shook her head. So that was why there had been such a rush to expedite the launch. And why there were no colony tools on the ship, after all. “But why keep that a secret?” she asked. “It’s not as if I would have refused to sign on if I’d known our real purpose—”

“ISF is never concerned about that,” Sagara cut in flatly. “We are replaceable, all of us. But they didn’t want any information leaks. On top of this being an undiscovered planet, there were clearly strange things going on here—even if what we were getting from Taban’s comms was just the ramblings of a madman. He should have died months ago, having run out of food. But he didn’t. We needed to understand how and why before we could unveil his story to the public.”

Park shuddered; at what point had the robot Taban replaced the human? Or had ISF been communicating with the robot the entire time, without realizing it, so deceived by the authenticity of his messages that they had never questioned his humanity? But the thought churned her stomach a little, so she kept silent on that for the moment. Instead she said, “So why did they need me? Why two psychologists?”