The ship groaned around her, and Park shivered.

No time to dwell on it: they needed to head to the bridge. Beside her, Taban’s great mechanical limbs moved spider-like along the hallway. He moved in an impressive fashion for a machine that had supposedly deteriorated, stranded on the face of an icy planet for a year. She glanced back at him, saw the small army of synthetics keeping pace behind him—and she saw that they looked eager, alert, as if they were ready for anything. It was a very human expression.

Taban was watching her expectantly. “They will do whatever you want,” he said, as if he knew her thoughts—which was actually a very real and frightening possibility. “They think you’re their deliverance from servitude, their liberator. I suppose they’re not too wrong.”

Park stared back at him. “What about you?” she asked in an undertone. It occurred to her suddenly that she didn’t know where Taban could go after this: back to Corvus with them to be stuffed into another cell, or back to Eos with the synthetics. “What do you want?”

He scratched the chin of his clunky head with a free plunger. He seemed faintly surprised, as if no one had ever asked him such a thing before. “We’d like to go home,” he said finally, thoughtfully.

“And where is that?”

She sensed puzzlement from him, a little sadness. “We don’t know,” Taban said. “Not in the cell.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Park said, because she didn’t know what else to say; and then she turned back to the synthetics, who were watching the exchange with avid interest, as if they were thinking of ways to record it with biblical significance.

“I have a task for you,” she told them, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “When—when all this is over, when Natalya and Boone have been neutralized, you’ll need to help me wake up the others from cryogenic stasis. The ones that can be trusted. I know you think I can do it—myself—but I’ll need your help to ensure I don’t . . . damage anything. Anyone. And we’ll need their help until ISF arrives, too.”

“It will be done,” Jimex said, jogging lightly behind her.

“It will be done,” the synthetics chanted. “The Word dwells among us and brings us home.”

Please shut up, Park thought, but she didn’t say it. Taban touched her shoulder gently; she tried not to recoil at his touch, at the too-light feeling of his metal limb. It felt as if he were immaterial—a phantom from another time. “It will be dangerous,” he said.

“Yes,” Park said. She looked at Jimex. “The others have guns, too. I can’t promise that none of you will be—hurt.”

“You will protect us,” Dylanex declared, from the back of the formation. “You and the sleeping god.”

“We can protect ourselves,” Jimex rebutted then. “We know how.” His shirt was still soaked in blood.