Yawning, she said sleepily, “My last question is how I could have seen Taban alive in the cafeteria, but I suppose I’ve answered my own question. If it’s true that you can see yourself in the Fold, can chase after not a reflection of yourself, but you—then I suppose it’s possible you can see . . . I don’t know, time folded together, too. An echo of time. A ripple of the past or future. It would make sense, if our ship is where Taban’s was. Or . . . maybe I was just seeing an image of him that was in someone else’s mind at that moment. Their consciousness.”

Sagara didn’t answer her. His shape was dark and distant, all the way on the far side of the freezer, and her ankles were now too cold to feel his legs—but somehow she felt his presence crouched warmly against hers. After a moment he said: “I think . . .” He hesitated. “I think I once saw someone, too.”

Park sat up a little. “You did?”

“I think,” Sagara said again. His voice sounded far away, muffled. “A thin man, with dark hair and blue eyes. For a moment I also thought he was a stranger—but then I decided he must have been an android. He was one. But an android I’d never seen before.”

Park’s eyes were fluttering; it was a struggle to keep her head up. “Maybe you just didn’t recognize one of our own.”

She felt the invisible weight of his eyes. “No,” Sagara said softly. “He was different. I knew he was.”

“How?”

Sagara didn’t answer. Park slurred, “You never told me about it. And you accused me of hiding things.”

The security officer made a sound that might have been a chuckle. “I suppose that’s what happens in times like this,” he said. “You’re not insane if you can think to hide your insanity.”

“We’re not insane,” Park said.

Sagara moved his leg away from hers; now he was retreating back into the shadows, the warmth of his presence withdrawing, fleeing from her into the arctic cold. “We’ll see,” was all he said.

Then he said nothing more, and after a long time Park leaned her head back against the wall and finally slept.

22.

On Park’s last day in New Diego, she and Glenn took a walk around the city.