Back down the dark shaft, back into the blue-lit room. When the chute opened again like the cavernous gullet of some strange creature, Park felt the queasy lurch of déjà vu: the flight from Natalya, the blinding blow to her head, the mad scramble upward. But she had to steel herself and go on, conscious of how the synthetics viewed her. This time they all went with her: it seemed they’d lost their fear of this place, their religious reverence of it, possibly as they’d become more assimilated by the unity rain. But they didn’t follow her into the chamber that held Taban. Instead, they paused in front of the tank holding the first dead man: Taban’s partner. Park stopped, too. She had to wonder why this man had not been . . . merged with a machine, as Taban had. Was it simply a matter of timing, availability? Or had his mind rejected the joining, the dissonance driving him insane and ultimately killing him?

Dianex sighed, staring up at the frozen dead man as if he were a sculpture, some work of art in a museum. Park had to avert her eyes from his ghoulish nakedness. His lifeless stare.

“Oh, Daley,” the engineer said sadly, laying her hand on the glass of the tank.

The other synthetics mimicked her. “Poor Daley,” they said, pressing their palms against the glass. “Poor, poor Daley.”

Park rubbed her arms and forced herself to walk on. Taban was still standing in his cell, his posture relaxed but alert. He cocked his head as she came in and said, “Oh, good. They didn’t kill you.”

“No,” Park answered curtly, beelining straight for the other console tucked into the far corner of the room. She held her breath as she activated it, waited for some alarm to go off as it booted up. But then the screen flickered gently to life, and the mail system was intact: it asked her whom she wanted to send a message to.

“You can let us out,” Taban said as she pulled up ISF Corvus with shaky hands. “It’d be better to, anyway.”

“In a moment,” Park said, trying to concentrate. How long did it take for a message to reach the other side, again? Eighteen hours—and then there’d be more time needed, of course, for ISF to actually send out their reinforcements. The Deucalion still wouldn’t see any help for weeks. But it was all they had.

“You’d better do it quickly,” Taban said, his voice still perfectly polite. “We don’t know how it’s going to affect you if they turn those neural inlays back on. Especially when the unity rain hits again.”

“What—what do you mean?” Park whirled then. “We’re off the planet—there is no unity rain!”