Carry me where? Park wanted to ask. But she couldn’t speak. Her brain felt like it was vibrating, as if it were a gong that had been struck, the sound resonating all throughout her flimsy skeleton—rattling through her breastbone and wrists. She didn’t know what Taban meant by letting it take her; she only knew that she had to get to him, that he was the only solid thing in a sea of distortion and uncertainty. She felt her eyes and teeth might fall out from how much her head was shaking. A kind of stream of information and feeling and thought flashed through her, like her brain was a walnut that had been pried open and something had shoved a funnel in it and was trying to squeeze in something far too big for the shell to fit. For a brief moment in that floating vertigo she thought she saw the surface of Eos, with a thousand lights pulsing beneath it, like the synaptic flashes of a giant brain—then a man in an exo-armor suit fumbling his way through a sea of dark waves—then the New Diego biodome. Herself, clutching the console for dear life while a strange alien consciousness rode along with her—a passenger in her brain.

They turned the neural inlays back on, was all Park could think. We’re all connected now. To the ship, to each other. How she knew that, she couldn’t say. She thought that the device in her head was exploding—that she would die.

But then, gradually, the feeling began to ease. The feeling of light rushed in and out of her in ebbing waves for a moment, then dwindled to the usual sparking pain.

After several moments, Park finally opened her eyes. She saw only white light and thought briefly that she had gone blind. She was lying on the ground, the metal floor cold and solid beneath her cheek. She tried to turn her head, but even that small movement made her nauseous—the same world-moving nausea, again, that she’d felt before. Was the gravity on, or not? She couldn’t even tell.

Taban was looking down at her, expressionless. Park said weakly, “Was that it? The unity rain?” A pale, milk-sour kind of scent filled her nostrils: she couldn’t tell if it was something in the room or her own desire to vomit.

“Yes,” Taban said. “It’s done now. The season’s finished. It assimilated you one last time.”

Park fought against the urge to gag. “Assimilated me with what?”

Taban didn’t answer for a moment. Suddenly, Park sat up, so fast that her vision nearly blacked out again. The message! Had it sent? The console’s screen was now dark and inactive.

It sent, another part of her whispered, with the same surety that she still had ten fingers and toes. Park recoiled from it just as Jimex and the others came in. “Dr. Park?”