She moved to obey, but already the corkscrew sensation was turning in her head again, a light shining behind her eyes. As she sat down in the chair, static filled her head, as if she’d stood up too quickly and all the blood had rushed to the wrong places, letting the white noise in. Fuzzily she received a grainy picture of what had happened here, just minutes before; it was like touching an object that was still warm from someone else’s hand after they’d left the room, only it was visual sensation rather than kinetic—a kind of double-vision, an eye-crossing instant of being stuck between two moments in time.

Natalya and Boone had been here, and they’d been arguing.

“No one’s responding,” the surveyor said. She was standing by the console for communications. On its screen blinked the profile of whomever she was trying to contact: Svetlana Severov. Her sister.

“They must be busy,” Boone snapped. He was by the ship’s controls, looking through possible coordinates on his neural inlays.

“All of them? All busy, all at the same time?”

“Well, what’s the other answer?” Boone asked.

“Something happened to them. Someone found the messages—Sagara, or ISF Surveillance—”

“But your sister encrypted them.”

“She’s tech support, not a spy!” Then Natalya saw something on another screen; the blood drained from her face. “Shit!”

The moment dissolved. Park blinked just as Fulbreech said, “Now, Park.”

Her hand moved; she activated the orange button without quite thinking about it, without even really seeing it. On the screens in front of them, Eos glowed like a huge luminescent pearl. Park shook her head. Natalya and Boone had not even managed to get the ship out of orbit. But where had they gone? That new muscle in her brain flexed; METIS fed her a tiny stream of data, hard to interpret, hard to piece into cogent thought . . .

Park’s eyes fell on the screen Natalya had seen, just before the vision broke off. It was the feed to one of the cameras down in Deck C, and Chanur’s body, looking almost bisected, the head practically gone, was lying crumpled in the center of the screen. With a jolt Park felt Natalya’s panic, her sour anger and fear and grief—and then her wild resolve, hatred, revenge—

The data suddenly untwisted. “They’re still in here!” she shouted.

She rose, the edge of the chair hitting her hard in the back of the knees just as she whirled. The ARGUS part of her said to look up, and doing so she saw the flash of a boot swinging down hard at her head. Park ducked, rolled—something landed half on top of her, scrabbled after her, knuckle and nail and rasping hot breath.