The ship tipped again, throwing all of them off their feet. Park would have snapped her wrist if Dylanex hadn’t caught her. We need to do something, she thought through the lurching and shrieking protests of the ship. Something grabbed her throat, and a dark thing—a gun—flashed past the corner of her eye, headed to her temple, and she sank her teeth into that hand before it could do more; Natalya screamed. Something snapped under Park’s teeth like a popsicle stick. Salt and heat filled her mouth. The surveyor was grabbing her head, kneeing her stomach, but Park’s mind felt so jumbled that she hardly felt it. The Deucalion is out of control.

On the screens, Eos loomed closer and closer. Park’s ears popped as her feet lifted off the ground. Someone was yelling, or praying—Jimex hurtled into her body, as light as a child—

Stop, Park thought, reaching for the golden simmering in the corner of her head. This time there was no nausea: only a strange shifting in her brain, the tensing of that hidden sinew she had never noticed before. A kind of tightness as she held the whole of the ship in her mind.

The Deucalion flopped back upright again.

Fulbreech yelled again. At first Park thought it was because he’d landed on his face, but when she looked up, she saw that he was pointing at something, holding his half-strangled throat with his other hand. Boone, still alive, dragging his body toward something in the corner—Sagara, rising grimly and limping after him—

Light exploded across Park’s vision. Natalya was rising, clutching her mangled hand protectively to her chest; she’d kicked Park in the head. The synthetics were righting themselves, turning to swarm her; Natalya gave a futile scream as they closed in. Her gun fell to the floor with a clatter.

Then some of them were pulling Park away, pulling her to safety, and she looked back and saw Natalya’s bloody, broken fingers; and for a moment she thought of Antarctica, that moment by the Earthmover when she thought she’d lose her own fingers, reaching into its guts, but the memory was drowned out as Natalya screamed and screamed. Jimex was diving toward the surveyor, perhaps intent on doing the same thing he’d done to Chanur—but then he recoiled in surprise, and the smell of alcohol filled Park’s nose: the strongest odor she’d smelled on the ship in a year. Wetness splashed across her face. Natalya’s hip flask glinted in her one good hand.