Jimex, beside her, said, “She means to kill us all.” Natalya had already vanished down the corner ahead; Park was falling behind fast, even though that fierce energy still filled her, propelled her on. She felt as if she were in a dream, one of those strange affairs where you couldn’t move fast enough no matter how hard you tried. Her arms pumped uselessly at her sides; she had never thought her own limbs so unnecessary before.

“She sabotaged the ship,” Park rasped. “So that none of us could fly it. She wants to die, too.”

But that didn’t seem right—and as she ran, suddenly Natalya’s true intention struck her, full-force, as if the surveyor had lobbed it at her. No, Natalya wasn’t running away to hide, to die somewhere alone when the ship crashed—she was running to the escape pod. She was going to leave the ship altogether. She’d damaged the Deucalion with the intention of killing everyone aboard it while she got away!

“You need to help the ship,” Taban said then, keeping pace with Park. “Use the unity rain—we’re all going to die if you don’t.”

“I will,” Park gritted out. “After I catch her.”

“She’s too far away. You’re not going to. You need to pull the ship out of freefall.”

“I will!”

And then she felt it again, the contraction in her brain, the feeling of time and space accordioning, the sensation of folding into herself. Her field of vision shifted, sliding to the right, though her eyes or head didn’t move. She felt as if she’d partially woken from a flying dream.

Then she blinked, and found that she was at the door of the escape pod, Jimex and Taban far behind her. The door to the escape pod had just slammed shut, the little porthole in it hazy with condensation—and Natalya was inside, slamming things together, rasping and screaming like an animal.

Park looked at her hand. The fierce golden glow had filled her vision again, and she felt the hard-edged knowledge that she could lift her hand and command the door to open for her, as she had with the freezer, with Taban’s cell. No, more than that: she could crush Natalya’s pod in her fist, tell METIS to blow the whole thing up and suck the debris into the vacuum of space. The powerful part of her, the cold thing, the vengeful thing, urged her to do it. Behind her somewhere, Taban was yelling. Park felt parts of the ship breaking off in Eos’s atmosphere, tearing back into space like scales from a thrashing fish; they were going down too fast, they were burning up. She didn’t care.