But then Natalya looked up, her eyes panicky and gray, and Park had the feeling of double-vision again—of déjà vu. Of herself, looking in at Taban in his cell; of Natalya, looking in at her in her own.

And then she returned to herself a little, again, and the clamoring insistence of the ship, its demand and its pull, faded and loosened. She could hear things better in the space it left behind. It came to her then what Natalya really wanted, in a trickle of data and intention and thought. What she was trying to get back to. Home. Family. Love. Freedom.

What the synthetics wanted.

What anyone wanted.

She took a breath and thought—

No. Let her go.

She felt the shuttle detaching from the ship as a slackening in her brain. A relaxing of the hidden muscle there. Had the structure of her brain, too, become machine-like? Was she tied, physically and inextricably, always to the ship? And to the things and people in it? Were they all a part of her, and she them?

Natalya had disappeared from the porthole. Jimex came running up, wall-eyed, taut. He looked questioningly at Park and said, “She’s getting away.”

“So are we,” Park told him. She wiped the blood from her mouth. “And she won’t come back. There’s nothing for her here.”

In her mind, she had wiser words to say to him, some great lesson about humanity or empathy or mercy or . . . something. But in the end she did not need to say anything. Jimex looked into her, into the core of what she was, and understood.

They watched as the shuttle finished its undocking procedures and navigated away. There was no pause, no brief glance of gratitude, of remorse. The escape pod simply spun away into space; and with a swoop of Park’s heart, the Deucalion slowed its descent and arced back down towards Eos.

25.

I don’t understand,” Sagara said later, as they made their slow and ponderous descent back to the planet’s surface. He had rolled up Boone’s corpse in a sheet of canvas. “Why are we going back?”

“The androids—no, the synthetics can’t come home with us,” Park heard herself saying. The golden glow had faded in her head, but only a little. “They want to stay here.”

Fulbreech made an incredulous noise, then winced and rubbed his throat. His voice was hoarse and gravelly, destroyed by Boone’s assault, but otherwise he and Sagara were both still intact. “Why?”

She looked at Jimex, who was helping to readjust the arm of one of the injured synthetics. He smiled at her, and Park said, “They’ll be happier here.”