Park hissed in a sharp intake of breath, as if Chanur had punched her. “Cryo?” she all but cried. Then she gentled her voice and said in an undertone: “Surely it can’t be that bad?”

The last time she’d seen the roboticist, Reimi had complained of stomach upset, but otherwise she’d seemed fine. How could her sickness have gotten bad enough that the young woman was placed in the “freezer,” as the spacers called it—and what were they going to do without her?

Reimi was the Deucalion’s lone engineer: the only person with the knowledge to service the ship’s vast governing systems and all thirteen of its androids. Park supposed the expedition could muddle through with the robots maintaining the ship—but what would happen when they fell into disrepair? Darkly she imagined an explosion in the ship’s innards, the silent bloom of fire in space. She said aloud, “Ten months out from Earth—no foreign microbes, filtered air. How could she have gotten sick enough to warrant cryo? It couldn’t be latent, could it? Something we missed in the scans?”

A disease, she meant: something that had lain dormant in Reimi’s system all this time, only to surface now. The part of Park that had grown up in a crowded biodome shuddered. Just please tell me it’s not contagious.

The corner of Chanur’s mouth twitched. “It’s confidential medical information, Park,” she answered, looking back at her with disdain. “You know I can’t disclose that to you. Surely things work the same way on Earth?”

Park ignored the jab. “Then why not keep her in quarantine, at least? That way she could work on the ship and the androids in isolation—or at least instruct someone else on how to do it remotely. Why cryo?”

If she’s unconscious, she meant, how can she help us? The ISF was not paying billions of dollars for their mission’s only engineer to be frozen as literal dead weight. But Chanur didn’t answer, and something else occurred then to Park. “How do we know she wasn’t poisoned, her food tampered with—like me?”

From over the top of her manifest, Chanur’s gaze flicked over Park with the hard precision of a scalpel. “I don’t know what it is you want from me,” she said finally, tightly. Her lips barely moved, as if she were practicing ventriloquism. “It’s classified and not under your purview. More than that, I didn’t realize I needed your approval.”