Then: “Is Keller really not available for . . . advice, at least? Where even is she? I can’t find her anywhere.”

Wick spread his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking off at something past her. “I couldn’t tell you.” She couldn’t decode what that meant, either.

So she left. At first she felt the urge to visit the infirmary, where Holt was resting under the supervision of Chanur, and where Reimi was being held in her suspended sleep. Park had the ghoulish idea of gazing into her cryogenic tank, as if she were an onlooker at a twenty-first-century zoo. Observing her body floating in the dark waters, oblivious to the rest of the ship and its troubles . . .

But she was so tired. Her own body felt swollen and waterlogged with weariness. Tomorrow, she thought, turning instead toward the long gray corridor that led to the residential section. I’ll look into all of it tomorrow . . .

She trudged to her bunk, trying to keep her head from drooping. The floor lurched oddly beneath her, as if she were on a seaward vessel; she told herself it was the exhaustion, lingering nausea from her space-sickness. The other women were sleeping by the time she crept in and grabbed her night gear; they were on strict sleeping regimens, since Eos only had seven hours of sunlight for them to use. Park, who could sleep in later, hurried down the corridor to the empty showers and activated the water at its hottest setting. The steam formed strange, twisting clouds under the artificial gravity. She shed her clothes and stepped in. Heat blasted her as if she had stepped into a furnace.

It must be heaven for the crewmembers who have to go outside, Park thought. One thing she did know was that Eos was cold—cold as hell. She’d felt it even through the super-reinforced shuttered windows on the bridge. The team had to ensure they were back before sunset every day: apparently nighttime on Eos meant almost-immediate death. Her stomach shuddered. Holt’s nightmare came to mind. Cold so extreme your skin might come off.

She turned her mind to other things. The confrontation between Boone and Natalya in the cafeteria still troubled Park: she had the feeling that if enough friction developed between the flinty surveyor and hotheaded Boone, disaster of an explosive degree might occur. What had they been arguing about? What body or thing were they hiding from her—what was Keller hiding, or Fulbreech, or Wan Xu?

And then there was Sagara. Cold and unreadable as stone. She didn’t even know if he was hiding anything, or if this was all just normal behavior for him. He was the wild card in the deck: she couldn’t predict him, couldn’t understand what his mindset or even purpose was. The big question mark over him scared her. Made him dangerous. And of course he’d done nothing to deter that feeling.