Park tried not to flinch at the obvious hostility of the statement. She was one of the two psychologists on the ship, charged with monitoring the crew’s mental health; Chanur was the physician in charge of their physical wellbeing. That meant they were both medical professionals—Hippocratic sisters, Keller sometimes joked—but Chanur obviously saw their roles as completely separate from one another. Worse, she seemed to perceive Park as some kind of rival, or a threat.

Stop antagonizing her, Park told herself. Stop worsening this divide—she has access to information you’ll need, and making her hate you even more is unwise. But she said instead: “Did ISF authorize the freezing? You don’t need my approval—but did you get ISF’s?”

Something flashed over Chanur’s face, then: a movement of the cheek, a hardening at the corner of her mouth. Park grabbed at the data and tucked it away for future analysis, using her neural inlays. Chanur, seeing what she was doing, turned her back.

“Of course ISF authorized it,” she said, busying herself with the console terminal installed into the medical bay’s left wall. Her shoulders were tight with derision and scorn. “You really think anyone would let me put Kisaragi on ice without their say-so?”

“But no one prepped us beforehand,” Park insisted, still watching the doctor’s back. She was trying to parse through her body language, recording subtly on the inlays installed into her eyes. “I wasn’t informed.”

“That’s not my problem,” Chanur said. She looked back once, her eyes unfocusing slightly as she seemed to contact somebody on her own inlays. “Is it?”

“No,” Park said. Now she backed off, wary of an outright power struggle. “I suppose it isn’t. But what are we going to do about the ship? The androids?”

Chanur made a discourteous noise. “You can take care of them,” she said. It was an insult, not an endorsement of Park’s skills. “You’ve seemed to have made that your priority, anyway.”

Park felt her stomach tighten. But before she could fire back a response, a pair of heavy, regular steps from farther back in the medical bay interrupted them both. The ship’s custodian android, Jimex, rounded the corner, accompanied by Ellenex again. Both had tepidly curious expressions on their faces, and Jimex moved instantly to Park’s side. Ellenex, whose crisp linen uniform and tinny voice reminded Park vaguely of the nanny android who had raised her, said mildly: “Hello. There are elevated stress indicators in your voices.” Her pale eyes turned to Park’s. “Is everything all right?”

“I’m fine, Ellenex,” Park assured her, just as Chanur said with an expression of dislike: “I already told you to go away.”