“I just want to look,” she said. She was five.

Sally switched tactics. “Don’t you want to help me?” Her kind, tinny voice sounded as if she were speaking from the inside of a metal trash can. Park was surprised, and strangely moved; she nodded. No one had ever asked her for her help before.

She remembered the softness of Sally’s dusty hands—the comfort of kneading the cool dough. Sally had encouraged her to taste a piece of it. “Children at your age develop through sensory play and kinetic experimentation,” she said.

Park had not understood this or what it meant, but sensed that it was important. She obeyed, putting the soft little triangle of dough in her mouth, making a face as it dissolved saltily on her tongue.

“Why did you make me do that?” she asked.

“Because,” Sally answered serenely, “it’s the only way you’ll learn.”

—

Holt had not been found by morning. Vincent Sagara sent out a curt announcement about it over the neural inlay system, his low and fricative voice speaking directly into Park’s ear and jolting her awake. He spoke one sparse sentence detailing Holt’s “absconding” and another about holding a ship-wide meeting later in the afternoon, after the day’s expeditions were over. He rounded off with a promise to find Holt by the end of the day and said that, to the best of his knowledge, everyone on board was still safe.

Then, abruptly, he stopped talking, leaving an eerie silence throbbing in Park’s skull.

Although he sounded as calm as ever, the news sparked a fervor in the rest of the crew. At breakfast, Park found everyone gathered in the mess hall in intense little groups, swapping theories about what was going on with Holt and why he would have chosen to vanish. Thankfully, no one seemed to mention anything about his having nightmares, or connected him to the case of Elly Ma—who Chanur said suffered from a panic attack, no doubt under orders from Sagara to keep hysteria from spreading.

Park wondered if she, too, was expected to take an active role in the campaign to soothe the nervous minds aboard the ship. Common sense said that she, now the expedition’s head psychologist, ought to take the lead; but neither Wick nor Sagara had said anything to her about it. And fear had an unusual way of actually improving the crew’s relations with each other. Holt’s absence unified everybody: it set aside the usual frictions and backbiting, making the crewmembers eager and clingy and conspiratorial with each other.