Thinking of this, she pulled up her datagrabs of Chanur’s face and examined them, rifling through the snapshots on her neural inlays. Privacy War skirmishes were still erupting on the outer rings of the system, rebels and ISF agents battling it out on colonies like Halla and Blest, and confidentiality was on everyone’s minds. Current privacy laws dictated Park had up to one hour to view any images for “personal use” before they were deleted; she used that opportunity now to scrutinize Chanur’s features. Yes, there was definitely something there: secrecy, annoyance, hidden anger and laughter in turns. But laughter at whom? Park? And anger at what?

No wonder she turned her back, Park thought—even though such a gesture was considered offensive in Chanur’s native Martian system, where face-to-face contact was scarce enough. There was a gamut of feeling roiling beneath the physician’s surface, and she’d hidden her face knowing—as everyone knew—that Park would sniff her out, given long enough. That meant she had something to hide.

She stood there for a while in the dark, trying to puzzle out Chanur’s state of mind. Park had her degrees in phenotypology: the kind of training that asked psychologists to analyze and interpret the feelings of their patients through facial tics, body language, topography. Words could lie, but the body often knew the truth of things, and would broadcast it to the most attentive phenotypologist. Park could deduce emotional stability in conversational pauses, anxiety or calculation in the twitch of a brow. Every look was a data point. It was the kind of skill that androids used to interpret the myriad expressions of human beings, and overall a good niche for Park: it meant she didn’t have to talk much.

“You’re the monitor,” Keller would often say. “The one who’s behind the scenes, watching. Figuring out what’s going on below the surface. I’m just here as the bait, coaxing everything out for you to examine.”

Flattery, Park had decided at the time—or, more uncommonly, genuine kindness. Most in the psych field disregarded phenotype analysis as simple data collation, research: it didn’t help anybody. Apparently Chanur thought so, with her venomous implication that Park had little work to do besides fussing after the robots. Worse, she thought Park’s ability was some kind of probe she had to protect herself from. An intrusion. But an intrusion on what?

She heard a tapping from down the hall, suddenly. Someone with a light tread, moving in soft deckboots—not an android, then, or Jimex coming back already because he’d misunderstood her commands. She half-turned, expecting Keller, who should have come looking for her by now; but instead she was surprised to find the tall, lanky form of Kel Fulbreech looming up out of the dark.

“Fulbreech,” Park said, trying not to sound startled. More likely than not, he was startled to find her lurking alone in a maintenance tunnel.

“Park,” Fulbreech answered, easily enough. “I was just looking for you.”