Tanaka’s voice buzzed with annoyance. “I have a complete physical map produced by the Falcon with best-guess locations based on structure and energy flow that appear to be more approximate and inaccurate than expected . . .”
“Or the place keeps changing around us,” Miller said with a shrug.
“。 . . In addition I have chemical markers that would be more useful if I had a different suit, but which I’m certain will get us to our goal. There’s some noise, but I’m making progress.”
Miller scratched his nose, and Jim’s started itching. “I don’t think she’s making progress. But violent, frustrated, and heavily armed? Not a combination I’d push.”
Teresa floated at Jim’s side. Her face was pale and there was a darkness to the skin around her eyes like she’d gone too long without sleep.
Jim put a hand on her shoulder, and it took a few seconds before she looked over. “How’re you holding together?” he asked.
“I keep hearing a boy talking about how much he misses his sister. I think he’s speaking Korean. I don’t really have Korean, but I still understand him. It’s like the Tower of Babel in reverse.”
“Don’t let it distract you,” Tanaka said.
Jim expected Teresa to bite back, but she only shook her head.
“I just want to find my father.”
“This way,” Tanaka said, gesturing at a branch of the intersecting passage. “The traces look stronger this way.”
She pushed off, and Teresa followed. Jim wondered what they’d do if he went his own way, then sighed and went after them. He wasn’t leaving the kid to Tanaka.
“You know,” Miller said, “you get a repeat offender, and after a while you kind of get to know them.”
Up ahead, the passageway brightened and split at a fork like an artery into two smaller versions of itself. Tanaka went through one, and Teresa followed, drifting until she bumped against the wall before she righted herself.
“I forgot how much I didn’t miss your gnomic cop stories,” he said.
“And yet, here I am. I’m making a point. You see the way someone works, you see the way they think. Joey cuts through a wall to get into warehouses a half a dozen times, the next time you see a warehouse with a hole cut in it, you maybe want to check where Joey was that night. People don’t change, not really. The strategies that work for them, they reach for.”
“I hear you.”
“So I look at your pal Duarte, right? And it looks to me like Eros all over again. Not the goal, maybe, but the method. Eros, the shit took over people’s bodies and made whatever it wanted out of them.”
“And Duarte’s doing the same thing. Using people like building blocks for something he wants.”
“Maybe.”
Jim looked over. Miller seemed to be at his side, even though he knew it wasn’t really true. The illusion was perfect.
Miller hoisted a weary eyebrow. “You need to ask yourself whether you think Duarte’s the perp, or first among victims. You know that this stuff can hook itself into your dopamine receptors. Train you up to like whatever it wants you to like. Maybe it grabbed on to how he feels about the kid over there and used that as a leash. The things that built all this shit could be using him from beyond their graves the same as they used Julie. And there are some things you can only access by being in the substrate. You remember that.”
“That’s uncomfortable,” Jim said. “But yes. I was thinking along the same lines.”
“Of course you were. I’m using your brain. It’s not like I brought any neurons of my own to this partnership.”
“So this is just me talking to myself ? That’s disappointing.”
“No,” Miller said. “This is what’s left of me trying to point you toward the clues. This is your case, old fella. You know more than you think you do.”
Something shifted deep in Jim’s gut. It hurt for a second, and then the pain turned to a coolness that made Jim think about things like nerve damage. But his mind wasn’t on his body. It was back on Eros Station when the protomolecule was first set loose. For a moment, he saw the corpse of Julie Mao in the crap little hotel room, the black spirals threading up the wall from her body. The blue fireflies floating in the air. There was something about her that tickled at the back of his mind. About her but not about her. About Eros, but not just about Eros.
“Oh,” he said. “Hey. We used heat.” Tanaka didn’t turn back or respond. He checked to see if his mic was on. “Tanaka! Back on Eros, we used heat.”