It landed on Fayez. He lowered his head, not a surrender to gravity but a surrender all the same. “Yeah. Okay.”
“If you can’t do this, that’s all right,” Elvi said. “I can arrange transport back to the Science Directorate for you. You can do your work there as easily as you do it here.”
“Sweetie. You know I’m not doing that.”
“I’d understand if you did.”
“Yeah, no. I just wanted to make sure we were doing what we meant to do. If doing the wrong thing is the right thing, then I’m still planning to wake up next to you while we do it. Kind of my life’s work, really.”
They floated together in silence for a moment, not touching.
“You should come to bed,” Fayez said. “It’s very late, and we’re both very tired.”
“In a little bit,” Elvi said. “I have to make my report back to Trejo about San Esteban, and Ochida is waiting for some resource reallocations based on the new plan moving forward.”
“Oh, and Dr. Lee wanted to talk to you too. If you have time. Personnel issue.”
Elvi nodded her query.
“I think there’s a dysfunctional love triangle in the physics group. They may need a talking-to from the boss.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Fayez spread his hands. “Every miracle we’ve pulled off, we’ve done it using primates. Just because we’re capable of mind-blowing wonders doesn’t mean we aren’t still sex-and-murder machines. The organism doesn’t change.”
“All right. I’ll stop by the bridge. Do me a favor, though?”
“Anything.”
“The relief pod was supposed to have updated menus. See if the download taught the galley how to fake up some sag paneer?”
“If it did, I will have it waiting in the cabin.”
He pulled himself in and kissed her before heading out to the hall. She turned back to the San Esteban images. Now, every corpse she saw, she imagined as Fayez. Or herself. Or James Holden. Or Anton Trejo. Or Winston Duarte.
She started a recording. “Admiral Trejo. I understand that San Esteban is yet another first priority. All I can give you right now is our overview, some speculation, and my plan moving forward . . .”
It took half an hour to get the version she liked best, and she made a copy with a different routing header to send to Naomi and the underground. They were all allies in this, whether they knew it or not.
By the time she’d sent her reallocation plan to Ochida and talked to Harshaan Lee about how to keep the social drama on the Falcon from spiraling out of control, two hours had passed. Fayez was in their cabin, asleep. A tube of sag paneer was waiting for her, a bulb of decaffeinated tea beside it. She ate and drank and pulled herself into the sleeping harness.
When she dreamed, she dreamed she was in an ocean teeming with sharks, and if she moved too fast, they would kill her.
Cara floated in the lab while the technicians went through the adjustments to the sensor arrays on her skull like a cap. Everything was bustling around them, but Elvi felt like the two of them—she and her test subject—were still. The eye of the storm. On the screens, Cara’s brain function shifted and stuttered as the expert systems matched what they were seeing now to what they had seen before. “Norming,” it was called. As if norms were still a thing for them.
“How are you feeling?” Elvi asked.
Cara’s perfect black eyes clicked to her, went still for a moment, and then Cara grinned. Elvi wanted to see it as genuine, and maybe it was. Maybe the extra processing delta between stimulus and response only read as inauthentic and studied because Elvi was trying to read the girl as if she were the same as other people. As if she were a primate. The organism doesn’t change, Fayez said in her memory, but now it felt like a warning.
The organism had changed.
As if she’d heard her thinking, Cara’s expression shifted. “Are you worried about something?”
“I was thinking . . . about the cognitive changes you and Xan went through. Do you remember what it was like before?” Elvi asked.
“Before?”
One of the technicians touched the sensor leads, and the displays clicked over to green across the board. Good to go.
“Before the change. Before all this,” Elvi said. Before you died, she didn’t say.
“I don’t know. Just like anyone, I guess. It was a long time ago.”
Elvi forced a little smile, trying to think where she would have been when Cara had run into the wilderness of Laconia for the last time. Who had she been when Cara had been human?