"You're there," Sarasti reminded him. "You must remember some—"

"Mom sent me patterns to parse. I was working on them. I'm still working on them," he added pointedly. "I didn't notice anything. Is that all?"

I'd never been able to get a good read on him. Sometimes Cruncher seemed to have more in common with the dozens of nonconscious modules working in James's head than with sentient hubs comprising the rest of the Gang. "You feel nothing?" Sarasti pressed.

"Just the patterns."

"Anything significant?"

"Standard phenomath spirals and gratings. But I haven't finished. Can I go now?"

"Yes. Call Michelle, please."

Cunningham stabbed at my wounds with anabolisers, muttering to himself. Faint blue smoke curled between us. "Isaac found some tumors," he observed.

I nodded and coughed. My throat was sore. The nausea had grown heavy enough to sink below my diaphragm.

"Michelle." Sarasti repeated.

"I see some more here," Cunningham continued. "Along the bottom of your brain pan. Only a few dozen cells so far, they're not worth burning yet."

"Here." Michelle's voice was barely audible, even through ConSensus, but at least it was the voice of an adult. "I'm here."

"What do you remember, please?"

"I–I felt—I was just riding Mom, and then she was gone and there was no one else, so I had to—take over…"

"Do you see the septum close?"

"Not really. I felt it going dark, but when I turned around we were already trapped. And then I felt something behind me, it wasn't loud or harsh it just sort of bumped, and it grabbed me, and—and—

"I'm sorry," she said after a moment. "I'm a bit—woozy…"

Sarasti waited.

"Isaac," Michelle whispered. "He…"

"Yes." A pause. "We're very sorry about that."

"Maybe—can he be fixed?"

"No. There's brain damage." There was something like sympathy in the vampire's voice, the practiced affectation of an accomplished mimic. There was something else, too, an all-but-imperceptible hunger, a subtle edge of temptation. I don't think anyone heard it but me.

We were sick, and getting sicker. Predators are drawn to the weak and injured.

Michelle had fallen silent again. When she continued, her voice only faltered a little: "I can't tell you much. It grabbed me. It let me go. I went to pieces, and I can't explain why except that fucking place just does things to you, and I was—weak. I'm sorry. There's not much else to tell you."

"Thank you," Sarasti said after a long moment.

"Can I–I'd like to leave if that's okay."

"Yes," Sarasti said. Michelle sank below the surface as the Commons rotated past. I didn't see who took her place.

"The grunts didn't see anything," Bates remarked. "By the time we broke through the septum the tunnel behind was empty."

"Any bogey would have had plenty of time to hightail," Cunningham said. He planted his feet on the deck and grabbed a handhold; the subdrum began to move. I drifted obliquely against my restraints.

"I don't disagree," Bates said, "But if there's anything we've learned about that place, it's that we can't trust our senses."

"Trust Michelle's," Sarasti said. He opened a window as I grew heavier: a grunt's-eye view of a fuzzy, bright blob weaving behind the translucent waxed-paper fibers of the skinned septum. James's headlight, from the wrong side of the barrier. The image wobbled a bit as the drone staggered through some local pocket of magnetism, then replayed. Wobbled, replayed. A six-second loop.

"See something next to the Gang."

Non-vampires saw no such thing. Sarasti froze the image, evidently realizing as much. "Diffraction patterns aren't consistent with a single light source in open space. I see dimmer elements, reflective elements. Two dark objects close together, similar size, scattering light here—" a cursor appeared at two utterly nondescript points on the image— "and here. One's the Gang. The other's unaccounted for."

"Just a minute," Cunningham said. "If you can see it through all that, why didn't Su—why didn't Michelle see anything?"

"Synesthesiac," Sarasti reminded him. "You see. She feels."

BioMed jerked slightly, locking into spin-synch with the drum; the guard rail sank back into the deck. Off in some far-off corner, something without eyes watched me watching it.

"Shit," Bates whispered. "There's someone home."

They never really talked like that, by the way. You'd hear gibberish—a half-dozen languages, a whole Babel of personal idioms—if I spoke in their real voices.

Some of the simpler tics make it through: Sascha's good-natured belligerence, Sarasti's aversion to the past tense. Cunningham lost most of his gender pronouns to an unforeseen glitch during the work on his temporal lobe. But it went beyond that. The whole lot of them threw English and Hindi and Hadzane into every second sentence; no real scientist would allow their thoughts to be hamstrung by the conceptual limitations of a single language. Other times they acted almost as synthesists in their own right, conversing in grunts and gestures that would be meaningless to any baseline. It's not so much that the bleeding edge lacks social skills; it's just that once you get past a certain point, formal speech is too damn slow.

Except for Susan James. The walking contradiction, the woman so devoted to Communication As Unifier that she'd cut her own brain into disunified chunks to make the point. She was the only one who ever seemed to care who she was talking to. The others spoke only for themselves, even when they spoke to each other. Even James's other cores would speak their own minds in their own way, and let everyone else translate as best they could. It wasn't a problem. Everyone on Theseus could read everyone else.

But that didn't matter to Susan James. She fit each of her words to their intended recipient, she accommodated.

I am a conduit. I exist to bridge the gap, and I'd bridge nothing if I only told you what these people said. So I am telling you what they meant, and it will mean as much to you as you can handle.

Except for Susan James, linguist and Ringleader, whom I trust to speak for herself.

Fifteen minutes to apogee: maximum safe distance, in case Rorschach decided to hit back. Far below, the artefact's magnetic field pressed into Ben's atmosphere like God's little finger. Great dark thunderheads converged behind it; turbulent moon-sized curlicues collided in its wake.

Fifteen minutes to apogee, and Bates was still hoping Sarasti would change his mind.

In a way, this was her fault. If she had just treated this new travail as one more cross to bear, perhaps things would have gone on more or less as before. There would have been some faint hope that Sarasti would have let us grit our teeth and keep on going, besieged now by spring-loaded trapdoors as well as the usual gauntlet of Seiverts and magnets and monsters from the id. But Bates had made an issue out of it. It wasn't just another piece of shit in the sewer to her: it was the one that clogged the pipe.

We're on the brink as it is, just surviving the baseline environment of this thing. If it's started taking deliberate countermeasures…I don't see how we can risk it.

Fourteen minutes to apogee, and Amanda Bates was still regretting those words.

On previous expeditions we'd charted twenty-six septa in various stages of development. We'd x-rayed them. We'd done ultrasound. We'd watched them ooze their way across passages or ebb slowly back into the walls. The iris that had snapped shut behind the Gang of Four had been a whole different animal.

And what are the odds that the first one with a hair-trigger just happened to also come with antilaser prismatics? That was no routine growth event. That thing was setfor us.