A qualified relief seeps into her. Something’s wrong, but she’s in the right place. Horkan’s Pride is equipped with the finest automated medical systems COLIN knows how to build, she’s read it in a Colony News digest, the whole shipboard AI suite was overhauled a couple of weeks before she left. And look, there’s a limit to what can go wrong with a cryocapped body, right, Ellie? Organic functions slow to a chilled crawl, and so does anything hostile that you might be carrying.

But the panic, the sense of inescapable nemesis, won’t let her go. She feels it dull and insistent, like a dog worrying at an anesthetized limb.

She rolls her head sideways on the gurney, and sees him.

More familiarity, sharper now, jolting through her like current.

Once, on a trip to Europe, she went to the Museo della Sindone in Turin and saw the tortured image printed on cloth that they keep there. She stood in dimness on the other side of the bulletproof glass, surrounded by the reverent murmurs of the faithful. Never a believer of any sort herself, Larsen was still oddly moved by the harsh and hollow lines of the face staring back at her out of the sealed vacuum chamber. It seemed a testament to human suffering that completely short-circuited its divine pretensions, that rendered the devotions paid it beside the point. You looked at that face and you were struck by the sheer stubborn survivability of organic life, the heritage of built-in, bitten-down defiance that the long march of evolution had gifted you with.

It could be the same man. Here, now.

He’s propped against a tall corner cabinet, staring at her, rope-sinewed arms folded across a cage-gaunt chest whose ribs she can see even through the T-shirt he wears, long straight hair hanging either side of narrow features drawn even thinner with pain and want. His mouth is a clamped line, etched in between the sharp chin and blade-boned nose. Hollows cling under the bones in his cheeks.