Unless, a thin demonic thought whispered in his brain, Strickland was too.

The woman was a stranger. Dark-haired with features that reminded Prax of the Russian botanists he’d worked with. She was holding a roll of paper in her hand. Her smile might have been one of amusement or impatience. He didn’t know.

“Can you follow them?” he asked. “See where they went?”

The boy looked at him, lips curled.

“For salad? No. Box of chicken and atche sauce.”

“I don’t have any chicken.”

“Then you got what you got,” the boy said with a shrug. His eyes had gone dead as marbles. Prax wanted to hit him, wanted to choke him until he dug the images out of the dying computers. But it was a fair bet the boy had a gun or something worse, and unlike Prax, he likely knew how to use it.

“Please,” Prax said.

“Got your favor, you. No epressa me, si?”

Humiliation rose in the back of his throat, and he swallowed it down.

“Chicken,” he said.

“Si.”

Prax opened his satchel and put a double handful of leaves, orange peppers, and snow onions on the cot. The boy snatched up a half of it and stuffed it into his mouth, eyes narrowing in animal pleasure.

“I’ll do what I can,” Prax said.

He couldn’t do anything.

The only edible protein still on the station was either coming in a slow trickle from the relief supplies or walking around on two feet. People had started trying Prax’s strategy, grazing off the plants in the parks and hydroponics. They hadn’t bothered with the homework, though. Inedibles were eaten all the same, degrading the air-scrubbing functions and throwing the balance of the station’s ecosystem further off. One thing was leading to another, and chicken couldn’t be had, or anything that might substitute for it. And even if there was, he didn’t have time to solve that problem.