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Colony say what happened?” I asked.
    Stevens shook his head but I saw something flash across his face. Something he was holding inside, a little twitch I had been trained to recognize.
    “No,” he said, “but it must’ve happened fast. Colony changed its mind midstream.”
    I looked toward the command module. “I didn’t think we’d really mastered the human brain like that.”
    “I don’t know that we have,” Stevens said. “Maybe it made a discovery after the sequence had already begun, or a difficult calculation finally spat out some conflicting result. We may never know.”
    He patted me on the shoulder, looking up and down my poncho. “I want you to keep me abreast of any problems you see. If you get any ideas on what to do about Hickson, I’d love to hear them.”
    “You should find something for him to kill,” I said.
    Stevens’s eyes widened. “Do what?”
    “Some predators. Anything that threatens the group. The guy is programmed for security, and right now you’re the threat. You need to find something outside our group to unleash him on.”
    Stevens nodded, his brow furrowing in thought.
    “You’re right. Absolutely right. But I really hope we don’t find anything like that out there. Colony is being pretty mum on what we can expect. Very secretive.”
    I clasped Stevens’s shoulder as he looked around at the other groups. “We’ll figure it out,” I told him. “On our own.”
    “Yeah,” he said. He nodded, but the corners of his mouth went down instead of up. Another of those little signs I’d been schooled to note.
    “All for the glory of the Colony,” he muttered.
    I nodded, but felt no compulsion to answer.

• 4 • Salvage
    Just a few hours after my talk with Stevens, I found myself back in the place of my birth: the charred remains of the vat module. I was working there when he died, pulling wire from the conduits below the decking. At first, I had no idea anything had happened. The base had been a blur of activity all morning—people shouting over the roar of the tractors, excited scavengers running to and fro with special finds. When the accident occurred, it must have been more of the same noise, blending in with the rest.
    Terri, another of the quasi-scientists, was working down the line of vats with me. She pulled up panels of deck plating while I followed behind, cutting open conduit and removing the intact wire. We rolled it up into coils before one of the others took it outside and arranged the scraps.
    Beyond us—further down the aisle of vats—members of the support crew performed the nasty job of dealing with the remains of the dead, which consisted mostly of bone and ash. They swept and shoveled the piles onto tarps, then carried them by the corners out through several new holes that had been cut in the sides of the module.
    Those holes let in a little light and the barest movement of fresh air. They also let both groups work simultaneously, giving us multiple exit points for taking out items useful or dead.
    We found out about Stevens from Tarsi. I heard her yelling my name outside the module, and I half expected her to come in with some sort of lunch. Instead, she ran down the loose decking we’d already picked through, her poncho flapping, her face red and chapped. She was out of breath when she reached me—she grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the exit.
    “What’s going on?” I asked.
    “Stevens,” she gasped. “He—he’s dead.”
    I shook my head and tried to pull my arm free, my body revolting. “No,” I said. “I was just with him, not three or four hours ago.” I looked back to Terri, hoping she would back me up, but she remained by the last grate she’d opened, her face slack, her eyes out of focus.
    Tarsi pulled me past our old adjoining vats and through the door. I stumbled along, my brain reeling with the idea that someone I had just come to know might be gone forever.
    I ran alongside Tarsi and noticed many others hurrying in the