Ayres halted a pace short of her. “Administrator,” he said, not yet ceding the title, “we need to return to our ship. You have a situation here.”

“Do not trouble yourself,” Tei said, and in the fraction of a second between that sentence and the next, another voice spoke the same words in a lower timbre and out of step, like a harmony that mistrusts its melody: “Do not trouble yourself”. She tipped her head a degree, as if listening to a conversation inside her own skull. When she righted it, the smile had brightened. “The station is afraid,” she said. “We must keep you safe.”

Parr felt the pressure behind her eyes make a small, exquisite knot. Tei’s presence was not simply visual; it created a pressure differential in the corridor, a slight heaviness, as if the air between them had thickened to water. Under that weight the whisper swam to meet her.

Emilia. You do not have to fight.

Ayres moved a half-step left, closer to Parr. “Lara,” he said, and not ‘administrator’ now, “you want to provide sanctuary. Let us help you do that.”

For the first time the skin of her face trembled, the tiniest muscular stammer pulling at the cheek beneath the eye. When the expression smoothed again, something had not entirely vanished; a second presence stood behind the first, leaning in. Tei’s mouth opened a fraction wider than the words needed, and the wrongness was not in any one gesture but in the way the gestures sequenced.

“You will allow me to assist,” she said, and it was harder now to be certain whether there were two voices or a single voice, a doubling. Her hands lifted and held themselves a polite height from her sides, neither welcoming nor warding; the gesture worked, in its ambiguity, as both.

Ayres kept his tone courteous. “We’re returning to our ship.”

She moved, and the movement failed to insert the anticipated syllables of muscle and fabric and air. She was in their path without appearing to cross it. The projection was all wrong, the dimensions broken.

Parr’s field of vision narrowed and brightened. She tasted tin. Her fingers had curled, she realised, without permission. The word ‘open’ repeated somewhere behind the eyes the way a song repeats unbidden, and every fibre of her knew that if she obeyed she would be relieved of the need to think again.

“Emilia,” Ayres said, and the name struck cleanly, a little bell in a room of stale air. The whisper won and, for a moment, the pressure in her mind lost purchase.

A shadow shifted behind Tei. Masks appeared. The first of the Pilgrims did not hurry. One paused, made a small inclination to Tei that looked to be deference.

Tei’s head rotated a fraction too far and then corrected. The smile reoccupied the face. “Please. There is no need for distress.” The two voices braided themselves into one, the second sulkily beneath the first. “Emilia, do not exhaust yourself. You are almost home.”

Parr’s knees softened. The thought of lowering herself to the deck and putting her head against the cool plate was a thought of mercy. She felt exhausted.

“The Farragut is my home?” she asked, as calmly as she could manage.

For a heartbeat the composition collapsed. Tei’s face was all the faces she might have worn. Where serenity had been, terror showed and then caved to something avid. Her mouth opened too wide again and the scream that came up struck with a frightening force, “Stay!”.

Ayres moved when the scream undid her. He took the opportunity to pull Parr toward him and they ran back the way they came, turning a corner into a different corridor, hoping it would lead them back toward the docking ring and the Farragut. But he was moving on instinct.

Running flat-out, they turned another corner into a narrower hallway. Tei was waiting again. She had arranged herself across the corridor, one hip resting lightly on the sill of a maintenance hatch, as if listening to the end of a piece of music.

“Michael,” she said, tilting her head. “Don’t make this difficult or ugly. Our hospitality is a beautiful thing but it does have its limits.”

Fighting to suppress his anger, Ayres tried to sound level-headed. “Lara,” he said, “you are being manipulated. The Pilgrims have corrupted your hospitality. Look around you! Is this beautiful?”

Her mouth formed a word that did not quite come. She looked, then, like a woman overcome with confusion and fatigue.

“Run,” she whispered. “Follow the pulsing lights. They will lead you to the Farragut.”

The corridor shuddered end to end. Somewhere beneath their feet a lock disengaged with a baritone thump. Tei’s spine arched with a sickening tremor and when it straightened there were two faces not laid neatly one atop the other but two distinct faces misaligned by a few centimeters. The image was terrifyingly uncanny.

Ayres did not waste the moment. He and Parr sprinted along the corridor, passing Tei, and followed the pulsing lights for the next several minutes, their breaths and muscles burning with the effort.

Then they saw it at the far end of the maintenance corridor, the docking area. The hatch to the Farragut lay twenty paces beyond.

Parr sagged. The pressure behind her eyes had settled into a sour hum. The whisper no longer pretended to be her thought.

Go then. But you will help us.