The pipe looked promising. He was able to heft it, though its diameter was too large to be comfortable in his hands, and the length was awkward. He felt like an out-of-shape pole-vaulter as he lugged it up the stairs toward the Mouse Hole.

“Anybody hear me?” he shouted, only then wondering just how smart that was. (A) It wasn’t likely that Makali, Dale, and Valya could hear him, and (B) if Dash was a prisoner…wouldn’t there be guards or surveillance?

Well, no one answered…and the Sentry habitat equivalent of a prison siren didn’t blare.

Zack positioned himself in front of the Mouse Hole, debating the wisdom of shoving the pipe through the bubble goo. If you do it slowly enough, they’ll know it’s you.

But then what? Would they know to start banging it on the edges of the Mouse Hole to widen it?

Would that even work? Zack scratched at one of the edges with his fingernail. It did crumble. This might work—

Suddenly the stuffing in the Mouse Hole bulged, and Makali’s head emerged. Like Zack, she was slipping and sliding, but she had Zack to catch her, though her inertia caused them both to fall flat on the platform. “There you are,” she said. “We were getting worried.”

“Sorry.”

She stood up, then went through the same reorientation Zack had, with the advantage of remaining on the platform, half a dozen meters above the beach. “Okay,” she said, “this is going to be a challenge.”

“What, getting everyone else out? I didn’t think you’d fit—”

“Nah, we can probably use your”—she nodded at the pipe—“big tool to open things up.” She waved at the habitat-sized lake.

“I’m just wondering how we get across that,” she said. “Swim?”

Extracting Dale, Valya, and Dash took hours and made Zack feel faint. It was true that the pipe was a useful tool for banging away at the Mouse Hole walls, especially when Zack squeezed back into Dash’s prison and worked from the other side. (This also had the advantage of allowing him to brief the others on this phase of “Escape.”)

It was still a tight fit for Dash, even with Zack remaining behind to push him. But eventually the Sentry was out, free for the first time in however many cycles.

The big alien immediately fell on its face on the nearest flat surface. “Well, it’s been a while since it could stretch out,” Dale said.

“I think he’s praying,” Valya said.

The posture did remind Zack of human religious ceremonies he’d seen. But he had to turn away; as arranged, Makali was poking the pipe back through the stuffing…Zack grabbed it and let himself be pulled through, marveling that with all the traffic through the Mouse Hole, and the serious beating it had taken, its weird colloidal stuffing was still present at all.

He emerged to find that Dash had now motored down the stairs to the beach and, as Makali, Dale, and Valya watched with varying levels of interest, was busy rolling around like a polar bear on a hot day at the zoo. “I think Dash is happy,” Valya said.

With their pathetic equipment—essentially Makali’s mesh bag and a pair of containers they had liberated from Dash’s prison—they descended to the beach and the shed.

“Okay, well done,” Dale Scott said. “I mean that sincerely.”

“Now what?” Valya said, likely beating Dale to the question. “Where do we go from here?”

During the hours it had taken for the tedious banging and scraping to widen the Mouse Hole, Zack had been “working the problem,” to use mission control terminology. (How he wished he had access to that back room and its great minds! Or even Harley, Weldon, Nayar, and Sasha!) He had the germ of an idea. But given his fatigue, and recent track record, he was reluctant to pitch it.

Besides, it was crazy. “Let’s ask Dash,” he said. After all, this was its own habitat. Maybe the water got sucked out every “cycle.” Maybe there were shallow places where you could walk—

Valya picked a moment when the Sentry surfaced, and put the question to it.

The immediate result was not promising. “We swim,” Dash said. It pointed down the rightward bank of the habitat.

“No way, Jose,” Dale said, not waiting for Zack or Makali to protest. “I did that fucking Russian sea training and almost drowned. I don’t do well with this much water.”

Makali was ready to argue on Dash’s behalf. “We can do this…it’s floating, not swimming—”

“Oh, bullshit, honey,” Dale snapped. Zack would have preferred more tact, but had to agree; this was a several-kilometer swim, and they weren’t in shape to do it.

Valya and Dash were having an exchange; the upshot was that the Sentry was amazed and horrified to learn that humans weren’t especially aquatic. For a moment, Zack thought the big alien would simply dive into the water and leave them.

“I think he’s pleading with me,” Valya said. “It’s as if he wants us to transform somehow….”

Zack realized that it was time for the crazy pitch. “There’s one possible alternative.”

The three humans fell silent while Dash kept complaining, which, for the Sentry, consisted of repeating the words lie and stupid and dryers, which sounded derogatory, even in the neutral voice of the translation unit.

Eventually Dash expended its energy, and looked to Zack.

“Ah, one of my favorite books is Huckleberry Finn,” Zack said.

Makali got it first, clapping her hands. “A raft!”

“With what?” Valya said.

Zack pointed back at the shed. “With that.”

Zack turned to Dash again. The Sentry had been watching the human antics with its usual stolidity. “If we get across the habitat, is there a way out?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Dash said, with what Zack took to be impatience. “Escape. Transit. Reboot.” As if to say, Are you idiots? What have I been telling you!

Dale was the first to respond. “Fuck it, let’s build a raft.”

HARLEY

“Just tell us what happened.”

Nayar, Weldon, Harley, and Sasha had taken Chitran first to find her baby. Then, with great difficulty, they had gotten her to accompany them to Lake Ganges.

They’d had to bring three of the Bangalore women along, for support and for translation. Nayar could have handled it and would provide a second voice…but Chitran was literally clinging to the women.

They’d also had to promise her that they were actively looking for Camilla and would arrest her the moment they found her.

“Assuming her story makes sense,” Weldon said to Harley, as they stood alone on the shore. Nayar and Sasha were helping Chitran retrace her steps from yesterday morning. “I still don’t see how a nine-year-old girl overcomes and kills a grown woman.”

“Stranger things have happened,” Harley said.

“Really?” Weldon said. “I’m trying to think of any event since Venture touched down that hasn’t been bugfuck weird. I’d be hard-pressed to pick a number one.”

“Oh, no challenge,” Harley said. “Dead people coming back to life, that’s easily number one through five—”

“—Out of five hundred strange things. I hear you.” Weldon was silent for a moment. “I keep feeling as though we just learned something really significant, like discovering fire. And haven’t had time to think about it.”

“We’re not in a place where we can afford the luxury,” Harley said. He, too, had been mentally buffeted by meeting aliens, being hauled from the Earth to a NEO, then trying to survive.

But finding proof that there was life beyond death—however temporary. That there was something more to a human being than blood, bone, and brain…some spirit or soul or bioelectric field that could be recorded, stored, uploaded…yeah, that was fairly important.

Weldon said, “I suppose we can always fall back on the excuse that NASA didn’t hire philosophers.”

“Or theologians.”

“NASA didn’t hire many police investigators, either,” Weldon said, nodding toward the “crime scene,” where Nayar and Sasha were trying, with some difficulty, to get Chitran to restage her death.