“He doesn’t know our names.” Male voice, on his left. Footsteps echoing on metal grid.

“Fletcher.” A voice he did know. Vince.

“Damn you, brat.” It was still another direction. He was blind. He had no concept what the place was shaped like, whether he could blunder off an edge, down steps…

“Fletcher.” Another voice. Older.

“Fletcher!” Jeremy. “Fletcher, come to me!”

Jeremy was in on it. He stopped turning, stopped playing their game at all, no matter how they called.

“Fletcher, come here, come this way.”

“Fletcher!”

“I said go to hell!” he yelled.

An icy bath of liquid hit him, full in the chest. He jerked, and convulsed, and spat, and fell, hard, helplessly, on the grating.

“Dammit!” a male voice yelled. “Sue!”

He heard movement around him. He was drenched, in bitter, burning cold. He couldn’t get his legs to bear under him, he began to shiver so, muscles knotting so it drove his knees together and his elbows against their ordinary flex. He’d hurt his arm on the grating. It burned with a different fire.

“Who am I?” a female voice said. “Try again.”

He couldn’t talk coherently. He was shivering so violently he couldn’t get his jaws to work.

“Hey, guys,” somebody said in a warning tone. Someone was close to him. He tried to defend himself with a kick, but that one touched his face, got the edge of the tape on his cheek, and then pulled away the tape across his eyes, ripping brows and strands of hair along with it.

He was lying soaked, still with his hands tied, in the dark, and their faces were lit with a lantern on the echoing metal grid, so they assumed a horror-show aspect, gathered all around him against tall cannisters and girders and machinery. It wasn’t the freezer. It was somewhere else. Chad was there. He knew that broad face. Vince and Linda were there. Jeremy was there, not saying a thing.

He just stared at Jeremy. Even when they introduced themselves, one by one, and said he had to learn the names to get loose, he just stared at Jeremy.

“My name’s Jeremy,” Jeremy said when it was his turn to talk, “and I was the last they did this to. It’s a Welcome-in, Fletcher, you got to go along with it, you got to say what they say and learn the stuff and then you’re one of us, that’s all, for good and ever. Welcome in.”

He didn’t know whether he ever wanted to talk to Jeremy again. What Jeremy said he didn’t doubt in the least: it was some form of Get the New Guy and he was supposed to bend to the group and kiss ass until they’d gotten their bluff in.

But it wasn’t just roughhousing. They’d put bruises on him and half-frozen him, soaking him with water, they’d dumped him on the burning cold deck, and he didn’t give a damn what else they were doing, or threatened to do, he wasn’t playing their silly games to get In with them, not if he froze to death.

He started memorizing names and faces, all right. They wanted him to, and he would, to remember where he owed what and for how long. He knew Chad, who’d started this and set him up, and he learned Wayne who was the second voice, who’d shoved him, and Connor, and a thin-faced girl named Lyra. Ashley was another thin one, the quietest voice, Sue was a broad-faced girl with a cleft in her chin, and that voice and her name had accompanied the water; Wayne had protested it. There were two different scores. They sat there in the dark, lit up like a horror show and going on with their stupid game, while he shivered and his hair stopped dripping, probably frozen. They told him how he was welcome to the ship, and how it was a great ship, and how he was lucky to be a Neihart and how he’d put up a good fight.

Fine, he thought. They hadn’t seen fight yet.

He didn’t talk, not even when Jeremy tried to get him to say it was all right.

At least he was getting numb, and the fingers had stopped hurting.

Wayne got up and so did Ashley; the two of them took hold of him, pulling him to his feet. “We’d better get him warm,” Wayne said.

“He never said the names,” Sue protested.

“He’s freezing his ass off!” Wayne said. “Get the knife, get the damn cords off.”

The lift thumped into operation. It was coming down. Connor was saying it wasn’t good enough. He was trying just to stand, telling himself if they’d just listen to Wayne he might get out of this.

“Ease off,” someone said. “Someone’s coming.”

Rescue? He asked himself. An officer?

His knees were shaking so they almost tore the ligaments. He staggered off to the side, and hit a pole and leaned on it, that being all he could do to stand up.

“What in hell are you doing?” Male. Young as the rest. He was losing his ability to stay on his feet. He wanted to fall down, and all that saved him was the fact his chilled knees wouldn’t unlock. “God, he’s frozen ! He’s all over ice. Get him topside, into the warm!”

“We can’t take him topside!” Connor said. “Clean him up, first, get him some clothes or there’ll be hell.”

There was argument about it. He stopped following it, The consensus was take him to the cargo office where they could bring down heat; but he couldn’t walk on his own—they dragged him across to the wall, and opened a door, and flung a light on that blinded him after the scant light of the lantern. Wayne had him stand with his forehead against the wall, his eyes sheltered from the punishing light, and cut the cords on his upper body, and his hands—that was all right. Then somebody yanked his coveralls off his shoulders. They cracked with ice. Warmer cloth landed on his back, somebody’s coat tucked around him, a coat warm from someone’s wearing it.

They fussed about getting heat started, and a fan began blowing warm air in. They stripped the coveralls the rest of the way off and wrapped coats around him, made him sit in an ice-cold chair, at which he protested, and they contributed another coat. He was starting to shiver so his teeth rattled.

“He could lose his ears,” somebody said, the new one, the junior officer, after that there was a lot of protest back and forth around him, about who’d thrown the water and how he’d fallen and cut his arm and whether his fingers and ears were all right. Chad maintained that they were and they hadn’t had time to freeze, but Lyra, more to the point, held her warm hands close to his head and tried to warm them up, and it hurt.

Then Jeremy showed up, out of breath, with dry clothes and a blanket.

“I got them from the room,” Jeremy said, his kid’s voice shaking whether from the running or from fright. “I got the heavy ones.”

He took the clothes. He levered himself out of the chair and a tumble of coats in his soaked and mostly frozen under-wear, no longer giving a damn about females present. He dressed, beginning as he struggled with the clothes to feel pain in his hands again, and in the joints he’d sprained simply in shivering. The cord had left marks on his skin. His elbow was cut from his fall. The tape had ripped his face and left it sore. His hair trailed around his face, dripping again, after being stiff with ice.

“Are you all right?” Jeremy wanted to know. “Fletcher, God,—are you all right? It was a joke. That’s all, it was supposed to be a joke.”

Jeremy was upset. Jeremy was sorry. Jeremy alone of all of them had meant it for a joke. Stupid kid.

Wayne had seen things going to hell and used his head. The young officer had found out and come after them. The rest—

They were somewhere in the depths of the passenger ring rim. It was uncompromisingly dark and cold outside the little office. It was hard to think of braving that dark and going out there again to get to the lift they’d come down in; but he wanted to get out of here in one piece and back to A deck, if they’d just let him, if they weren’t going to try to cover up what they’d done or try to threaten him to silence.