I hurled myself into the far corner of the dining room, great big sobs wracking my body and stealing the air from my lungs.

Pop wasn’t dead he wasn’t there was something wrong with me oh Feozva it hurt to see him but it wasn’t him it wasn’t.

I folded into myself, unable to sort it out in my mind because it was too much.

The hallway door opened. I pressed my face into the cold titanium wall and squeezed my eyes shut. It had come for me. Not he. Not Pop. It.

Footsteps circled around the other side of the table and strode into the kitchen at high speed. I turned my head in time to see a figure dressed in a smock and a long brown, frizzy braid.

“Ellison,” I whispered, scrambling to my feet. I had to tell her what I saw even though I wasn’t so sure myself.

The sound of drawers opening and slamming shut sped my movements. No one should be in the kitchen alone.

She barged out again, her lips flattened together, her gray eyes wide. And a large knife gripped tight in her hand, her gaze snapping to mine.

A shiver skated up my spine. The consumectalon cylinder slipped from my hand and rolled underneath the table. On instinct, I slid around the table to put it between us, searching her eyes for a trace of green. Like mine, there was only gray, but they were tinged with a lack of emotion that didn't fit Ellison at all.

"What are you doing?" I demanded, my voice as shaky as the rest of me.

She started around the table. I matched her step by step to keep the table between us.

"Answer me, Ellison," I barked, hoping to snap her out of it, whatever it was, with the sound of my voice.

“She’s been found.”

“She? As in the drug?” I asked. “Ellison, what the hell? Put the knife down.”

Her lips twisted into a snarl. "You know too much."

"Too much about what?"

"You’ll tell the humans."

The humans, as in separate from her.

“Listen to me,” I bit out with a wobble. “You must have a Mind-I inside of you. We’ll get it out. The Saelis are controlling you.” Oh, Feozva, help me. Was that what was happening, or was this something completely different? "Just put the knife down."

“You need to be silenced,” she spat.

She was on the same side of the table as Mase's gun he’d hidden underneath. Not that I could ever shoot my own sister, but I could threaten her with it. That might be more effective than flinging my ice picks at her from across the table.

"Fill in my blanks first and tell me what’s happening here,” I said. “After you put the knife down."

Loud, hysterical cries sounded from the hallway, then the door burst open and my world ripped into two literal halves. The half with me and a knife-wielding Ellison. The other half held a gray-scaled, yellow-eyed engineer propping up Ellison. Another Ellison. No knife. Only tears tracking down her pale face, her shoulders hitching, her entire body shivering, her clothes torn and ragged, and spots of blood in too many places.

The two halves stared at each other, soaking in this impossible sight, for the length of time it took for invisible thread to sew the halves together into an impossible reality. Two Ellisons. Two.

Ellison, the one who had just entered, lifted her arm and pointed at the other, her eyes shining fiercely. "That thing is not me."

I blinked, my brain sputtering to keep up. Out of the corner of my eye, Esmerelda the Space Vixen took in this impossible scene with me. There were multiple actresses who played her part.

Copies. Two Ellisons. Like the paid copies of those who looked like me who’d been dropped all over the galaxy. Copies. Clones. Doppelgangers.

The other Ellison, the one with a knife, let out an inhuman screech that clamped my teeth together. Without bending her knees to gain height, she leaped onto the table. Breakfast dishes jumped at her feet. The knife in her hand gleamed in the light as she sprinted toward me.

My brain hadn't had time to process, but I did know one thing—this wasn't my sister.

I gripped Randolph’s chair and swung it at her head. She stumbled to the edge of the table, blood spraying from her mouth. I took that second of unbalance and used it to my advantage by grabbing the thing’s legs and yanking. It crashed to the table and split it into two equal halves down the middle.

Poh pushed my sister behind her and brought out her gun in one fluid arc. She leaped over the broken table to the thing’s side. But it only had eyes for me. It lunged, knife still in its hand, and chucked the blade through the air. The tip burned across my upper arm as I jumped out of the way.

Poh fired her gun. The thing howled. A hole had opened up near its shoulder, inches away from its heart, if it even had a heart, and dribbled a steady stream of blood to the floor.

It still came at me. I yanked at a chain on my neck, gripping the ice pick tight, and plunged it deep into its chest. Blood spurted. Its legs and arms twitched, yet it surged toward me once again.

I leaped out of the way at the last second so it smashed into Esmerelda’s poster. The thing heaved an angry wail and whirled around, arms flailing. Ellison lunged forward and introduced the thing’s face to a metal platter that had held some of our breakfast.

It stumbled back into the wall and crumpled to the floor on all fours, its limbs bent at odd angles that turned my stomach inside out. Then it dashed toward Poh. She fired her gun. It bent unnaturally to the side, dodging the bullet, and plucked the gun from Poh’s hands. Head down, it scrabbled up the wall to the air vent, flung the grating over the air shaft away so it crashed into Poh, and disappeared into the black void.

I stared after it, desperate to understand what had just happened.

A broken sob sounded from beside me. I turned to Ellison, the real Ellison, and threw myself over the table rubble to get to her. As soon as I gathered her into my arms, she gasped as if she’d just won a race with her own shadow. My sister, always so logical and stoic, almost always wore her emotions internally. An ache speared hot and sharp through my chest that she had gone through this.

She pulled away and blinked around the room with wide eyes, her face paler than I’d ever seen it, and gripped me hard around the forearm. "I-I couldn't find you and... I had no idea where I was. I woke up somewhere I’d never been, and I didn’t know how to get back to you and…" She hugged me hard again, her whole body quaking.

All the years we'd grown up, she'd never seen the ghosts who maliciously attacked me. She’d seen me thrown into walls and what was left of my hair dangling from a piece of bloodied scalp, but never a corporeal threat. The only reason she was on this ship was because of me, and because of its dark past, the Vicious had always made what lurked inside its dark hallways, ghost or otherwise, known to everyone. I traced the messy braid at the back of her head, its curves and twists as complicated as our current situation.

“I’ll keep you safe.” I repeated it again and again as if to undo everything that had happened to her.

A doppelganger. One that wasn’t human and thought we knew too much. It had attacked right after I thought I saw Pop, right after I found the consumectalon cylinders. It had wanted me dead. All of us dead. A shudder dragged down my spine. Had that been it and not Randolph who had poisoned our food? Had that been it and not the captain who had ushered me away from the cargo room?

Poh stared hard at my arm wrapped around the back of Ellison, then flicked her gaze up to me and swallowed hard. I glanced over Ellison’s shoulder to see. Gray scales marked my wrist, darker than before, and this time, they didn’t vanish.

Dread slinked through my insides, threatening to pull me down with it. I sealed my mouth together and shook my head at Poh. Not now. I couldn’t deal with this right now.

She gave a short nod. “I’m calling the captain about Ellison.” She stepped over what remained of our second dining room table in as many months and pushed the button on the telecom on the wall. “Captain, it’s Poh. I found Ellison.”

A staticky burst came through, and then the captain’s voice. “I didn’t know she was missing.”

“I didn’t know she was missing, either,” Poh said. “I reckon you should come to the dining room.”

With my scaled arm behind my back, I guided Ellison to a chair that somehow wasn’t broken. “Let me get something to clean you up.”

“Wait.” She grabbed my hip before I could head into the kitchen. “Just…don’t be long.”

“I won’t.” I squeezed her shoulder on my way past and swept through the kitchen doors.

As soon as I was alone, I crushed my hands to my mouth so no one would hear my soul cracking apart. Seconds after I thought I’d lost Pop, I thought I’d lost Ellison when she’d charged me with a knife. That was too many losses at once, whether real or imaginary. We hadn’t had any more reasons to be afraid on this ship, or so I’d thought, but obviously I was wrong. My mistake had nearly cost all of us our lives. I should’ve been more vigilant, especially with Ellison, instead of pointing an accusatory finger at her for taunting me with iron cubes.

She’d saved my life countless times. The least I could do was return the favor again and again.

After wiping my eyes, I wrapped a rag around my wrist, the scales pricking at my fingers as I worked. I would figure this out later, but my priority right now was Ellison. I grabbed a glass of water and a blanket from the stasis pantry then strode back into the dining room. Once I’d wrapped Ellison in the blanket to warm her up, I placed the water carefully in her trembling hand. As soon as she took her first sip, the captain burst in.

“What is this all…about?” He took in the state of the dining room with wide eyes. He blinked, and his shoulders drooped with the weight I wished none of us had to carry. “Ellison?”

“I found her in the air vent around the engine room,” Poh said. “I kept hearing noises.”

At the captain’s questioning gaze, Ellison said, “Something put me in there. Maybe they drugged me, I don’t know, but that was where I woke up.”

“How long?” he demanded.

Tears swam in Ellison’s eyes. “I don’t know. A day or two, judging from how hungry and thirsty I am.”

I sank to my knees next to her stool and wrapped my arms around her. “I’m so sorry.”

“So that cry we heard shouting Absidy’s name was you. The person we’ve been interacting with these last few days was…” Captain Glenn scrubbed at his eyes. “The seventh lifeform aboard this godforsaken ship.”

“A copy,” I said, nodding. “It looked and acted almost exactly like Ellison. The copy barged in here saying something about how we all knew too much and therefore had to die.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Too much about the Saelis or the Ring Guild?”

“Both?” I said. “I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure this thing can appear as anyone.”

Captain Glenn looked at me sharply. “Not just those on this ship, you mean.”

“You saw someone?” But as soon as I asked, I knew the answer from the pinched lines in his face. His wife and daughter. Had he thought they were dead and haunting the ship like I had thought Pop was?

Poh lifted a finger, dropped it, and heaved a breath. “It also took my gun, so…there’s that.”

“This just keeps getting better.” Captain Glenn’s fists tightened at his sides.

“But when did it get on the ship?” Ellison asked. “How long has it been here?”

“I don’t know.” I smoothed my hand down her messy braid and snagged my fingers into the band at the end to release it. “But I don’t think it wanted me to see what was in the cargo room, and we only just got that on Orin.”

“Nothing’s been in the cargo room since the teralinguas,” Captain Glenn said.

“Well, now we have boxes and boxes of consumectalons, the Ringers’ parasites,” I said. “Captain, I saw you on Orin talking to someone near truckloads of that stuff. You locked the door after you to the cargo room, which…I’m about 99 percent sure wasn’t really you.”

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “No, it wasn’t me. I was hiring clones for you, Ellison, and Mase while…it was cloning me. Jesus Christ.”

“That doesn’t make sense, though.” Ellison sipped at her water. “Why bring consumectalons aboard the ship if it didn’t want anyone to see them? What was the point?”

A knock came from the room next door. “Someone!” Randolph called. “I’m locked in here!”

“Why is he locked in there?” Captain Glenn shook his head as he left the dining room. A moment later, the door to Randolph’s quarters clicked open.

“You didn’t need to let him out,” Poh muttered from the corner of the dining room.

Randolph stood frozen in the doorway except for the trembling flask in his hand. “We just…we just weren’t meant to have a table.”

I sawed my teeth against my lower lip as he blinked around the room. “Tell the captain why you were stuck in your quarters, Randolph. It wasn’t you, and everything that has just happened proves it.”

“What…?” Randolph gaped at me, but then squared his shoulders and nodded at the broken table.

Captain Glenn appeared behind him in the doorway. “What wasn’t you?”

Randolph turned to face him. “Captain, I didn’t poison the food.”

“That might be the best news I’ve heard all day,” Captain Glenn said, crossing his arms, and frowning at Randolph.

“But someone did,” I said. “I thought I saw Randolph walk away from a pot that had crushed up pills in it, but it wasn’t our Randolph.”

He shot me a grateful smile.

Poh narrowed her eyes. “You think it was that thing wearing Tits’s body.”

“Randolph’s body,” I corrected. “And yes.”

“Pills. What kind of pills?” Ellison asked.

“Oxy-something?” I said. “Almost a whole bottle.”

Ellison paled. “Definitely enough to kill us.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner, Absidy?” Captain Glenn asked, skirting around Randolph so he stood in front of me.

“I wanted to, believe me I did, but I didn’t trust you. You, Ellison, and Randolph were acting so strangely that I thought you must’ve been controlled by a Mind-I. Now I know it wasn’t really any of you at all that I was talking to but some…other thing.”

Ellison shuddered. “There’s a superstition that if you see your own doppelganger, a copy of yourself, it’s an omen of your death. And I saw mine. Right here.”

I hugged her to me. “It’s just a superstition.”

“But if this thing looks like us and talks like us, how will we know who’s real and who’s not?” she asked. “Did the copy of me appear to know everything I did?”

I nodded. “It was you, only grayer, not as lifelike. I knew something was off about you lately, and it was because that thing definitely wasn’t my sister.”

She pressed her wet cheek against mine, my chains clinking around both of us in a protective cocoon.

Captain Glenn rubbed at his chin. “If we can somehow make everyone prove they are who they say they are with…I don’t know, a secret code?”

“We can track everyone’s location if we can rig it correctly.” Ellison dug in her pocket and pulled out a small plastic disk. “With this.”

A Mind-I.

“Where did you get that?” I demanded.

“The engine room on top of Poh’s toolbox. I was helping her paint the metal barrier around the engine and found it before that thing took me.” She looked to Poh. “I hope you don’t mind, but we could really use it. Can you rig it for us?”

I glanced sharply at Poh, who nodded. Betrayal sizzled under my skin. She’d had a Mind-I this whole time and hadn’t said a rusted word about it. “It was just lying out in the open, huh?”

Poh winged up her eyebrows, making her gray scales appear misaligned down the center of her face. “Not possible. I’ve been looking for a Mind-I everywhere, and there definitely wasn’t one anywhere near my toolbox.”

“Well, now we have one,” I said, my voice hard. “So I guess you don’t need to look everywhere anymore.”

Randolph eyed Poh from the doorway. “Did the seventh lifeform on our ship put the Mind-I on your toolbox for you to find? Is the thing working for you, or is it the other way around?”

Poh fingered her holster where her gun was supposed to be. “I work for no one.”

“You work for me,” Captain Glenn barked. “We need that Mind-I to be able to pick up all of our locations on this ship. You said you might be able to make that happen. Is that still the case?”

“Yes, Captain. That’s still the case.” She moved toward the hallway door.

I dodged in front of her, kicking the tray that Ellison had used to smash into the seventh lifeform’s head. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I need tools if I’m going to rig the Mind-I. I would also like some sort of weapon since that thing stole my gun.” She gestured to her empty knife straps down both legs. “And I haven’t seen my knives in days.”

Wariness rolled off of me in thick waves. That, and disappointment that I could no longer trust her.

“Use tools from the kitchen like I do.” I jabbed my finger at the air behind her, barely containing a snarl. “You’re not going anywhere.”