Chapter 7 Summary: Orienting Toward Up
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.
Summary
Chapter 7 opens with Mallory outside Infinity, performing a spacewalk to recover the dead from the damaged diplomatic shuttle. She is grateful for her unusual history with corpses—they are a familiar horror that keeps her from fixating on the void around her. Disoriented and nauseated in zero gravity, she calls out to Xan, who does not answer. Fear creeps in: she wonders if he might simply leave her out here.
The HUD eventually lights up with instructions: she can fire propulsion jets by saying numbers 1 through 4, and combinations work. She fumbles through the controls, rolling slowly in space, until she reorients herself so the shuttle's roof and her head point the same direction. The nausea subsides once her brain accepts a relative sense of up.
Xan remains silent, communicating only through the HUD. When Mallory asks if he can hear her, the HUD answers yes. When she asks why he won't talk, it says simply: busy. She decides to narrate her work aloud to keep herself sane, joking that a silent spacewalk is far from the scariest thing she's experienced.
She retrieves the first body—a large man in a tan business suit, arms raised as if warding something off. She learns to manage the inertia of dragging a corpse while firing jets, and Infinity extends a robotic arm to take the body into storage. The HUD displays a list of nine names in red; the first, Jalo Kynsi, is crossed out. As she focuses on each floating body, its name rises to the top of the list.
The dead include Ambassador Kathleen Pilato, billionaire tech mogul Jeremy Neander, heiress Viv Brooks, Senator Sheryl Hayes, Ellen Klouman, a pop star named Christine, Alex Kamachi, and finally Terence McManus. Mallory reflects that the public relations fallout from so many VIP deaths will be horrendous, and wonders whether Adrian is up to the task or focused on getting rid of her and Xan.
While retrieving bodies, Mallory tells Xan a long story from her bartending days. She worked at a members-only lounge in Raleigh where a film crew was shooting a movie starring Salty Fatts, a gay trans rapper. Salty was the nicest person she met on that job, and one night he came in upset about a sick family member, planning to drive to the mountains. She gave him coffee instead of alcohol and talked him down. The crew arrived angry that Salty had quit the film, and Mallory nearly broke up a bar fight before sneaking Salty out the back door. That night, a murder occurred on set—Salty's stunt double was killed, presumably mistaken for Salty. Mallory notes that she didn't get her murder-sense that night, the strange sharpening of details and brightening of colors she associates with impending violence. Salty later sent her a card with a thousand dollars, thanking her for getting him out of there.
For the last body, Terence McManus, Mallory realizes she can't reach him with the tether at full extension. She fires all four jets, then disconnects her oxygen and power lines to use the built-up tension as a slingshot. Xan's alarmed voice cuts off as the cords release. She grabs McManus's pant leg, but her helmet fogs and her oxygen runs out. She pulls herself along the tether hand over hand, black blooms spreading across her vision, until she loses consciousness.
She wakes gasping as air floods back into her suit. Xan has pulled her inside, and the corpse of McManus lies beside her. Xan is furious, demanding to know why she disconnected her oxygen lines. Mallory shrugs it off, saying it seemed like the only way to get the last body and that he'd said he'd keep watch. Xan storms out, telling her she needs to make good decisions for herself.
Mallory discovers Xan's bedroom is a shambles—he opened the airlock before pressure stabilized, and the decompression sucked everything loose toward the airlock. She realizes how desperate he was to reach her.
On the flight deck, Xan explains that he secured the shuttle and extracted its data. Survivors remain aboard with significant injuries, but the shuttle's damaged AI can't report on human health. Station security has closed the main shuttle bay, caught between evacuating people and not letting the murderer escape. Stephanie has arranged for them to use the Gneiss private bay.
As Infinity approaches, Eternity comes into view, transformed: the station has grown pseudopods—giant tentacles as big as skyscrapers—waving in space. Its surface, once a calm blue-and-pink iridescence, now shifts between black, dusky red, and sick yellow. Xan says grimly that she's not happy. Mallory asks if they should even go back, but Xan insists they have to try—they have injured people and a shuttle full of dead bodies.
Mallory presses him on whether they should run instead, noting that someone on the shuttle could be there to arrest him. Xan says they're in too deep to run. He adds that at least there's no mystery with these bodies—it's clear who killed them. Mallory disagrees, saying she doesn't think Eternity is fully responsible; she believes it all traces back to whoever killed Ren. Xan mutters something under his breath. When Mallory asks what he said, he claims it was nothing—but she's fairly sure he said,