23
The Niche
April slept little during the journey to the Asteroidi, her ears always straining as if she could hear something approaching before it punched through their hull like a cannonball. She tried to do some research into demons and demonology on her reader, and while her encyclopedia had extensive articles and a labyrinth of links to related articles, she couldn’t focus on any of it. Lars went through what material he had gathered when the messages had first come in, about Mr. Chapelier and the station Asteroidi, but he seemed as distracted as she. Even Salima took to staring at the open back of the machine she was working on, twirling tools in her fingers without quite doing anything with them.
Hakim, by contrast, was consumed once more in math. April had given him one of her h
