Even after Gabe put the remains of Mr. Gao’s buddy back in his locker, he couldn’t concentrate. The dead man’s eyes seemed to follow him everywhere he went about the room.

The man seemed to be judging him, laughing at his pathetic attempts to locate something like the air filter Tori had described. She’d even scribbled a diagram of what it should look like on her armband and sent it to him. Rectangular, with wavy lines through the center that indicated, what, exactly?

It didn’t help that he had no idea what he was doing. When he was young and something broke, his mother had always shooed him away from where the maintenance people worked.

As he struggled to remove the fourth hatch he’d found (please let this one have an air filter), he could almost hear his m...

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