Anna offered a quick prayer: Please help me save Sophia from this man who’s going to kill her if I don’t stop him.

“I said,” Anna continued at Nick’s back, “that I would make sure you went to jail for it.”

Nick turned around at that, a rodent’s low cunning back on his face. “Oh yeah?”

“Yes.”

He moved toward her in the low-gravity version of a saunter. It was intended to look threatening, but to Anna, who’d grown up down the well on Earth, it just looked silly. She suppressed a laugh.

“Sophia won’t say shit,” Nick said, walking up to her desk to stare down at her. “She knows better. She fell down in the kitchen, and she’ll say it to the magistrates.”

“That’s true,” Anna said, then opened the drawer of her desk and took the taser out. She held it in her lap where Nick couldn’t see it. “She’s terrified of you. But I’m not. I don’t care about you at all anymore.”

“Is that right?” Nick said, leaning forward, trying to frighten her by pushing into her personal space. Anna leaned toward him.

“But Sophia is a member of this congregation, and she is my friend. Her children play with my daughter. I love them. And if I don’t do something, you’re going to kill her.”

“Like what?”

“I’m going to call the police and tell them you threatened me.” She reached for her desk terminal with her left hand. It was a gesture meant to provoke. She might as well have said, Stop me.

He gave her a feral grin and grabbed her arm, squeezing the bones in her wrist together hard enough to ache. Hard enough to bruise. She pointed the taser at him with her other hand.

“What’s that?”

“Thank you,” she said, “for making this easier.”

She shot him, and he drifted to the ground spasming. She felt a faint echo of the shock through his hand on her arm. It made her hair stand up. She pulled up her desk terminal and called Sophia.

“Sophia, honey, this is Pastor Anna. Please listen to me. The police are going to be coming to your house soon to ask about Nick. You need to show them the bruises. You need to tell them what happened. Nick will already be in jail. You’ll be safe. But Nick confronted me when I asked him about what happened to you, and if you want to keep us both safe, you need to be honest with them.”

After a few minutes of coaxing, she finally got Sophia to say she would talk to the police when they came. Nick was starting to move his arms and legs feebly.

“Don’t move,” Anna said to him. “We’re almost done here.”

She called the New Dolinsk Police Department. The Earth corporation that had once had the contract was gone, but there still seemed to be police in the tunnels, so someone had picked it up. Maybe a Belter company. Or the OPA itself. It didn’t matter.

“Hello, my name is Reverend Doctor Annushka Volovodov. I’m the pastor at St. John’s United. I’m calling to report an assault on my person. A man named Nicholas Trubachev tried to attack me when I confronted him about beating his wife. No, he didn’t hurt me, just a few bruises on my wrist. I had a taser in my desk and used it before he could do anything worse. Yes, I’d be happy to give a statement when you arrive. Thank you.”

“Bitch,” Nick spat, trying to get off the floor on shaky limbs.

Anna shot him again.

“Tough day?” Nono asked when Anna finally got home. Nono was dandling their daughter on her lap, and little Nami gave a squeal and reached for Anna as soon as she closed the door behind her.

“How’s my girl?” Anna said, and dropped onto the couch next to them with a long sigh. Nono handed the baby to her, and Nami immediately set about undoing Anna’s bun and trying to pull her hair. Anna squeezed her daughter and took a long sniff off the top of her head. The subtle and powerful scent Nami had given off when they’d first brought her home had faded, but a faint trace of it was still there. Scientists might claim that humans lacked the ability to interact at the pheromonal level, but Anna knew that was baloney. Whatever chemicals Nami had been pumping out as a newborn were the most powerful drug Anna had ever experienced. It made her want to have another child just to smell it again.

“Namono, no hair pulling,” Nono said, trying to untwist Anna’s long red hair from the baby’s fist. “Don’t want to talk about it?” she said to Anna.

Nono’s full name was Namono too. But she’d been Nono ever since her older twin had been able to speak. When Anna and Nono named their daughter after her, the name had somehow morphed into Nami. Most people probably had no idea the baby was named after one of her mothers.

“Eventually, yes,” Anna said. “But I need baby time first.”

She kissed Nami on her pug nose. The same broad flat nose as Nono, just below Anna’s own bright green eyes. She had Nono’s coffee-colored skin, but Anna’s sharp chin. Anna could sit and stare at Nami for hours at a time, drinking in the astonishing melding of herself and the woman she loved. The experience was so powerful it bordered on the sacred. Nami stuck a lock of Anna’s hair in her mouth, and Anna gently pulled it back out again, then blew a raspberry at her. “No eating the hair!” she said, and Nami laughed as though this was the funniest thing ever spoken.

Nono took Anna’s hand and held it tightly. They didn’t move for a long time.

Nono was cooking mushrooms and rice. She’d put some reconstituted onion in with it, and the strong scent filled the kitchen. Anna cut up apples at the table for a salad. The apples were small and not very crisp. Not good for munching, but they’d be fine in a Waldorf with enough other flavors and textures to hide their imperfections. And they were lucky to have them at all. The fruit was part of the first harvest to come off of Ganymede since the troubles there. Anna didn’t like to think how hungry everyone would be without that moon’s remarkable recovery.

“Nami will be asleep for at least another hour,” Nono said. “Are you ready to talk about your day?”

“I hurt someone and I lied to the police today,” Anna said. She pushed too hard on the knife and it slipped through the soft apple and scored her thumb. It wasn’t deep enough to bleed.

“Wellc okay, you’ll have to explain that,” Nono said, stirring a small bowl of broth into her rice and mushroom mix.

“No, I really can’t. Some of what I know was told in confidence.”

“This lie you told, it was to help someone?”

“I think so. I hope so,” Anna said, putting the last bits of apple in the bowl, then adding nuts and raisins. She stirred in the dressing.

Nono stopped and turned to stare at her. “What will you do if you get caught in the lie?”

“Apologize,” Anna said.

Nono nodded, then turned back to the pot of rice. “I turned on your desk terminal today to check my mail. You were still logged in. There was a message from the United Nations about the secretary-general’s humanitarian committee project. All those people who they’re sending out to the Ring.”

Anna felt the sharp twist of guilt. Of having been caught out at something.

“Shit,” she said. She didn’t like profanity, but some occasions demanded it. “I haven’t responded yet.” It felt like another lie.

“Were we going to talk about it before you decided?”

“Of course, I—”

“Nami is almost two,” Nono said. “We’ve been here two years. At some point, deciding to stay is deciding who Nami is going to be for the rest of her life. She has family in Russia and Uganda who’ve never seen her. If she stays here much longer, they never will.”

Nami was being fed the same drug cocktail all newborns in the outer planets received. It encouraged bone growth and fought off the worst of the effects low-gravity environments had on childhood development. But Nono was right. If they stayed much longer, Nami would begin to develop the long, thin frame that came with life out there. To life in low gravity. Anna would be sentencing her to a life outside her home world forever.