When he’d passed through the Ring, she’d been in three conversations simultaneously and watching an electrical meter for dangerous fluctuations. She didn’t find out until they were being rotated back to the Cerisierthat Holden hadn’t died. That he wasn’t going to. The missile had been stopped and the enemy had been spared.

Back on her ship, she’d gone straight to her bunk, curled up on the crash couch, and tried not to panic. Her brain felt like it had come untied; her thoughts ran in random directions. If the Martians had just launched a few missiles of their own instead of waiting for the OPA’s to do the job, Holden would be dead. If the Rocinantehad been a few thousand kilometers closer to the Behemothwhen it fired, Holden would be dead. The gimbaling under her couch hushed back and forth in the last of the deceleration burn, and she realized she was shaking her body, banging her back against the gel. If the thing that made the protomolecule—the nameless, evil thing that was hunched in the abyssal black on the other side of the Ring—hadn’t changed the laws of physics, Holden would be dead.

Holden was alive.

She’d always known that the destruction of James Holden was a fragile thing. Discrepancies would be there if anyone looked closely. She couldn’t match her announcement to the exact burn that the Rocinantewould be on when she sprang her trap. There would be artifacts in the video that a sufficiently close analysis would detect. By the time that happened, though, it would have been too late. The story of James Holden would have been set. New evidence could be dismissed as crackpots and conspiracy theorists. But it required that Holden and his crew be dead. It was something she’d always heard her father say. If the other man’s dead, the judge only has one story to follow. When he put his communication array back together, the investigation would begin. She’d be caught. They’d find out it was her.

And—the thought had the copper taste of fear—they’d find Ren. They’d know she killed him. Her father would know. Word would reach him in his cell that she had beaten Ren to death, and that would be worse than anything. Not that she’d done it, Melba thought. That she’d been caught doing it.

The sound came from her door, three hard thumps, and she screamed despite herself. Her heart was racing, the blood tapping at the inside of her throat, banging at her ribs.

“Miss Koh?” Soledad’s voice came. “You in there? Can Ic I need to talk if you’vec”

Hearing fear in someone else’s voice felt like vertigo. Melba got to her feet. Either the pilot was repositioning the ship or she was just unsteady. She couldn’t tell which. She looked in her mirror, and the woman looking out could almost have been a normal person woken from a deep sleep.

“Just a minute,” she said, running her fingers through her hair, pressing the dark locks against her scalp. Her face felt clammy. Nothing to be done. She opened the door.

Soledad stood in the thin, cramped corridor. The muscles in her jaw worked like she was chewing something. Her wide eyes skittered over Melba, away and back, away and back.

“I’m sorry, Miss Koh, but I can’tc I can’t do it. I can’t go there. They can fire me, but I can’t go.” Melba reached out and put her hand on the woman’s arm. The touch seemed to startle them both.

“All right,” she said. “It’ll be all right. Where can’t you go?”

The ship shifted. That one wasn’t her imagination, because Solé moved too.

“The Prince,” she said. “I don’t wantc I don’t want to volunteer.”

“Volunteer for what?” Melba asked. She felt like she was coaxing the girl back from some sort of mental break. There was enough self-awareness left in her to appreciate the irony.

“Didn’t you get the message? It’s from the contracts supervisor.”

Melba looked back over her shoulder. Her hand terminal was on the crash couch, a green-and-red band on the screen showing that there was a priority message waiting. She raised a finger, keeping Soledad out of the room and away from the locker, and grabbed the terminal. The message had come through ten hours before, marked urgent and must reply. Melba wondered how long she’d been lying in her couch, lost in her panic fugue. She thumbed the message accept. A stream of tight legal script poured onto the screen, brash as a shout.

Danis General Contracting, owners and operators of half the civilian support craft in the fleet, including the Cerisier, was invoking the exceptional actions clause of the standard contract. Each functional team would choose a designated volunteer for temporary duty on the UNN Thomas Prince. The remuneration would remain at the standard level until completion of the contract, when any hazard bonuses or exemptions would be assessed.

Melba had to read the words three times to understand them.

“I can’t go in there,” Soledad was saying, somewhere away to her left. The voice had taken on an irritating whine. “My father. I told you about him. You understand. Your sister was there too. You have to tell Bob or Stanni to do it. I can’t.”

They were going after Holden. They were going through the Ring after Holden. Her panic didn’t fall away so much as click into focus.

“None of you are going,” Melba said. “This one’s mine.”

The official transfer was the easiest thing she’d done since she came aboard. She sent a message to the contracts officer with her ID number and a short message saying that she’d accept transfer to the Prince. Two minutes later, she had her orders. Three hours to finish her affairs on the Cerisier, then into the transport and gone. It was intended, she knew, as a time to meet with her team, make the transition easy. She had other fish to fry.

Filling a locker with industrial sealant was one thing. The foam was made to apply quickly and remain malleable for a few seconds before the yellow mush dimmed to gold and set. The excess could be cut away with a sharp knife for the next hour. After that, nothing would move it except the right kind of solvent, and even that was an ugly, arduous process.

But leaving the body where it could be found wasn’t an option. Someone would be assigned to her bunk, and they’d want to use the locker. Besides which, leaving Ren behind seemed somehow wrong. And so with two and a half hours before she left the ship, Melba took a pair of shoulder-length latex gloves, three cans of solvent, a roll of absorbent towels, and a vacuum-rated large personal tool case into her room and locked the door behind her.

The locker door didn’t want to open at first, fixed in place by a drop of sealant she hadn’t noticed, but a few sprays of solvent degraded it until she could pull it open with her fingers. The sealant was a single rough-textured face of gold, like a cliff made small. She opened the tool case, took a deep breath, and faced the grave.

“I’m sorry about this,” she said. “I’m really, really sorry.”

At first the solvent spray didn’t seem to do anything beyond a sharp smell, but then the sealant began ticking, like a thousand insects walking over stone. Gouges and crevasses formed in the sealant wall, then a small runnel of slime. She rolled up a few of the towels, setting them on the floor to catch the flow.

Ren’s knee was the first part to appear, the round cap of the bone and death-blackened skin emerging from the melting foam like a fossil. The fabric of his uniform was soaked with fluid rot. The smell hit her, but it wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. She’d imagined herself retching and weeping, but it was gentler than that. When she took his legs to draw him out, they fell away from his pelvis, so she cut the trousers, wrapped the legs in towels, and put them in the toolbox. Her mind was quiet and still, like an archaeologist pulling the dead of centuries before out into the light. Here was his spine. This was the vile slush where the hydrochloric acid in his gut, no longer held in check by the mechanisms of life, had digested his stomach, his liver, his intestines. She drew out his head last, the bright red hair darkened and flecked with matter like an overused kitchen mop.