“The pay’s good, though,” Ko said philosophically. “And it was kind of nice taking some time off.”

Miller nodded in agreement, leaned close, tucking the barrel of his gun through the interleaving of armor at Ko’s belly, and shot him.

“What the fuck!” Holden said as Miller put his gun into his jacket pocket.

“What did you think was going to happen?” Miller said, squatting down beside the gut-shot man. “It’s not like he was going to let us go.”

“Yeah, okay,” Holden said. “But… ”

“Help me get him up,” Miller said, hooking an arm behind Ko’s shoulder. Ko shrieked when Miller lifted him.

“What?”

“Get his other side,” Miller said. “Man needs medical attention, right?”

“Um. Yes,” Holden said.

“So get his other side.”

It wasn’t as far back to the radiation shelters as Miller had expected, which had its good points and its bad ones. On the upside, Ko was still alive and screaming. The chances were better that he’d be lucid, which wasn’t what Miller had intended. But as they came near the first group of guards, Ko’s babbling seemed scattered enough to work.

“Hey!” Miller shouted. “Some help over here!”

At the head of the ramp, four of the guards looked at one another and then started moving toward them, curiosity winning out over basic operating procedures. Holden was breathing hard. Miller was too. Ko wasn’t that heavy. It was a bad sign.

“What the hell is this?” one of the guards said.

“There’s a bunch of people holed up back there,” Miller said. “Resistance. I thought you people swept this level.”

“That wasn’t our job,” the guy said. “We’re just making sure the groups from the casino get to the shelters.”

“Well, someone screwed up,” Miller snapped. “You have transport?”

The guards looked at each other again.

“We can call for one,” a guy at the back said.

“Never mind,” Miller said. “You boys go find the shooters.”

“Wait a minute,” the first guy said. “Exactly who the hell are you?”

“The installers from Protogen,” Holden said. “We’re replacing the sensors that failed. This guy was supposed to help us.”

“I didn’t hear about that,” the leader said.

Miller dug a finger under Ko’s armor and squeezed. Ko shrieked and tried to writhe away from him.

“Talk to your boss about it on your own time,” Miller said. “Come on. Let’s get this asshole to a medic.”

“Hold on!” the first guard said, and Miller sighed. Four of them. If he dropped Ko and jumped for cover… but there wasn’t much cover. And who the hell knew what Holden would do?

“Where are the shooters?” the guard asked. Miller kept himself from smiling.

“There’s a hole about a quarter klick anti-spinward,” Miller said. “The other one’s body’s still there. You can’t miss it.”

Miller turned down the ramp. Behind him, the guards were talking among themselves, debating what to do, who to call, who to send.

“You’re completely insane,” Holden said over Ko’s semiconscious weeping.

Maybe he was right.

When,Miller wondered, does someone stop being human?There had to be a moment, some decision that you made, and before it, you were one person, and after it, someone else. Walking down through the levels of Eros, Ko’s bleeding body slung between him and Holden, Miller reflected. He was probably dying of radiation damage. He was lying his way past half a dozen men who were only letting him by because they were used to people being scared of them and he wasn’t. He had killed three people in the last two hours. Four if he counted Ko. Probably safer to say four, then.

The analytical part of his mind, the small, still voice he had cultivated for years, watched him move and replayed all his decisions. Everything he’d done had made perfect sense at the time. Shooting Ko. Shooting the other three. Leaving the safety of the crew’s hideout to investigate the evacuation. Emotionally, it had all been obvious at the time. It was only when he considered it from outside that it seemed dangerous. If he’d seen it in someone else-Muss, Havelock, Sematimba-he wouldn’t have taken more than a minute to realize they’d gone off the rails. Since it was him, he had taken longer to notice. But Holden was right. Somewhere along the line, he’d lost himself.

He wanted to think it had been finding Julie, seeing what had happened to her body, knowing he hadn’t been able to save her, but that was only because it seemed like the sentimental moment. The truth was his decisions before then-leaving Ceres to go on a wild hunt for Julie, drinking himself out of a career, remaining a cop for even a day after that first kill all those years earlier-none of them seemed to make sense, viewed objectively. He’d lost a marriage to a woman he’d loved once. He’d lived hip deep in the worst humanity had to offer. He’d learned firsthand that he was capable of killing another human being. And nowhere along the line could he say that there, at that moment, he had been a sane, whole man, and that afterward, he hadn’t.

Maybe it was a cumulative process, like smoking cigarettes. One didn’t do much. Five didn’t do much more. Every emotion he’d shut down, every human contact he’d spurned, every love and friendship and moment of compassion from which he’d turned had taken him a degree away from himself. Until now, he’d been able to kill men with impunity. To face his impending death with a denial that let him make plans and take action.

In his mind, Julie Mao tilted her head, listening to his thoughts. In his mind, she held him, her body against his in a way that was more comforting than erotic. Consoling. Forgiving.

This was why he had searched for her. Julie had become the part of him that was capable of human feeling. The symbol of what he could have been if he hadn’t been this. There was no reason to think his imagined Julie had anything in common with the real woman. Meeting her would have been a disappointment for them both.

He had to believe that, the same way he’d had to believe everything that had cut him off from love before.

Holden stopped, the body-corpse now-of Ko tugging Miller back to himself.

“What?” Miller said.

Holden nodded at the access panel in front of them. Miller looked at it, uncomprehending, and then recognized it. They’d made it. They were back at the hideout.

“Are you all right?” Holden said.

“Yeah,” Miller said. “Just woolgathering. Sorry.”

He dropped Ko, and the thug slid to the floor with a sad thud. Miller’s arm had fallen asleep. He shook it, but the tingling didn’t go away. A wave of vertigo and nausea passed through him. Symptoms,he thought.

“How’d we do for time?” Miller asked.

“We’re a little past deadline. Five minutes. It’ll be fine,” Holden said, and slid the door open.

The space beyond, where Naomi and Alex and Amos had been, was empty.

“Fuck me,” Holden said.

Fuck me,” Holden said. And a moment later: “They left us.”

No. Shehad left him.Naomi had said she would, but confronted with the reality of it, Holden realized that he hadn’t really believed her. But here it was-the proof. The empty space where she used to be. His heart hammered and his throat tightened, breath coming in gasps. The sick feeling in his gut was either despair or his colon sloughing off its lining. He was going to die sitting outside a cheap hotel on Eros because Naomi had done exactly what she’d said she would. What he himself had ordered her to do. His resentment refused to listen to reason.

“We’re dead,” he said, and sat down on the edge of a fern-filled planter.

“How long do we have?” Miller asked, looking up and down the corridor while he fidgeted with his gun.