Before Ethan can protest, tell Ophelia that she’s delusional—obviously not an impossibility, given their current situation—she continues. “I’d tell you to check with Birch. He recognized me. But obviously we’re a little late for that.” She flings her hand in a gesture toward her office and Birch’s body within.
Ethan shakes his head, but he steps away from her, retreating toward the central hub. That hurts more than she expected.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Ethan says. “It’s not possible. Bledsoe’s family, they died in the attack. I was sixteen. I remember hearing that.” His expression goes somewhere distant. “We had trouble getting food shipments in the Lunar Valley for a while because of the new transport regulations.”
The lunar colony famine. More pain that could be traced directly back to her family.
“But I bet you didn’t hear a lot about his family, did you?”
His silence is enough of a response.
“My mother fell in love with Field Bledsoe, and the Brays cut them off. They spread some story about her going on some special assignment somewhere because they were embarrassed. A Bray marrying an asteroid miner? Perish the thought. Brays are meant to work miners to death for greater profits, not procreate with them.” Even the words taste sour in her mouth. “And after … after…” She swallows. “They paid. Everyone.”
“No one can do that. Not even the Brays.” But he sounds less certain now.
“I would agree with you, but the fact is, I’m living proof.” Ophelia forces a shrug, more casual than anything she’s feeling right now. “Goliath and the other stations were Pinnacle owned. Not to mention on the fuck-edge of nowhere. And when you have enough money, you can hide anything or pay people not to care.” Sometimes she suspects it was more the latter than the former, which gives her even more doubt about humanity.
“But you work for Montrose. They would have done a background check and—”
Ophelia laughs, but it’s a hopeless, empty sound. “They missed that Birch was from Goliath. I can guarantee you, my forged records are a lot better than his.” And a lot more expensive. Plus, Montrose wanted her to work for them—all the better to rub it in her family’s face. Even if they had spotted something odd, Ophelia doubts it would have mattered.
He scrubs his hands over his face and turns away from her.
She follows a step or two, then stops. “I don’t know what’s happening, what’s causing the changes in behavior here, but I can’t take the chance that I might hurt someone.” Again. “Please, just listen to me. Put me in one of the—”
“Why are you here?” he asks. “You requested this assignment.”
She stiffens. “I’m trying to help. I’ve devoted my life to helping prevent ERS. It was an opportunity to try new—”
“What I’m hearing is that you were so concerned with proving yourself and getting rid of your guilt that you put us, my team, in additional jeopardy just by being here. Is that about right?”
Shame washes over her. “I had no reason to believe that anything would—”
He spins to face her, so suddenly that Ophelia lurches backward. “How am I supposed to do my fucking job and keep people safe if no one tells me what’s going on?” His face is flushed with fury.
There is still a part of her that wants to flinch away from a man, an authority figure, vibrating with anger. She hates that that part of her still exists after all these years. Part of her father’s legacy, before he became Bloody Bledsoe.
She lifts her chin. “You’re not hearing me. No one knew. I wasn’t hiding it from you, specifically. Don’t flatter yourself, Commander. You’re not that important.” She winces internally at the words and the coldness, even as she’s still saying them. Hell of a time for her grandmother’s influence to make an appearance. As much as she would have preferred that Miranda Bray had no hand or share in who she is, it seems that Miranda is impossible to escape.
Ethan glares at her, then his gaze skates away. “Never mind. Forget it,” he mutters.
She’s missed something, and she’s not sure what.
“No,” he says after a moment.
“No?” Ophelia repeats, confused.
“No, I’m not going to lock you away in a hab where you can wait for this to be over,” he says icily. “Hiding is a privilege, Doctor, as it seems you already know well. The rest of us have to own up to our responsibilities.”
She gapes at him as if he’s slapped her. “I’m not hiding, I don’t want to hurt—”
“Everything you told me is about what your father did. Not you.”
“But Birch—” Ophelia begins.
“There’s nothing to indicate that his death isn’t exactly what it looks like. No footprints leading away from him. Please explain to me how someone would have done that to his arm without stepping in the blood. Particularly someone on some level unaware of their own actions.”
That stops her. She hadn’t thought about that. “Still, the genetic predisposition, combined with a violent upbringing—”
“Any of us might have that same predisposition. You’re just the only one who knows for sure. And there’s been plenty of violent upbringings on this team.” He gives her a grim smile. “So theoretically, we all have the same amount of risk, for all anyone knows.”
Ophelia doesn’t have an argument for that, damn it.
“I’ve lost another crew member under my care, and we’re in a dire situation where we don’t know the variables, other than the fact that we can’t leave.” As if in response, the wind rages against the hab, and Ophelia would swear she can feel her ears pop from a pressure change.
“I can’t take the chance that locking you away is the better bet,” Ethan continues. “I won’t. I need all hands.”
She opens her mouth to protest.
“And that’s my call.” He cuts her off. “I’ll live with it. Well…” His mouth does that thing again where it quirks in a smile that is almost equally grimace. “As long as any of us will, I suppose.” He pulls up his sleeve, tipping the inside of his forearm to her view.
Those little red raised nodules dot the surface of his skin.
“Shit,” she breathes. She knew it was real.
Whatever this is, he’s afflicted, infected, as well. “Nothing came up on the diagnostics I asked Kate to run,” he says. “Not even anything unknown. The bio filter in the decon unit is supposed to hold anything it can’t identify in stasis. But there’s nothing.”
She reaches out with a cautious finger and presses one of the raised areas.
As with her arm, the reaction is immediate. The nodules scoot away from the pressure.
Shuddering, Ethan yanks his arm away with a muffled curse. “What was that?” he demands. Even as he lowers his sleeve, he’s running his short fingernails over the area, trying to scratch and not scratch at the same time.
“I don’t know. Mine did the same thing. Vanished by this morning.” Ophelia shows him her arm, now smooth and unremarkable as ever. But have they vanished, though? Or simply relocated to somewhere she can’t see?
Dread swells in her.
They’re in trouble. Really in trouble. And maybe not the kind of trouble she’s been preparing for her whole life.
The memory of herself in that wavy mirror this morning, bloodied and uncertain, returns. She’s been living under the weight of her father’s actions for most of her life, fearing the possibility of becoming him, avoiding anything that reminds her of him. Maybe it’s time to take a different approach.
“There’s a sealable body bag in the medikit,” she offers finally. “In the Kellerson pack.”
His eyebrows lift slightly, but then he nods. “Good. Let’s go.”
It takes longer than it should, the whole process of just finding the scattered pieces of the medikit in Ophelia’s trashed office. Ethan had insisted on wearing envirosuits to go back into her office with the antigrav sled.
“You realize even if this is some kind of biological contaminant, we’re already infected,” Ophelia pointed out as they suited up in the airlock. “Possibly even through the suits.”
“We have no idea how it works, so we’re going to follow level five quarantine protocol,” he said. “By the book.”
By the book. Ethan is very much a rules-exist-for-a-reason type of person. He must despise everything about her existence. Nothing by-the-book about it.
“I’ve got it,” Ophelia says now, holding up the trifold fabric pack of old-school emergency instruments. It’s much lighter than it should be, which makes sense, given where one of the scalpels and the scissors are. “It was under the desk.” She pulls herself up with her other hand, using the edge of the desk. Even though their suits weigh the same inside and out of the hab, they are more cumbersome in an enclosed area.
Ethan joins her as she opens the pack. Most of the elastic tool loops are empty, leaving her to wonder where the rest of the instruments are. Scattered on the floor, perhaps.
“Are you sure it’s in there?” he asks.
The outer pocket of the pack looks much too thin to hold anything large enough for a body. And yet when she awkwardly sticks her gloved fingers in to search, something crinkles in response. With some clumsy maneuvering, she manages to tug the contents out—a thin rectangle of opaque plasti-seal the length of the open kit.
At Ethan’s doubting look, she starts to unfold it.
It is horribly thin, but it should do the job. “I don’t think it’ll hold up under the weather out there for very long,” Ophelia says. It’s not really meant for this kind of a thing. More just a temporary solution until the deceased can be placed in cold sleep—cold storage at that point—back on the ship.
“I hope we won’t need very long,” he says.
With the bag expanded to its full length and width, it’s harder to manipulate into place, flapping against Ophelia’s suit every time she moves forward. The last thing she wants to do is snag the bag and tear a hole in it.
At Birch’s feet, Ophelia hesitates. Theoretically, she and Ethan could drape it over Birch and then sort of wrestle it around the back of him, but sealing it would be tough.
“Here.” Ethan shoves the other lab table parallel to Birch. “We lay out the bag here and then…” He gestures between Birch and the other table.
Ever practical. Though Ophelia wishes at this moment she could remind him once again that she does not have experience dealing with death and the dead, with a couple (big) exceptions. She can’t even look at Birch, not without comparing and contrasting the living version with the empty flesh and bones that remain. His boots, not standard issue, are scuffed along the toes but otherwise highly cared for, and all she can think is that he won’t have a chance to polish those scuffs out.
She closes her eyes for a second, steeling herself for what they’re about to do. Then she steps to the other table.
With Ethan’s help, she gets the bag situated and the opening pulled as wide as possible. The seal is a simple activation strip. Once the two sides of the opening are pressed together, she just has to remove the strip, which should activate the sealant, theoretically one strong enough to prevent leakage even on a microcellular level.
“You take his feet. I’ve got this end,” Ethan says. If anything, he sounds colder, more professional than ever. His go-to defense when he’s actually feeling more, she’s pretty sure.
She moves to Birch’s scuffed boots, traces the scratches with a fingertip. She didn’t like Birch. Really didn’t like that he threatened her. But no one deserves this.
Ethan steps to Birch’s head. With a grunt of effort, he slips his arms beneath Birch’s armpits and pulls.
Birch flops upright, like a zombie version of sitting up. His left eye is still open, staring at her, the iris already gone cloudy and gray. The right is closed, courtesy of the pair of bandage scissors pinioning the lid to the eye beneath. Bloody fluid rolls out from beneath the lid. And—
“Wait, wait!” Ophelia says.
“What?” Ethan asks, voice tight with strain, emotional and physical.
“Was that … Did I miss that too?” She leaves Birch’s feet to point to the thick black fluid, like ink, slowly seeping from both nostrils. It screams wrong on a visceral level, raising prickles on her skin inside her suit.
But she has to ask, because if she didn’t see the scissors, it’s more than possible she missed this.
Ethan gently sets Birch’s upper body back on the table and then shifts to the side to look. Ophelia knows the moment he clocks what she’s talking about; the jolt of surprise runs through his whole body.
“What is that?” Ethan asks, retreating from the table. The calm in his voice is like reinforced steel, deliberate, unmovable.
“I don’t know.” Blood, drying blood, can have a blackish tinge to it, depending on conditions, but this is clearly not dry. And she’s pretty sure it’s not blood, either.
“No,” he says finally. “That wasn’t there this morning.”
“It’s coming out of his ears, too.” More of the black sludge is slipping from Birch’s left ear, presumably the right as well, curving into the topography of his outer ear.
Ophelia can feel it creeping, crawling into her own ear, and she instinctively reaches up to touch her ear, to reassure herself that it’s just her imagination, but finds her helmet instead.
“All right,” Ethan says. “Nothing’s changed.”
Ophelia wants to argue that, because unknown black stuff leaking out of major orifices qualifies as a big change in her book, but he’s right. They still need to get Birch out of here, the faster the better.
Ethan returns to the table, at Birch’s head once again, and a belated thought occurs to Ophelia.
“Hang on,” she says, searching the ground. She finds an unbroken sample vial from the medikit, with the seal still intact, and then rummages until she finds a still-wrapped swab.
“I suspect we’re going to have more than enough later,” Ethan says.
Ophelia pauses, swab in her gloved hand. “Was that an actual sense of humor I’m detecting, Commander?” she asks. “Perhaps you’re more ill than we realized.”
“Carry on, Doctor.”
Taking care not to get any on her suit, Ophelia swabs a gloppy sample from Birch’s nose and quickly transfers it to the vial, scraping as much of it as she can from the swab before resealing the vial. In an ideal situation, they should probably take a separate sample of the black stuff rolling out of his ears, but they are far from ideal here.
She tucks the used swab inside a corner flap of the body bag, where it will be sealed in with Birch.
“There.” Ophelia puts the sealed vial on her desk, which is still at odd angles with everything in the room after the chaos Birch evoked, and holds her hand over the vial for a moment, making sure it doesn’t roll off. What they can do with it, she has no idea, but at least they have it.
“Can we do this now?” Ethan’s prickly tone should get under her skin, but now that she knows he’s using it to cover strong emotions, it’s easier.
With grunting effort, they lift and then transfer Birch to the bag-covered table. More of the black sludge rolls out, as if their movements are pushing it out of him. Or like it’s oozing out with a purpose and mind of its own. It drips from his ears, landing on the expanded bag with a splat she can hear even with her helmet on. Her skin crawls like it’s trying to run away.
Moving as fast as she can, she hauls her side of the bag up and over Birch, and Ethan does the same on the opposite side. With some trial and error, they figure out that the side without the activation strip has to be tucked in, wrapped tightly around … the body. Emergency body bags do not come with instructions, and they should.
Once that’s done, Ophelia tugs the activation strip free and presses the edge into place. It makes a hissing noise and the bag bubbles and melts where the strip touches it. A chemical reaction of some kind.
“Okay,” she says, breathless.
Ethan ratchets up the antigrav sled until it’s closer to level with the table, and they transfer Birch. It’s not a good fit. The sled is meant for crates, cargo, equipment, boxed and stacked. Birch’s frame is too long, too person-shaped. No matter what they try, his covered and booted feet dangle.
“He deserves better,” Ethan says with harshness. “More dignity.”
“He does,” she agrees.
Ethan looks up at Ophelia in surprise.
“I don’t have to have gotten along with him to recognize that this is a shitty end.” Not to mention Birch had plenty of reason to hate her and more than enough terrible life experiences to earn him a better death, if things worked like that. They don’t, unfortunately.
Together, Ophelia and Ethan pull the sled out into the corridor and then into the central hub.
Kate, Suresh, and Liana are suited up and waiting near the main airlock.
Ethan stops, forcing Ophelia to halt as well. “I told you to seal yourselves in on the other—”
“We’re here for Birch,” Suresh says, steadfastly avoiding looking at Ophelia. It seems his anger hasn’t dissipated.
She can feel Ethan weighing his choices, whether the risk is large enough to push his authority on them or if it’s better to let them join.
As always, the team dynamics here are complicated for reasons she doesn’t understand. She’s tempted to step back out of the way, to make room for Suresh to take her place at the sled next to Ethan. But she’s beginning to suspect that her efforts to support the team, to help them see her as an advocate, have only raised suspicions about her motives instead of soothing them. Ethan thought she was trying to undermine his authority. She wasn’t, she’s not. But if you have a crew where leadership is in question from one side or another, it might seem like that. Ophelia came in trying to solve the wrong problem.
So she stays quiet and keeps her hand on the sled handle.
That seems to be the right move. After a moment, Ethan shakes his head. “Fine,” he says with a sigh, and the thick lines of tension winding around everyone slacken a little. “Keep your distance, don’t touch the bag. We don’t know what this is yet.”
Ophelia moves back to make room for Suresh, who takes her place with a sullen look.
The five of them make a somber procession into the main airlock and then out into the storm. The wind immediately tears at them, and the sled lifts and tilts under the gale.
For a second, it looks as though Birch is going to tumble off before they can even get clear of the hab.
Ophelia lunges forward to the side of the sled and then crouches down against the barreling force of the wind to press her hand flat on the bottom of the sled. Across the sled, Kate does the same.
In this slow, hobbling, uneven manner, they creep forward in the storm.
“Far enough,” Ethan says. “We need to be able to find our way back.” The snow clinks hard against Ophelia’s faceplate, gathering at the seal just at the edge of her vision.
Suresh starts to reach down for the bag surrounding Birch.
“No,” Ethan says sharply. Then he looks to Ophelia, and for a second she imagines she can see the battle being waged inside him, though in this weather it’s likely her imagination, extrapolating.
Then he says, “Doctor?”
“Why?” Suresh demands. “He was my friend, not—”
“Because we know we’ve already been affected,” Ethan says.
Suresh gives a derisive snort. “You don’t even know what it is, let alone how—”
Enough. “Do you have a rash or any kind of raised bumps on your arm?” Ophelia asks.
“No,” Suresh says after a moment, as if he wants to say yes just to prove a point. What point that would make, other than being a stubborn ass, she has no idea.
Which reminds Ophelia that they’ll need to do a thorough check on everyone when they get back in. And then, after that, they should probably have all the exposed quarantine together until they can get clearance to take off. God, this would be so much easier if she knew what she was doing.
“Then stay back,” Ethan says to Suresh. Ethan nods at Ophe- lia, and they move into the same positions as before, he at the head and Ophelia at the feet. But the storm makes it even harder, with the sled bobbing and wobbling and the wind tearing at Birch the moment they lift him. It’s less a gentle transfer of Birch to the ground and more like a partially controlled fall, ending with an audible thud.
Suresh makes a pained noise. “Fuck,” he mutters, kicking at the snow as he turns away.
Ophelia shifts to the opposite side, feeling very much like the funeral pallbearer that no one wanted to be there, and Ethan bends down to stab the pointed end of a makeshift flag into the snow. The bright orange fabric flaps in the wind, wrapping itself around the post.
Everyone stands in silence until Kate pushes forward to stand over Birch. At first Ophelia’s not sure why, then she sees Kate’s mouth moving. She’s saying something to him, on a private channel with Birch, whose helmet and suit are of course back in the hab. It’s a last chance to say what needs to be said.
When they retrieve Birch, they will be rushing to make the lander. Kate’s right to do it now.
Ophelia’s eyes sting at the final good-bye, one that so many can’t have.
Liana steps up after her and does the same as Kate. Ophelia gives her as much privacy as she can by not watching, though from the corner of her eye she sees Liana’s shoulders moving up and down in a gesture that speaks to crying.
Suresh moves into place, and just as Ophelia could read Liana’s body language as sadness, his anger comes through even without his words.
“Permission to return?” Kate asks in a clipped tone, even as Ethan starts forward to take his turn.
He closes his eyes for a second, then opens them. “Granted,” he says in that flat tone.
The three of them leave, hauling the sled behind them.
Ophelia’s not invited, but even if she was, she would have remained. Ethan is a lonely figure in front of Birch’s body. Empathy pulls at her. She wants to say something to help, but she doesn’t know what.
“I can’t keep anyone safe if they don’t talk to me,” he says. Almost exactly what he said before, only now he sounds more frustrated than angry.
Ophelia’s first temptation is to react defensively, assuming his words to be directed at her—he is after all on a channel with her, rather than speaking to Birch as the others did—but then it occurs to Ophelia that it’s not about her being Bloody Bledsoe’s daughter. It’s not even about Birch. Or not just about him. The damage is too old, too deep for that, both in Ethan and in the reactions of the others.
“Ava,” she says, disparate pieces coming together.
He doesn’t say anything at first. Then, after a moment, he says, “It was a routine assignment, just a drop and flop on Minos. HQ wanted a sample of some mineral that was registering on scans, but it was underground, through a system of old tunnels. Old.” He tips his head toward the remains of the city in the distance, signaling that he meant millennia rather than decades or even centuries.
“But when we checked it out, the passageway was blocked, and the whole thing looked shaky as hell. I called it, sent us back to the hab. By the book,” he says with a bitter laugh.
His sisters died in the Lunar Valley collapse; no wonder he was reluctant to push into those tunnels.
“So wait, if it wasn’t ERS, you’re telling me that Ava went back later on her own?” Ophelia is aghast. “Why?” There’s no bonus involved in taking those kinds of risks. In fact, Ethan would have been well within his rights to write Ava up, and she would have been immediately removed from the active roster.
He tips his head back to look up at the storm. “We need to head back to the hab. Now.”
“Ethan.” Her legs are shaking from bracing herself in the wind, but she’s not leaving, not until she hears the rest.
He shakes his head, and for a second she thinks he might just make good and walk away, forcing her to follow. But then he says, “I suppose that even if this isn’t covered under doctor–patient confidentiality, I have my own form of certainty that this stays between us?”
Ophelia grits her teeth. “Correct.” She waits for the threat, for the reminder of who she is.
But he just nods. “You know about the Challenge?”
She blinks, attempting to make the conversational leap. “What happened with Ava was about a dare?” Rumors of an underground competition among R&E teams to obtain the most valuable or rarest of items have been circulating for years. It’s mostly urban legend, according to Montrose’s Internal Affairs department. Something for teams to brag about over beers on leave and frighten the newbies.
“No, no. That is bullshit. Or maybe the Challenge was real once, I don’t know. Now it’s just a cover for the Nessers.”
Every once in a while, in life, there’s a moment where you sense that you’re balancing on a precipice, a before-and-after, with a question in the offing that you’re not sure you really want answered.
“Nessers?” Ophelia asks in a strangled voice.
“It’s a bastardization of NSR. New Silk Road. A black market where samples or artifacts from claimed planets are sold to competitors. Or the highest bidder. It’s not exactly a formalized process. Nessers are the ones who supply the product.”
Ophelia gapes at him. “How—”
“Just clip an extra sample for your ‘customer’ and slip it through with your personals, or so I hear.” He shrugs. “Other teams may sell on the market, but not my team, never my team.”
That sounds like a point of pride for him, but Ophelia can barely focus on it because she’s too busy reeling from the potential ramifications. Personal items go through a general decontamination process and quarantine, but that’s nothing like the stringent protocols for anything extraterrestrial brought back to their solar system from an assignment. “But the risks…” She can’t think straight. “That outbreak on New Rhodes, the plague they couldn’t get a handle on.” Thousands dead on a Montrose-claimed planet, an entire colony abandoned because of the virulence of a disease they couldn’t identify.
“Maybe the employers involved shouldn’t buy on the market then, if they don’t want their people selling on it,” he says flatly. “Or, here’s another possibility—they could treat their R&E people less like disposable garbage. Unions, medical care, pay increases for assignments with higher risk … all proposed, all rejected.”
“And that makes this okay?” Ophelia stomps toward him, nearly falling over in the snow. “People died!” God, it makes her dizzy thinking of all the lives lost.
“I’m not saying I like it,” he snaps. “I’m saying I understand it. If you leave a gap, desperate people will find a way to fill it. Capitalism isn’t only for the wealthy.”
“At what cost?” Ophelia demands.
“The costs don’t go just one way. And neither do the deaths, as you well know,” he says.
His sisters. Her father’s victims. All of them, in one way or another, could be listed as victims of greed. The Lunar Valley should have been reinforced years before, with better infrastructure. Goliath and the others should have been retrofitted with new equipment, new safety protocols.
But that’s not what he means, not this time.
“Ava’s daughter,” Ophelia breathes. Experimental treatment that isn’t covered. That’s what Liana said, back that first day.
“She needed the money. But I didn’t know it was happening until it was over. I would have stopped it,” he says. “I would have stopped her. I still don’t know how she left the hab without it notifying us.”
Disgust curls through Ophelia. “That hardly makes you the hero,” she points out. “You know what’s happening, and you haven’t told anyone, when people are being hurt!”
He laughs, a dark, humorless sound. “How’s the view from that glass house, Doctor?”
Ophelia takes a step back, stumbling a little, physically repulsed by the idea. “I … that’s not the same. Not at all.” Isn’t it, though, Lark Bledsoe?
“If you say so,” he says, in that same even tone that somehow manages to scream the opposite of his words.
Before she can even find an opening to argue, or decide how to argue it, he continues.
“Besides, reporting won’t stop it. The companies, they’re all too dependent on the market.” He shakes his head. “They’ll change the name, take it deeper underground. In the meantime, how many R&E teams would lose their jobs as part of the cover-up?”
In that moment, she can see it playing out. The press releases from Montrose, the grave statements of concern from Pinnacle, Generex, Mivida, Li Qi, and others, and the lower-level sacrificial lambs who would be fired or jailed to “make things right.”
Ethan’s right. It wouldn’t matter. The power imbalance is tipped too far to one side, even with the existence of a black market. A swirl of despair—one that has always spun in Ophelia, sometimes a small dark cloud, other times a funnel cloud of hopelessness consuming everything in its path—lurches to life, gripping her chest and cutting off her breath.
“Anyway, none of that matters. The point is, Kate, Suresh, all of them, they don’t entirely trust me anymore. I wouldn’t let them go after Ava, once we figured out where she’d likely gone.” Shame and frustration color his voice.
“That’s your job,” Ophelia manages. “To make the ugly choices and keep them safe.”
“Yes, but doing my job then is making it impossible to do it now, if they won’t tell me anything. Ava’s death is my responsibility because she was my team member, but Birch’s…” He takes a deep breath. “That’s my fault.”
“You can do the right thing and still end up being fucked,” Ophelia says flatly. Not her finest moment, but at this exact second she can’t seem to summon even a thin facade of optimism.
A glimmer of a smile emerges on Ethan’s face. “That your professional opinion?”
“I think it’s more along the line of a universal truth, but sure, if you want to go with that.” She shrugs. “Not helpful but accurate.”
“It might be more helpful than you realize,” he says, after a moment. “Thank you.”
Lightning flashes above them, followed by a booming crack of thunder.
“We’re done. Now.” Ethan turns toward the hab, authority back in place.
They haven’t gone more than a few steps before she has to ask, “Are you … you’re sure that all of them are involved? The corporations. The New Silk Road thing.”
Ethan glances over at her with pity, and she hates herself for asking. But since she’s going to hate herself anyway, might as well know. She’s always struggled with her Bray side, but not nearly as much as with her Bledsoe half. “At least they never killed anyone” is not exactly high praise, but it’s not nothing, either. Now she’s not so sure she chose the right side of that moral conflict. If there even is a right side to it.
She’s tried to build a new self out of the unobjectionable parts of her past. But now it feels like there are no unobjectionable parts, no ground on which to build her identity. Like she’s creating an imitation of a semidecent human out of shit, blood, and corruption.
“Why else do you think the market still exists?” he asks. “None of them can rat out the others without being caught in the net themselves.”
“Right.” Ophelia nods, sickness welling in her.
When lightning slashes behind them, she can’t help but turn and look back. The gray sky is violet now, the white lace of lightning spreading across it in jagged embroidered lines.
Back near where they left Birch, not far from where the flag twists and squirms in the torturous wind, a glint of metal in the snow catches the flash of lightning, a spark of brightness.
Liana’s spider; it has to be. The one that found the Pinnacle R&E body. They must not be far from him, from Delacroix.
We’re creating our own impromptu morgue out here.
That feels like an omen, or just fucking bad luck. Either way.