“He thinks he can buy me.” His voice faltered, choked by bitter resentment. “He thinks he can drop me because I’m inconvenient, and then pick me up again when I’m suddenly useful.” Arms still raised, he balled his fists. “Well, as Alva would say, ‘Fuck that.’ I’ve got a place here, if you’ll still have me, and here’s where I’m staying.”

He let his arms drop and stalked past me to the door, his cheeks burning. I let him go. He looked as if he was about to burst into tears, and I wanted to save him the embarrassment of doing so in front of everyone else.

“How about you, Childe?”

The man in the carbon exoskeleton stepped forward. “As the kid says, they only want us when we’re useful. And there’s no way I’m going back to smuggling weapons. I’m out of that game, and I’m out for good.” His face was thinner than it had been when I’d first met him, a handful of days before. His eyes were sunken, his chin unshaven, and the lines on his forehead seemed more pronounced. He gave a half-hearted smile and rubbed the back of his neck.

“So, you’re staying?”

“If you can get me to a hospital and get this thing off me before it kills me, then I’m Reclamation all the way, Captain.”

I narrowed my eyes. “And why should I trust you?” An image sprang into my mind, of the moment, two nights ago, when he had thrown me across a table in the infirmary.

Seemingly reading my thoughts, he stretched out his arms. “You won’t get any trouble from me. I’m finished with the Conglomeration, and I’m not really fit for anything else. Where else have I got to go?”

I ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth, considering Alva Clay’s chest drain. There was no way Preston would have been capable of performing such an operation, and that could only mean Childe had been the one to save her life. Perhaps I felt I owed him something for that.

“Can you get Clay to the sick bay?”

“Captain, it would be my pleasure.”

I lowered my weapon. “Then go now, quickly,” I said, “before I change my mind.”

“Okay.” He reached for Alva, but she stepped away from him before he could help her.

“No,” she said, waving the point of her knife in Ona Sudak’s direction. “Before I go, I want to know who this is. I want to know why she’s so goddamn important that the Conglomeration are willing to kill an RV to get to her. And why they sent two Carnivores and a fucking Scimitar to find her.”

Sudak had been watching proceedings from in front of the box in which she’d arrived. Now, as we turned to her, she lowered her hands.