She sighed, and shot a glance at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. ‘It doesn’t take a shrink to figure you out, Saul. First you let Mitchell talk you into that insane orbital jump, then you started drinking too much, like you were deliberately trying to kill yourself.&rsququo

He glared at her. ‘I was not trying to get myself killed,’ he snapped, a little too loudly. Seeing the barman glance their way, he lowered his voice. ‘It’s just . . .’

‘Just what?’

He fingered his drink and, noticing the way she looked at it, gulped it down as if in defiance. It coated his tongue with a sticky numb fieriness.

‘There was more to the jump we made than that,’ he said firmly. ‘You remember Mitch’s brother?’

She nodded. ‘Danny? I only met him once.’

‘You know he died?’

She nodded.

‘Mitchell blamed himself for it,’ Saul continued. ‘Felt he hadn’t been there for him. Do you know the actual details?’

She hesitated. ‘In the sketchiest sense, yes. But all of that happened after . . . after us. After you’d moved on from the Jupiter station.’

Saul had first met Olivia on being assigned, along with Mitchell, to security on the Jupiter orbital platform. The station had been huge even then, constantly growing as pre-assembled units were shipped there via the Inuvik gate back on Earth. Her husband, Jeff, had worked on experimental helium-dredges dropped into the Jovian atmosphere, while Olivia herself had served as the platform’s communications specialist. The sheer scale of the station made it easy for the couple to avoid each other once they’d decided to separate.

‘Mitchell and Danny both grew up near the DMZ in post-partition Chicago,’ Saul went on, and Olivia nodded to signify that this much she knew. ‘It was still a pretty rough place, even a couple of decades after the war. Mitch joined the ASI just to get away from the gangs, but . . .’

‘Danny didn’t?’

‘No.’ Saul could feel a sour taste building in the back of his throat. ‘Danny disappeared, and Mitchell was frantic. He asked me to help try and find him. I was already doing undercover work, so had an idea how to track him down. To cut a long story short, I was the one who found him.’

Olivia had that faraway look that told Saul she was accessing public records on the incident. ‘He got himself involved with traffickers,’ she said, glancing back at Saul a moment later. It was a statement, not a question.

‘I eventually found him in an illegal gene-lab that had been set up in an abandoned apartment building. The traffickers Danny had been working for were all long gone when I discovered him.’

‘They killed him?’

‘That’s whatthe coroner’s report said.’ He could clearly picture Danny’s lifeless face, still twisted up in anger. ‘The lab had been developing customized embryos for unregulated off-world labour markets. Slaves, essentially.’