Leo stared at the datachip in his hand, wondering what he was supposed to do with it now.

And how his father could have been so wrong about everything all at once.

Leo didn’t think that he would sleep, that he could sleep, but he was wrong.

Folding up Kat’s bloodied jacket for a pillow, Leo somehow managed to drift off on the cold steel floor, still clutching his father’s chip, Baz trusting him to hold on to it for a change. There had been some debate about what to do with it next, now that Crayt was a bust. Once the Aykari had vanished deeper into the compound long ago abandoned by the rest of his kind, the crew of the Icarus had circled up to discuss, each member putting in their two pentars.

Kat had voted to just tackle the Aykari, strap him into one of the chairs, and force him to comply with their demands. She said she could persuade him using some of the tactics she’d learned running the streets on Andural—something about a pair of pliers and working on each finger one by one. Skits was enthusiastically behind the idea until Baz pointed out that threatening Crayt would probably only result in Number Nine going ballistic. And as much as this dusty planet reminded him of the Wild West, he wasn’t interested in having an old-fashioned gunfight at the edge of a mine shaft. Boo had no idea what the Wild West was, but he was very much in favor of not getting shot at again.

“We have to do something,” Leo pleaded.

“I know, kid. But Crayt’s clearly made up his mind,” Baz said. “We can’t force him to help—even with a pair of pliers. We will do something, but I’m not going to try and find our way back to the ship in the dark. So we stay here, sleep on it, and make our decision in the morning. Patch up the Icarus as best we can and get the hell off this dust pile. We’ve still got enough juice left to get this chip into someone’s hands.”

“Yeah, but whose?” Kat asked.

It was clear from the look on his face that Baz had no idea.

Who do you trust, Bastian Black? Leo wondered. But he already knew all the possible answers to that question because he was looking at them. And unfortunately, for all their skills—admirable or otherwise—none of the pirates were geniuses relative to their kind.

“Skits, you’re on watch. You see anything suspicious—anything at all—you wake us, got it?”

“What. Ever,” Skits huffed. She took up her position by the corridor and activated her scanner; a soft yellow beam slowly arced around the room like a lighthouse’s roving eye. Clearly the captain didn’t buy the Aykari’s promises either.

“It’s all right,” Boo told Leo. “We’ll figure something out. You should try to sleep. You can use one of my arms as a pillow if you’d like. Just not the one with the bandage. It’s still a little sore.”