After the Gamarra, Marco had come home drunk and happy from his celebration. She’d told him to be quiet, not to wake the baby. Marco had swooped her up in his arms, twirling her in the little room until her ankle hit the bed and she yelped with pain. He’d put her down then, rubbing the little injury. Kissing it. He’d looked up at her with a smile that asked as much as it promised, and she’d thought about whether they could make love quietly enough that Filip would keep sleeping. That was what she’d been thinking of when he destroyed her.

“Managed it, us. You, que si?”

“Managed what?” she asked, leaning back against the gel of the bed.

“Got even for Terryon Lock,” Marco said. “Stood up for the Belt. For us. For him.”

Marco nodded toward the baby. Filip’s thumb had been in his sleep-slack mouth, his eyes so closed they seemed like they’d never open again. She’d known before she understood what she knew. An electric cold washed her heart, her belly, all her body. Marco sensed it. The memory of his quizzical smile looking up past her knee was still burned in her mind.

“What did I manage?” she said.

“Perfect crime,” he said. “First of many.”

She understood. The Gamarra had been killed with her code. The people who died there were dead because of her, and all of Rokku’s rough talk and ranting had stopped being empty banter. Marco was a killer now. She was too. They’d gone on to make love anyway, him too warm and dangerous to refuse, her too much in shock even to understand how much she wanted to object. She hated the fact, but they had. It was the beginning of the dark times, but looking back, all the rest of it – the depression, the fear, the loss of Filip, her failed suicide – had all been implicit in that night.

The script over the doors of hell, writ small.

Renting a hole by the port was easy. She had enough money to buy anonymous credit, route it through an off-station exchange, and bring it back to a mayfly shadow account. It only felt strange doing it because she hadn’t had to go through those motions in so long. Not since she’d signed on to the Canterbury, and that felt like it had been seven lifetimes ago.

She sat on the thin gel bed and waited for the weeping and nausea to stop. They would, even though at the worst of it, they felt like they might not. Then she took a long shower, changed into a fresh set of clothes purchased from a kiosk. Watching the hard puck of compressed cloth expand into a jumpsuit reminded her of an insect pulling itself out of its shell. It seemed like it should be a metaphor for something.