Her hand terminal showed a half-dozen new messages from Jim. She didn’t play them. If she had, the temptation to reply – to confess to him and take comfort in him, to talk to someone she trusted completely – would have been too much. And then he would have felt obligated to do something. To come and fix things. To insert himself into the messes that she’d made and the things she’d done. The distance between here and there, between Marco and the Rocinante, was too precious to sacrifice. The time for comfort would come later, when she’d done the things she needed to do. When she’d saved Filip. When she’d escaped Marco. So she didn’t play the messages. But she didn’t delete them either.

Even back on with Rokku, Marco had been cultivating himself as a leader. He’d been good at it. No matter how bad things got, he’d always managed to make it seem like each new hurdle was something he’d factored in, every solution – even ones he’d logically had nothing to do with – was somehow his brilliance. He’d explained once how he managed it.

The trick, he said, is to have a simple plan that more or less can’t go wrong so that you always have something, and then stack your risks on that. Have another alternative that won’t work but maybe one time in a hundred, and if it happens, you look like a god. And then one that won’t work but one time in twenty, that if it lands you look like you’re the smartest one in the room. And then one that’s only one time in five, but you look like you knew you could do it. And if everything else fails, you’ve still got the one that would always win.

If there was a single phrase for Marco, that was it: always win.

She wondered more than once over the years where she’d been on that scale. Had she been his one-in-a-hundred or his sure thing? She’d never known, and there was no way that she ever would. It didn’t even matter to her anymore, except the way a missing finger itched sometimes.

And now here she was again, doing what he wanted. He’d made her complicit in his plans, whatever they were. This time, though, she knew who she was dealing with. She wasn’t the girl who he’d tricked into sabotaging the Gamarra. She wasn’t a love-struck teenager in over her head. And Filip wasn’t a baby that could be spirited away and held as hostage against her good conduct. Her silence.

And so maybe – maybe – this was the moment she’d wanted. Maybe calling her in was Marco’s mistake. She pushed the idea away. It was too dangerous, too complicated. Too likely to be what Marco had known she would think.