His arms tightened around her, pinning her arms to her sides. He reared back, lifting her feet off the deck. Something bit at the flesh of her thigh and Karal limped back, needle still in his hand. Naomi thrashed, slamming her knee into Cyn’s body. The vicious embrace pressed the air out of her. She bit Cyn’s shoulder where she could reach it and tasted blood. The big man’s voice was soft and lulling in her ears, but she couldn’t tell what the words were anymore. A numbness spread along her leg and up into her belly. Cyn seemed to fall with her locked in his arms, but he never landed. Only spun backward into space without his legs ever leaving the deck.

“Don’t do this,” she gasped, but her voice seemed to come from far away. “Please don’t do this.”

“Had to, Knuckles,” Cyn said. “Was the plan immer and always, sa sa? What it’s all about.”

A thought came to her and then slid away. She tried to land her knee in his crotch, but she wasn’t sure where her legs were anymore. Her breath was loud and close. Over Cyn’s shoulder, she saw the others standing beside the gantry to the ship. Her ship. Filip’s ship. They were all turned to watch her. Filip was among them, his face empty, his eyes on her. She thought she might have cried out, but it could only have been something she imagined. And then, like a light going out, her mind stopped.

Chapter Twenty: Alex

When piloting a ship – any ship – there was a point where Alex’s sense of his body reached out to subtly include the whole vessel. Coming to know how that individual ship felt as she maneuvered – how the thrust gravity cut out as that particular drive shut down, how long the flip took at the midpoint of a run – all of it made a deep kind of intimacy. It wasn’t rational, but it changed how Alex felt about himself. His sense of who he was. When he’d gone from the massive, stately heft of the colony-ship-turned-ice-hauler Canterbury to the fast-attack frigate that had become the Rocinante, it had been like turning twenty years younger.