Filip looked at her, his lips pressed thin. His fingers too aware of the trigger on his gun. He should have looked threatening, but he mostly looked scared. And angry. Sending a son on a kidnap job was the sort of thing Marco would do. It wasn’t that it was cruel, though it was cruel. It wasn’t that it would corrode any relationship that they might have had, though it did that too. It was only that it would work. Even putting Filip on Ceres looked like a manipulation now. Here is your son, where you left him. Come into the mousetrap and take him back.

And she’d done it. She didn’t know if she was more disappointed in Filip or herself. They were two very different kinds of disappointment, and the one pointed at her had more poison in it. She could forgive Filip anything. He was a boy, and living with Marco in his head. Forgiving herself was going to be harder, and she didn’t have much practice.

When the outer airlock cycled, she suffered a wave of disorientation. The passage was the usual design of inflated Mylar and titanium ribs. There was nothing about it that looked strange. It wasn’t until they’d nearly reached the other side that she recognized the smell of it: tangy and deep and probably carcinogenic. The outgassing of volatile organics from the cloth.

“This is new?” she said.

“We don’t talk about it,” Filip said.

“We don’t talk about much, do we?” she snapped, and he looked back at her, surprised by the bite in her voice. You think you know what I am, she thought, but all you’ve got is stories.

The airlock of the other ship was weirdly familiar. The curve was like the airlock on the Roci, and the design of the latch. Martian design. And more than that, Martian Navy. Marco had come into a military ship. Inside, soldiers waited. Unlike the ragged group on Ceres, they wore a rough kind of uniform: gray jumpsuits with the split circle on their arms and breasts. Against the clean design of the ship’s corridor, they looked like bad costumes in a play with good set design. The guns were real though, and she didn’t doubt they’d use them.

The bridge looked like the Rocinante’s younger brother. After the cheap, barely-enough aesthetic of the Chetzemoka, military-grade crash couches and terminal displays looked solid and reassuring. And there, in the center of it all like he’d posed himself, floated Marco. He wore something like a military uniform, but without any insignia.