It was the wrong thing to say. The boy flinched, drawing into himself like a snail’s feeler touched with salt. The feed changed. The dead and missing on Earth had topped two hundred million. A cheer went up all through the galley.

“Is that why you left?” Filip asked. “Couldn’t handle doing the work?”

She sat silent for a long moment. Then, “Yes.”

“Better that you went, then,” Filip said. She told herself he didn’t mean it. It was just something he said to hurt her. It worked. But more than that, she felt a vast sorrow for all the things her baby boy might have been that he wasn’t. For the child she could have had in him, if there had been a way. But she’d left her child in the hands of a monster, and the infection had spread. A family of monsters, father and mother and child.

It made it easier.

“Weighed on me,” she said. “All those dead people because of what I’d done. I tried to leave. Told him I wouldn’t turn him in if he just let me take you and go. So instead he took you away. Said I was acting crazy, and he didn’t trust me around you. That if anyone was getting turned in, it would be me.”

“I know,” Filip said. Spat. “He told me.”

“And I was going to have to do it again. And again. And again. Kill more people for him. I tried to do it too. Tried to push through. Let them die. He tell you I tried to kill myself?”

“Yeah,” Filip said. She should stop. She didn’t need to put this on him. Her little boy. Her little boy who’d just helped kill a world.

God, she still wanted to protect him. How stupid was that? He was a murderer now. He needed to know.

“I was at an airlock on Ceres Station. Rigged it to open. All I needed to do was step out. It was an old-style one. Blue and gray. And it smelled like fake apple. Something about the recycler there. And, anyway, I did it. I triggered it. Only the station had put in a fail-safe I didn’t know about. So.” She shrugged. “That was when I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That I couldn’t save you. You could have a gone mother or a dead one. Those were all the options.”

“Some people aren’t meant to be soldiers,” Filip said. It was meant to cut, but she was past feeling now.

“The only right you have with anyone in life is the right to walk away. I would have taken you with me if I could. But I couldn’t. I would have stayed if I could. But I couldn’t. I would have saved you if I could.”

“I didn’t need saving.”