“I’m going to be busy the next few days putting Tycho in order for Drummer. I’d like you to oversee the crews on the Roci.”

“Wasn’t going to do anything else.”

“Fair enough,” Fred said. And then, almost wistfully, “It will be good to see Luna again.”

Holden tried to wait until he got back to his quarters, but lost patience when he reached the lift. He opened Alex’s message and set up the camera to record his reply.

“Hey, Alex. So, funny thing. Looks like I’m going to be catching up with you sooner than we’d thought…”

Chapter Twenty-nine: Naomi

She’d known to expect it. Like falling back into a bad habit, the dark thoughts came: which conduits had power lines in them with enough voltage to stop a heart, which rooms were small enough to seal and evacuate, the ways the medical bays could be tricked into administering an overdose. And the airlocks. Always the airlocks. The ideas weren’t compulsions, not yet. They were just her brain noticing things that interested her. The worst would come later. If she let it.

So instead, she distracted herself. Not with the newsfeeds that played constantly, everywhere. Those only made her feel more helpless. Not with the conversations with her old friends. At best, those left her feeling like she was lying. At worst, like she was becoming an earlier version of herself for whom the dark thoughts were more natural. What she did have was work. It was all simple tasks like checking inventories and swapping air filters, and always under the watchful eyes of a minder. When she did talk, it was polite and superfluous; the kind of banter anyone crewing the same ship would make. It gave the rest of the crew the illusion that she was one of them in a way that sulking in her bunk wouldn’t have. If she had any hope at all, it came from finding a way to leverage her weird non-status with the group. And with Marco.