Marco touched something else on his hand terminal, and the screens sprang to life. Exterior cameras, probably connected to the point defense. The Chetzemoka burned not more than a hundred meters away, a docking tube clinging to her airlock like an umbilical cord. A ship that, if they dug hard enough, would trace back to her. The payments that had come from her accounts.

“Put it on intersecting course, more or less,” Marco said, his voice weary and sorrowful in a way she was certain hid glee. “Set the bottle to fail when the proximity sensors ping a ship. Didn’t have to be this way, but it does now.”

A real despair rose up in her throat, and she pushed it back down. It was what Marco wanted, so she would do anything, feel anything except that. She considered the screen. The ship looking like a box held together with one line of solder and some epoxy.

“You’re stealing it from your own son,” she said. Marco frowned. Naomi pointed toward the screen with her chin. “The Chetzemoka. I told Filip he could have it when we were here. That’s his ship. You’re stealing it from him.”

“Necessity of war,” Marco said.

“Shitty parenting.”

His jaw slid forward. His hands balled in fists. For a moment, she thought he was going to make it easy. He’d show whatever audience he was playing for who and what he really was. He got his temper back in time, and she wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed.

“If you’d stayed in your place, James Holden would have lived. But you stepped out. Put yourself where you didn’t belong. Because of you, he’s going to die.”

Naomi stood up, rubbed her eye with the back of her hand. Her false voice repeated through the mess hall – “Tell James Holden I am in distress…”

“Anything else?”

“You pretend you don’t care,” Marco said. “But you do.”

“You say so.” She shrugged. “I got a little bump. It’s giving me a headache. Or something is. Going to med bay get it fixed, yeah?”

“You can pretend —”

“Can I pretend in the med bay? Or do you need to go on impressing me?” It was too much. She felt a flood of words hammering up behind all she’d said. You are an egomaniac and a sadist and I can’t believe I ever thought I loved you and If Jim dies, I will by God find a way to make the bottle on this ship fail and we’ll all go to hell behind him. But engaging was also a trap, so she didn’t. She let the silence break the rhythm of Marco’s performance and saw his shoulders shift when he gave up and stepped off the stage in his head.