Avasarala frowned. “You’re not?”

“Well, mostly I’m a mechanic. But the idea that the UN has a file on me somewhere that lists me as the Rocinante’s killer? That’s kind of awesome.”

“You say that kind of thing, it doesn’t make me think we’re wrong, you know.”

“So,” Amos said, shrugging with his shoulders like an Earther, his hands still behind his back, “we done here?”

“Mostly,” Avasarala said. “How was everyone when you left? Good?”

“Roci got beat to shit during the Ilus thing. But crew’s good. Alex is trying to reconnect with an ex. Captain and Naomi are still rubbing uglies pretty regular. Same same, mostly.”

“Alex is on Mars?”

“Well, his ex is. I assume he’d head over there, but he was still on Tycho last I saw him.”

“That’s interesting,” Avasarala said. “Not the part where he’s reconnecting with his ex-wife, though. No one ever tries that without seeming like an asshole.”

“Right?”

“Well,” Avasarala said, then looked up at someone offscreen. She smiled and accepted a steaming cup from a disembodied hand, then took a long sip and sighed with pleasure. “Thank you for meeting with me, Mr. Burton.”

“Oh, it was my pleasure.”

“Please keep in mind that my name is pretty closely connected with the Rocinante, Captain Holden, and his crew at this point.”

“So?” Amos said with another shrug.

“So,” Avasarala said, then put her steaming cup down and leaned forward again. “If you’re about to do something I’ll need to cover up later, I’d appreciate a call first.”

“You got it, Chrissie.”

“Honestly. Fucking stop that,” she said with a smile.

The screen went black, and the woman who’d stopped him at the port came in. Amos pointed to the screen with his chin.

“I think she likes me.”

The street level view of New York wasn’t all that different from the Baltimore streets he’d grown up on. Lots of tall buildings, lots of automated street traffic, lots of people stratified into two distinct groups: those who had someplace to be, and those who didn’t. The employed scuttled from public transit to office buildings and back again at shift change. They bought things from street vendors, the simple fact of having currency a mark of status. Those on basic drifted and bartered, living on the excess created by the productive, and adding to it where they could with under-the-table industry too small for the government to notice.

Drifting among them like ghosts, invisible to anyone not from their world, was a third group. The ones who lived in the cracks. Thieves looking for an easy score. Pushers and con artists and prostitutes of every age group, every point on the spectrum of gender and sexual orientation. The kind of people Amos had once been. A corner pusher saw him looking and frowned back, seeing Amos for what he was without recognizing him. It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be in town long enough for it to get to anyone who’d come demanding to know where he fit in their ecosystem.