“People call me Amos now.”

Erich laughed. “Guess I knew that, right?”

“Guess you did,” Amos said. Erich looked good. Healthy in a way he’d never looked as a kid. He even had a middle-aged man’s spare tire around the gut. He still had the small, shriveled left arm. And from the way he was standing, he looked like he’d still walk with a limp. But now, surrounded by his success and his well-fed chubbiness, they looked like trophies of a past life instead of disabilities in the current one.

“So,” Erich said, “kind of wondering what you’re doing in town.”

“He beat up Troy,” one of the guards said. “And Laci says he manhandled her some too.”

“Did he kill anyone?” Erich asked. When neither guard answered, he said, “Then he’s still being polite.”

“That’s right,” Amos agreed with an amiable nod. “Not here to mess up your shit, just here to chat.”

“So,” Erich said, sitting back down on his rubber ball chair, “let’s chat.”

Chapter Eleven: Alex

Three days after he’d seen Talissa – for what he had to think now was the last time – and gone afterward to eat with Bobbie Draper, Alex knew it was time to go home. He’d had dinners with family and a couple old friends; he’d seen the ways his old hometown had changed and the ways it hadn’t. And he’d determined once again that sometimes a broken thing couldn’t be fixed. That was the closest he was going to get to having it be okay.

But before he left, there was one more person he was going to disappoint.

The express tube to Londres Nova hummed to itself, the advertisements above the seats promising to make the lives of the riders better in a hundred different ways: technical certifications, improved undergarments, tooth whitening. The facial-recognition software didn’t seem to know what to make of him. None of the ads spoke to him. The closest was a thin lawyer in an olive-green suit offering to help people find passages to the new systems beyond the Ring. Start a new life in the off-world colonies! We can help!

Across from him, a boy of about seventeen was staring quietly into space, his eyes half-open at the edge of boredom and sleep. When Alex had been about the boy’s age, he’d been deciding whether to go into the Navy or apply for upper university. He’d been dating Kerry Trautwine even though Mr. Trautwine was a religious zealot who hated him for not belonging to the right sect. He’d spent his nights playing battle simulations with Amal Shah and Korol Nadkarni.

This boy across from him was traveling the same corridors that Alex had, eating at some of the same restaurants, thinking about sex in likely more or less the same terms, but he also lived in a different universe. Alex tried to imagine what it would have been like to include travel to an alien planet in among his options at seventeen. Would he have still enlisted? Would he have met Talissa?