“I can take a Breathalyzer,” Rosalyn chirped, too chipper. “If you like?”

“Not necessary, not at all.” Girdy waved her off, but she saw the little flicker of panic in his eyes. “Trust, am I right? That’s what this is all about. The company, our mission here, all of it. Trust.”

Rosalyn watched him internally meander around for a moment. Clearly, he wasn’t finished, and he kept fishing in his pockets but never bringing anything out. His eyes darted up to hers, oddly blank and sharklike, almost black. She felt those drums in her head again, the pounding nerves, the sense that something bad was coming and she was powerless to stop it.

“Your reports really are good,” he finally said, reaching to scratch nervously at his Adam’s apple. “Thorough. Exacting. It’s why, you know, we noticed, when things started to dip. But I listened to your report from this week. The Reevey case.”

Captain Reevey. The killer. Not Captain Murder Ship, as Owen had so descriptively called him. Rosalyn nodded, still feeling as if she were somehow in trouble. Girdy kept rocking on his heels, never settling, never going still.

“It was solid work, Devar. That’s partially why you’re even here and not on a transport back to Tokyo Bliss Station. I’m interested to see how this goes. There’s been, um, a string of this kind of thing lately, and to be completely honest, upper management is getting fidgety. First Reevey, then the Quant-7 . . .”

The Quant-7 had been Alexia’s last gig, the one that had driven her to babbling about talking trees. Something was off. Two completely liquefied crews in one week? That was odd by any metric.

“This is a full code blue, and that doesn’t look good for us, so please, if you see anything weird, anything that strikes you as unusual, make a note of it, all right? Maybe bring it to me first.”

Rosalyn lifted a brow at that. What Girdy was suggesting wasn’t procedure, and he knew it, blowing out a nervous breath and rocking faster on his feet.

“It was me, you know, that got you this last assignment,” he reminded her, focusing those shark eyes directly into hers. “Favor for a favor?”

It was her turn to check that Walters wasn’t around. She quashed the urge to squirm and shrugged. “You sound like you’re expecting us to find something weird.”

“It is weird,” Girdy replied with a grunt. “People are dropping like flies around here, Devar. I think maybe one of us should try to find out why, and without all the, you know, stupid bullshit red tape upper management likes to toss up.”