“There weren’t supposed to be. But you didn’t load the crates, and neither did I. Neither did Nico and Bao. Dag and Henke did that.”

Dag would have loaded anything Adam told him to load, and Henke would have been happy to include more weapons. Nico wouldn’t have known. He had always been careless, but even so he wouldn’t have fired a projectile explosive into our cargo if he had known it would be deadly. Dag and Henke could not have meant to risk the precious lives of our family. We needed Boudicca. We needed Nico and Bao. Nobody was expendable. It had to have been an accident.

“But why?” I said. “We don’t need explosives. We need—needed supplies. And why hasn’t Dag said anything?”

“I don’t think the explosives were for us.”

I thought we were going to kill them, Henke had said.

“Adam never intended to release the hostages,” Malachi said.

I shook my head, wanting to deny it. But it was all too easy to see Adam’s plan. He would have sent the shuttle away. He would have invited SPEC to fetch their students. He would have smiled when the rescue ship was close enough, and he would have smiled when the explosion consumed both vessels. He would have called it a lesson more merciful than what they deserved.

“But the woman who killed Henke,” I said desperately. “How could she do that? She’s supposed to be a student, but she—she could be . . .”

“I think Bhattacharya was telling the truth. I think she was infected somehow, when she tore her suit and scraped herself. It made her delusional, made her lash out. She got lucky with Henke. He was careless.”

Henke had been confident, grinning, looking for a fight. He had been twice her size. He had not thought she was a threat.

“Zahra,” Malachi said, “we can’t stay here. We have to keep moving.”

He sounded as tired as I felt. I wanted to close my eyes and rest, the two of us alone in the darkness, sleep until the cold drained away and the ache in my head was gone and the sour taste of fear had faded from my throat. I couldn’t remember the last time I had tried to choose right and wrong for myself. I felt cold and hollow, as papery as the savaged corpses. Nadra and Anwar were on their way. I had promised them safety. I had promised them peace. We were supposed to be together here, and happy.

But our dream of a new life, of freedom and beauty unshackled in the stars, it had been dead before we left the ground. I understood now the fear I had seen on Bhattacharya’s face aboard the shuttle, and the horror in his voice when Ariana began to panic. He had known what we were too arrogant to see. House of Wisdom was not a sanctuary. It was an abyss. It had taken nearly five hundred lives already. If we brought the family here, it would swallow three hundred more.