“I’d like to speak with the captain,” M’Baga said. There was a click as he unclasped his harness.

“This will be fun,” Henke said. I glanced at him. He was smiling.

Panya caught my eye over the tops of the seats. I nodded. It was time.

Dag drew a gun from a compartment in the crew area and pointed it at M’Baga. His face carried none of Panya’s serenity or Henke’s pleasure, nor was there the slightest hesitation in his voice when he said, “You don’t need to talk to the captain.”

M’Baga stilled, looking from Panya to Dag. “What’s going on?”

“You’re going to remain in your seat.” Panya raised her own weapon; her hands trembled. “Fasten your harness, please.”

Henke took two weapons from the rear compartment and pressed one into my hand. We were not carrying the suppression weapons the Councils favored to subdue people using electric shock or sedation. These were projectile weapons designed for use in space. Most of the passengers had probably never seen one before except on news reports or in history books. The Councils saved their violence for those they could not control, not the sheep who submitted to their will.

Nothing has weight in space, but there was a pull to the gun’s mass that I could not ignore, and it made my motions awkward. I caught the slightest sneer of disapproval on Henke’s broad red face. I ignored it.

“What’s going on?” M’Baga said again. He was speaking calmly, deliberately slowing his words, as though we were wild animals and he meant to tame us. “What do you want?”

“Please stay in your seats,” Panya said. “We don’t want you to get hurt.”

“If you tell us what you want, we can help,” the professor said.

The passengers gaped at Panya and Dag, all of them transfixed and on the verge of panic. I had not expected fear to mesmerize them so easily. They could not look away as Panya repeated herself, told the professor to stay quiet, told the students to remain seated. She spoke in the same soft way she used to when teaching children on the homestead, and like those children, the passengers were captivated by her voice—save one.

Bhattacharya was not looking at Panya. He was looking at House of Wisdom.

There was a spark in the back of my mind, the beginning of something that I might have recognized as doubt, had I considered it at all. But watching and seeing are two different things, and I did not know what it meant that, when faced with armed strangers on what was supposed to be a peaceful trip, nothing inside the shuttle frightened Jaswinder Bhattacharya as much as the ship outside that window.