Relief was a sharp pain in the center of my chest. She would not lie to me about that.

“Auntie, there’s something—it’s important. Dr. Lago didn’t kill anybody,” I said. “He had nothing to do with any of it. It wasn’t even—”

“We know,” Aunt Padmavati said, interrupting me gently. “Jas. We know. Everybody knows by now. His daughter made certain of that before she died.”

I had not expected otherwise, but still I felt a pang upon confirmation of Zahra’s death. She had apologized when she sedated me. Apologized, and promised to finish it. I had never meant to leave her to do it alone.

So sluggish were my thoughts that it took me a moment to ask, “What do you mean? What did she do?”

My aunt raised a single eyebrow, then reached for the panel beside the bed. Live news reports from across the world filled the wallscreen. House of Wisdom. Homestead. Dr. Lago. The man called Adam Light. A significant amount of debris had struck Providence, causing serious damage and seven fatalities. Of greater concern was the ongoing danger from the debris. Orbital Control had restricted space traffic while they monitored the possibility of a Kessler cascade. There were salvage crews working to clean up what they could.

“The man who was calling himself Adam Light was in truth a former Councils citizen named Jeffrey Kimball,” my aunt said when an image of him appeared. “Twelve years ago he was convicted of assault. Rather than enter a counseling and service program, he fled to the desert.”

I tried to decide if I cared about being right about that, that he had been a Councils criminal before he became overlord of his own scrabbling desert kingdom, but I felt nothing.

The news reports did not mention Malachi and SPEC’s secret, forbidden mission. They did not mention the parasite. They were still referring to it as a bioengineered virus. The survivors from Homestead were receiving a great deal of attention.

As was Zahra.

“Listen,” said my aunt as she called up a public audio file.

Zahra’s voice filled the room. She sounded hoarse and tired. She was asking for help, not for herself but for her siblings, her family. For the memory of her father. She was saying goodbye.

I turned my head away, too late to hide my tears. To my right, tall windows looked over Armstrong City. There was no sunlight on the domes; Armstrong was somewhere in the middle of its long lunar night, as well as its artificially defined local night. Wispy clouds drifted over the city, twisting around the buildings and winding along rails and pathways. It was as close as Armstrong ever came to experiencing real weather, that fleeting formation and dissipation of moisture exhaled from the city’s carefully maintained parks and farms. The buildings were mostly white, tinged with a silver gleam that faded into gray, with broad windows like flat blank eyes.

Zahra’s message ended. My aunt moved in her chair but said nothing.