I started to laugh, but I was choking on my own breath, shuddering and shaking, and I could hear him saying, “Hey, hey, Jas, come on, breathe, you can breathe, you’re okay,” his words running together into a meaningless soothing rumble, the only good thing in a world where a man’s life might end with the slash of a knife, a child’s skeleton might snap with the burst of a spaceship engine, a mother might vanish with the halt of a heartbeat, and he didn’t stop saying it, didn’t stop for a second. “You’re okay, you can breathe, you’re okay.”

•   •   •

The woman put her gun to Baqir’s head. My mind was a blank white panic.

“You’re going to do what we say,” she said, “or I’ll kill him too.”

Baqir was holding himself so still the tendons in his neck stood out like ropes. He looked at me—didn’t turn his head, only moved his eyes—and the fear I saw there cut into me.

Salvatore was dead. The dark-haired woman had killed him. His head—gone, like a burst balloon. An hour ago he had been snickering loudly about how many Moon girls he was going to fuck during his fellowship at the Tereshkova Shipyard. Lucian, next to him, had groaned and told him to shut up. They had laughed. Now he was dead.

I had barely looked at the shuttle crew when we came aboard, ignoring my aunt’s oft-repeated advice to always, always look beyond the uniform. Look, notice, remember. I had dismissed her concerns as paranoid. People stared at me, but only because I was a morbid curiosity. I never took my aunt’s worries seriously.

The blond woman was pale and thin, looked to be in her midtwenties, but she spoke with a high little-girl voice that seemed more affected than natural. The older of the men, the one with the Flight Service tattoos on his hands, had a shaved head and a bland expression. The other man, the big one at the back of the shuttle, was scowling, his red face wrinkled beneath his flat pale hair. They were all armed.

The woman who had killed Salvatore was in her twenties, with light brown skin, dark brown hair, hazel eyes. She was unremarkable. I had not looked twice at her when we boarded.

“I’ll do what you say,” I said.

It wasn’t a decision at all. I would do anything to keep her from killing Baqir.

Across the aisle Gena’s screams had quieted to a high-pitched wheeze. Lucian had started to gasp. It was a horrible sound, those struggling breaths, that growing panic.

Professor M’Baga said to the blond woman, “What do you want? Tell us what you want.”