Zahra escorted me back to the passenger cabin, where I took my seat beside Baqir. The scowling blond man, the one Zahra had called Henke, wasn’t holding a gun to Baqir’s head anymore, but he was watching the cabin carefully, taking in every motion, every sniffle of fear, every whispered word. Baqir met my eyes, twitched his lips in something that might have been, in any other circumstance, a reassuring smile. He always smiled when he was afraid. He had once said it was a survival instinct, like coyotes baring their teeth before a fight, and I had laughed. My hands shook as I tried to fasten my harness. Baqir moved, hesitated, then reached over to do it for me; his metal fingers clicked softly on the clasp.

The shuttle’s thrusters fired, filling the cabin with a low rumble.

Baqir cleared his throat and whispered, “What do they want?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, just as soft. The cabin was leadenly quiet. Even Professor M’Baga had stopped trying to reason with our captors. The blond woman kept her gun trained on him. “They want to get to the ship.”

“Why?” Baqir said. “What’s there?”

“We only want to be left alone,” Zahra said.

Baqir jumped at the sound of her words. But she hadn’t raised her voice, nor her weapon, so he turned as far as the harness would allow to look at her.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Stop fucking talking to them,” the big man said. His grin was gone, but there was now a calculating look in his eyes. He wanted us to disobey.

“It does no harm to help them understand,” Zahra said. “We have nothing to hide. Our only goal is to break away from the shackles of your Councils and make a life for ourselves among the stars.”

She sounded as though she were quoting somebody else, the shackles of your Councils, the words rolling off her tongue with the ease of a phrase she had repeated firmly and often. Zahra did not have a North American desert accent like Baqir’s, but I was certain she and her people were separatists who chose to live outside the governance of the United Councils. But that didn’t tell me who they were, or what they truly wanted, or how to stop them. People fled the Councils to be left alone—not the other way around. The North American wasteland was where they went when they didn’t want the responsibilities of citizenship, the burdens of a global society, the rules, the laws, whatever else it was they found distasteful about the Councils. They didn’t hijack shuttles to steal ships and risk bringing the whole force of SPEC down on them.

“Are you going to kill us?” Baqir asked and, oh, how I hated him for asking that so baldly, and loved him for speaking aloud what we were all thinking.