Ariana ducked when he grabbed for her, down and to the left, dodging under one of his arms, the motion so smooth it was as though she had practiced it a thousand times.

When she spun away from him, she had his gun. She had plucked it from his holster.

She leveled it at him and said, “You’re going to stop making a fuss now.”

And she fired.

The bullet hit him square in the chest. It penetrated his suit and exploded with a wet, gruesome sound: the bones of his rib cage cracking outward, his lungs sucking in, a wheeze of shock. He flew backward and struck the glass wall of the computer core with a thump. He blinked rapidly behind his faceplate. A red flood spread from the gaping cavern of his chest.

Firing the gun had sent Ariana backward, too, but she used the momentum to propel herself gracefully toward the door. She hit the control panel without pausing and grabbed the frame to pull herself into the corridor. She hit the panel on the outside, and the door slid shut.

It happened so fast. A matter of seconds.

“She’s fucking playing us,” Dag said, and he went after her at once, without waiting for a response. Panya followed only a second later. They both had their weapons drawn for the chase. Malachi launched himself across the room to Henke, but already it was obvious there was nothing he could do.

Their shouts blended together, an ear-stinging cacophony, and I could not move. Henke’s chest had been exploded from the inside. That’s what the guns were designed to do. Stop the target, but don’t pass through. Don’t endanger the hull of the ship. She had moved so quickly, so gracefully, after panic that had seemed so very real. Henke was dead.

“Malachi,” I said, too softly.

I turned slowly, looking over the room, casting my headlamp into every corner. My heart was thumping, my blood racing. A roar filled my mind. In the corridor, Panya and Dag were arguing about which way to go.

“She’s been planning this,” Dag said. “It was a trick. She has an escape route.”

They had lost the woman already. Their shadows moved in the low red light, bending through the door in a distorted dance.

“She must be a SPEC infiltrator,” Panya said. There was uncertainty in her voice, but not as much as I expected, and it faded as she went on, convincing herself as she sought to convince Dag. “She must be. It was all an act. She isn’t who she claims to be. She sabotaged the shuttle.”