“Really? Would that have helped? Would anybody have believed me, if SPEC was denying it?” I asked. “If I’d gone against the Councils and SPEC and told everyone that no, actually, Dr. Lago didn’t send up the nice kind of virus that just lets people die in their sleep, he sent the bad kind, the kind that made them go so fucking crazy they hacked their own limbs off trying to cut out invisible bugs? Tell them that the reason SPEC wouldn’t release the transmissions was because all they showed was a massacre? That I didn’t feel much like talking about it because I’d just watched my father carve himself up with a kitchen knife? And all of that happened because somebody who was their friend, who came over for fucking dinner and told jokes and they all laughed and the whole fucking time he was thinking about how to murder them to prove a point? Do you really think that would have stopped these—these—”

“Jas,” Baqir said.

I shut my mouth. Looked down. Rubbed my hand over my face. The feel of the grimy, cold space suit made my skin crawl. I opened the seals and tugged off the gloves, let them dangle like severed hands on the ends of my sleeves. I ran both hands through my hair and tried to breathe steadily. Tried, but it was so hard. I felt as though my entire chest was spasming and seizing. The air was so fucking cold. I couldn’t panic. Not now.

When I finally looked up, Xiomara was wiping tears from her eyes.

“I got this,” she said. “But I don’t know how to use it.”

For the first time I saw that she was not empty-handed. She was holding a small black object with prongs on the end. It was a suppression weapon, the sort SPEC Security used to shock or sedate targets. Baqir and I stared.

“Where the fuck did you find that?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It was in a console by the—you know. The crew. I didn’t even know SPEC crew were allowed to be armed. I took it. I don’t know if it still works.”

“You can check the charge with—that button, there,” Baqir said, pointing.

Xiomara turned the weapon, then simply handed it over to him.

“It’s charged,” he said after a moment, studying the weapon thoughtfully. “The charging node must have had power. It won’t last long in this cold, but at least now we have something?”

He tried to hand it back to Xiomara, but she shook her head, so he tucked it into the collar of his space suit, where the battery would stay warm.

“We have to check our suits,” I said. “Any puncture. Any tear. We have to be sure. Before we do anything else.”

“Okay,” Baqir said quietly. “We’ll check each other.”