She floats through the void with her broken dreams;

But though she may long for a lover’s lips,

The Sargasso Rose isn’t what she seems.

Black Orpheus took one look at the Sargasso Rose and knew there was more to her than met the eye.

How he found her in the first place is a mystery, since he wasn’t likely to have had any business up there, six thousand miles above Bella Donna. Probably it was the ships that attracted him, strung out in space like glittering fish on a line, some dying and some already dead. He named the station, too: he hated names like Station Number 14, and so he called it Deadly Nightshade, which was a fitting sobriquet for a graveyard of spaceships, especially one that circled Bella Donna.

He spent a couple of days up there, talking to the Sargasso Rose, jotting down her story the way he did with everyone he met. Some people say he even slept with her, but they were wrong; Black Orpheus never slept with anyone after his Eurydice died. Besides, the Sargasso Rose wasn’t the type of woman who’d jump into bed with just anybody.

In fact, that may have been one of her problems. She was forty years old, and she had had only three lovers. The first two had left her for other women, and Duncan Black had left her to start working in the pits of hell a few years ahead of schedule. She’d always fought a lot with him, but she’d loved him as much as she would let herself love anyone after her first two experiences, and when his heart finally gave out it came pretty close to breaking hers as well.

She was still grieving a year later, when Black Orpheus stopped by—but she took the trouble to show Deadly Nightshade off to him just the same. He went deep into the bellies of the metal leviathans and spent almost a full day there, scribbling down notes as her crew gutted them and set them adrift, then watching with childlike enthusiasm as space tugs dragged new corpses up to the station’s docks. He even found time to name Bella Donna’s three tiny moons—Banewort, Foxglove, and Hellebore—before he left for his next port of call.

Deadly Nightshade wasn’t much to look at by the time Cain and Terwilliger arrived. Its hull was pockmarked by small, hastily repaired meteor holes, one of its docks had been damaged beyond repair by an errant tug, and it had come into contact with enough cosmic dust and debris so that the entire exterior needed refurbishing.

Still, it wasn’t Deadly Nightshade that they had come to see, but rather the woman who owned it, so Cain carefully maneuvered his ship up to a dock, waited for an enclosed mobile walkway to be attached to his airlock, and followed Terwilliger to the interior of the station.