Rig stepped back, raising his goggles and inspecting the wing. Then he grinned. “It does look pretty good, doesn’t it? And it will be even better when that last part is sealed. Eh?” He hefted the spray.

I sighed, stretching, but picked the lighting device back up. I followed behind as he started spraying the last section of the hull, near the front.

“So, you going to spend more nights in the bunks now?” he asked as we worked.

“No. I can’t risk getting the others involved. This is between me and Ironsides.”

“I still think you’re reading too much into what she said.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Ironsides is a warrior. She knows that to win this fight, she can’t just defeat me—she needs to demoralize me. She needs to be able to say I was a coward, like the lies she tells about my father.”

Rig continued to work in silence for a few minutes, and I thought he was going to let the argument pass. He sprayed a careful line of sealant under the part of the hull that locked into the cockpit. Then, though, he said in a more subdued tone, “That’s great, Spensa. But… have you ever paused to wonder what you’ll do if you’re wrong?”

I shrugged. “If I’m wrong, she’ll kick me out. Nothing I can do about that.”

“I wasn’t talking about the admiral. I meant your father, Spensa. What if… you know… what if he did retreat?”

“My father wasn’t a coward.”

“But—”

“My father was not a coward.”

Rig glanced away from his work and met my eyes. The glare I gave back would have been enough to silence most people, but he held my gaze.

“What about me?” he asked. “Am I a coward, Spensa?”

My fury sputtered, then died.

He looked back to his spraying. “You say if you drop out, it will prove you’re a coward. Well, I dropped out. So I’m a coward. Basically the worst thing you could imagine.”

“Rig, it’s different.”

“Is Cobb a coward? He ejected, you know. He got shot down and ejected. Would you call him a coward, to his face?”

“I…”

Rig finished covering the last metallic section with black sealant, then stepped back. He shook his head and looked at me. “Spin, maybe you’re right. Maybe there’s some big conspiracy that has pinned a great betrayal on your father. Or maybe, you know, he just got scared. Maybe he was human, and acted like humans sometimes do. Maybe the problem is that everyone has made such a big deal of it.”

“I don’t have to listen to this,” I said, setting down the sealing light. I stomped off—though the only place I could stomp to was the other side of the cavern.

“Spin, you can’t walk off and ignore me,” Rig said from behind. “This cavern is, like, twenty meters across.”

I sat down. Doomslug trilled beside me, imitating my huff of annoyance. Like usual, I hadn’t caught sight of her moving over. The way she snuck about only when nobody was watching her was uncanny.