Looking at him, I still wouldn’t know it. He’s wearing a jockey’s flight suit with all the fittings, and every tab and unit marker you’d expect, a service term to match the lines on his face. His armour has its paint worn away around the edges, and his sidearm has obviously seen some use. For someone who does most of their hunting indoors, it sure looks like he flies a lot.

He also looks like he’s never touched a shell. He’s got none of the quivers, and his eyes are sharp, not a moment lost to focus. There isn’t the delay between thought and action, or any sign that he’s used to waiting on a machine. If anything, he’s got the bottled energy I’d normally expect in a marine, every movement measured and precise.

He catches me staring, and immediately his eyes adjust, like they’re working to bring me into focus. A second more, and they’re glassy-sharp again.

A sergeant, and then a jockey. An admin drone, or whatever else he needs to be. A company shape-shifter, just out of sight.

Above all else, I think Andrade might be a con. Scars trace the sides of his face and creep out below his jaw, too fine for gunshot wounds or shrapnel or crash damage, but too raw for clean-room surgery. They’ve bubbled in patches, darker than the sandy skin around them—infection caught him before they could fully heal. They map where someone pulled his implants out, rough and hasty, before he and his Werewolf ’ware could do NorCol’s systems any harm. Too valuable to leave that way, it seems.

I’m still staring when the scenery skips behind his head. I’m expecting one of the ship’s vast caverns to open up behind him, distant ceilings like faraway skies, but the walls pull close on either side of the train, rushing past like cast-iron crags.

We pass narrow platforms and airlocks made to take one person at a time. On a ship like Horizon, they’re completely out of place. Everything is built to take as many employees as possible, and to keep them from trampling each other when the decompression alarms start shrieking.

If I couldn’t see NorCol’s markings on every flat surface, I’d have thought I was riding a rail through somewhere else.

Maybe I am still dreaming.

“Rook?” Hail shifts in her seat, meets my eyes. “Are you all right?”

I blink. “I’m fine.” It’s a lie, and she probably knows it as well as I do.

I aim a glare at the Werewolf. There’s something I need to know. “You said you knew it.”

“Knew what?” he asks, voice polished to a sheen.

“You said you knew my bird. That day, after I landed, you said you knew the Juno. Was it true?”