“You don’t understand. People like you never do.” He paused, waiting for a reflexive rebuttal, but Stacia held her silence to let him continue speaking. “Back on O.E., I got picked on. A lot. All through school. I learned early on when a group of folks wanted to exclude me, wanted to isolate me, wanted to pick on me, I needed to walk away. If they were ‘too good’ for me, I’d leave them alone. Better to be by myself than subject to their nonsense. And every time I left those types behind, I’d find folks like me, who also avoided them, who didn’t fit in. And we’d form our own clique.”

“Who’s in your … clique?”

“What kind of friend to them would I be if I told you?”

“The same kind that claimed to be a member of this crew, I guess.” Stacia hesitated, considering whether to ask—or if she wanted to know the answer to—the next question. “Was Dina a part of your group?”

“No.” Hondo couldn’t meet her eyes. Now the glimmers of shame began to haunt his face.

“Why not?”

“We each had our own things. I don’t think she’d appreciate the nuance of where my friends were coming from.”

“So, what, you were protecting her?”

“Maybe. From me. Or me from, I don’t know, her seeing who I am. We all have parts of us we hide, even from those who claim to know and love us best.”

“Then ‘we all’ have missed the point of relationships.” Stacia stood up. “So does Zenith Prebius head your crew?”

Terror filled Hondo’s eyes, like he’d been caught peeing in her soup. “I never mentioned…”

“I already know. You’d be surprised what all I already know. At most, you’re just confirming.” Stacia closed the series of holovids. “Now, where can I find him?”

Stacia took a contingent of her finest security to the Cypher’s engine room. Three arms spiraled from a central chamber to the bulkhead of the ship, the containment unit of the core’s kheprw crystals. The entire array was reinforced, especially the window, which allowed the viewing of the carefully curated garden of crystals and their shifting colors. Near the back was an antechamber used mostly by the maintenance crew, though rarely unless something was wrong with the isocrawl tubes.

“Priority security override: Chikeke1,” Stacia said. “Open this door.”

With Maya still down, the command was issued to her wrist link and patched directly into the door control nodule. When the doors slid open, a man hunched over a bowl, shoveling a fistful of noodles into his mouth. Strains of classical music echoed throughout the room.

“Zenith Prebius.” Stacia circled the man.