Trust worked without fondness, if you had a shared goal; our shared goal had been survival.

“How do we know there even is an implant?” I demanded of Quint.

“It’s painless and invisible from external examination and most standard medical scans,” Quint agreed. “However, you can feel it if you touch the right part of your skull.”

I reached up and pressed my fingers where the ache was. And I felt it: a small, hard, solid thing, like a pea beneath my skin.

I lowered my hand. We could run, I thought. As soon as we got our ship, we’d just run and find some doctor/hacker who could take it out—

“The implant will detonate if its bearer passes outside of a set radius,” Quint said, like she knew what I was thinking. There was no sympathy and no remorse in her tone, only vague discomfort. “The implant can be detonated remotely by our boss if he learns that you have sabotaged the mission in some way—sold the data to another buyer, copied it for yourself, exposed the secrecy of the mission to anyone else, et cetera. A supervisor will go with you to the salvage ship to ensure you follow these rules. Namely, me.”

They had us well and truly cornered. If I’d just taken the deal earlier, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. But how could I know how deep the water was unless I dove in? I couldn’t just accept Quint’s boss’s deal, not when I wanted to know just how hard he was willing to push.

The imp of the perverse: in the face of trouble, I always made it worse.

Benny looked like he was holding himself with his crossed arms, like if he uncrossed them his ribs would curl open and all his old festering anger would explode out like fire.

“I’ll do it,” I said to Quint.

“Good,” said Quint. “The sun will go nova in eleven days, so we will leave immediately.”

Benny had turned away from me, his only response to my concession. It dug deeper than Quint’s impromptu surgery had done. “It’s been a thousand years,” I said to her. “You’re sure no one else has stolen the data already?”

“Shared knowledge loses its value,” Quint said. “If my boss had the slightest doubt, we wouldn’t be going.”

That’s how I knew that the Nameless should have been empty.

CHAPTER SEVEN:

Lantern-Eyes and the Minister

The woman’s scream broke us all from our inaction.

“Where the fuck did she come from?” Benny demanded. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Leah draw her gun.

“Whoa!” I shouted, but Leah advanced, gun still raised. I stepped between Leah and the strange woman, turned my back on Leah, and set my hands on the woman’s shoulders.

The woman stopped screaming abruptly. Her cheeks were dirty, and she was the sort of skinny that came from a long period of malnutrition, her large eyes even larger against the hollows of her cheeks. It was hard to tell how old she was, but she was a grown woman, maybe older than me.