“Have you lost your fucking mind?” Benny said.

The shards of a future I was assembling in my mind—get the implant out of Benny, get on the Viper, get off the Nameless and find out where the Senator banked his money then cheat him out of a couple million terraques—blew apart like leaves in a gale. “I—”

“You’ve got things inside you, you don’t know what they’re doing, and you want me to do the same thing?” Benny said.

How couldn’t he see it? “I’m trying to save your life! Why the hell else would I suggest it? Do you think it was comfortable, having a swarm of little robots crawl into my eyes? I don’t want to hurt you, I want to help—like we promised, Benny!”

“Like we promised,” Benny repeated, cold and sharp, like metal splinters left outside in the snow. “All you’ve done for the past few years is make it hard for me to survive.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You promised to put my life first. But every chance you’ve gotten, you’ve put other people’s lives ahead of mine. Sometimes it didn’t matter and I could ignore it, because what other choice did I have?” Benny said. “My family and my friends are dead. All that was left was you.”

“It’s the same for me,” I said, but he didn’t seem to be listening. “What are you talking about? When did I put anyone ahead of you?”

“And sometimes it’s like that cop,” Benny said. He looked at me harder, colder than Indigo had ever looked at me, even when Indigo had been about to kill me. “We could’ve gotten away. We could’ve lived. But you put that cop’s life ahead of ours, ahead of mine, and here we are.”

He couldn’t mean that by sparing the cop I had chosen the cop over him. If there had been a gun to that cop’s head and a gun to Benny’s and I could only save one, of course I’d pick Benny. But I couldn’t just let him kill a man because that man might make our lives harder in the future. How could Benny think I could’ve seen this coming, with the Senator and the implant and the magic data on an abandoned spaceship?

“You got us killed, Sean,” Benny said. “You telling me you kept your promise?”

“You don’t really think I should’ve let that cop die—”

“Yeah,” said Benny. “And everyone else you’ve risked your neck and mine trying to help, when it wasn’t our fault or our problem to do it.”

Now and again when Benny and I traveled, I’d taken the time to help people we passed who needed help. Sometimes little things, like we came across a ship that needed a part to get to dock safely. Or sometimes riskier things, like that girl on Reyka who had been running from someone, stepfather or boyfriend, determined to show her what. Of course I helped them. Benny and I needed help all the time, though we didn’t always get it. And service was as much a sacrifice to the God Who Shed His Blood For Us as blood of our own. No one else was going to help them, like no one else was going to help us, so I always did. Even if we were short of parts ourselves, or that stepfather/boyfriend had a gun. Benny couldn’t imagine that was me putting other people’s lives ahead of his. It made our lives harder from time to time, but he couldn’t think it was the same.