The window was visible over Tanner Sack’s shoulder, and she stared through it as she spoke. That was much easier than meeting his eyes. Whenever she glimpsed his face, she burned. The outrage of betrayal, and most of all the shame, scoured her.

"I believed what I told you," she told him, and remembering the carnage, she winced so hard it hurt. "He lied to me, too."

"I don’t fucking know how they found Armada," she said, a little time later, still in the face of Tanner’s scorn and livid disbelief. "I don’t know how it works; I don’t know what they did; I don’t know what information or machinery he stole to let it happen. There was something… He must have hidden something; he must have given them something they needed, something to track us, in that message…"

"The one you gave me," Tanner said, and Bellis hesitated, then nodded.

"The one he gave me, and I gave you," she said.

"I was convinced," she said. "Jabber, Tanner, why do you think I was on the Terpsichoria? I was a fucking exile, Tanner." He kept quiet at that.

"I was running," Bellis went on. "I was running. And damn, I don’t like it here, this isn’t my place… But I was running. I wouldn’t call those bastards; I wouldn’t trust them. I was on the run because I was scared for my fucking neck." He looked at her curiously. "And anyway…" She hesitated to say more, fearing that she would sound ingratiating, though she wanted to tell him the truth.

"Anyway…" she continued, keeping her voice calm. "Anyway, I wouldn’t have done that. I’d not do that to… to you, to any of you. I’m not a fucking magister, Tanner. I’d not wish their justice on any of you."

He gazed back at her, his face like stone.

What decided him, she realized later, what led him to believe her, was not her sadness or her shame. He did not trust those, and she did not blame him. What convinced him that she was telling the truth, that she had been as duped as him, was her rage.

For a long, wordless, miserable time, Bellis felt herself trembling, and her fists clenched bone-hard and white.

"You fucker," she heard herself say, and shook her head.

Tanner could tell she was not speaking to him. She was thinking of Silas Fennec.

"He told me lies," she spat suddenly to Tanner, surprising herself, "after lie after lie… so that he could use me."

He used me,she thought, like he used everyone else. I watched him at work; I knew what he did, how he used people, but…

But I didn’t think he was doing it with me.

"He humiliated you," Tanner said. "Thought you were special, did you?" he sneered. "Thought you could see through him? Thought you was in it together?"