She stopped then, shocked by the heat of her own anger, her fear. Sagara didn’t say anything for a moment, and she felt as if his belt were melting out of her own grasp. Finally he said flatly: “The ISF represents order in the universe. The only order. Its way of doing things might not be perfect, but at this point in time, it’s the only thing standing between the human race and total chaos. Of course I support that—of course I trust it. I have no choice. Neither does anyone else. And of course I’ll continue to serve it, and accept the flaws such a system comes with. There is no alternative. To do anything else is to contribute to the collapse of our civilization.”

“Sometimes collapse is necessary,” Park argued, “to incite change.”

“By collapse you mean destruction,” Sagara fired back. “Mass death, loss. Change on that scale is always violent. Look at the Comeback. Look at the Privacy Wars.”

“Some might say those who started the Privacy Wars were in the right. They wanted a revolution, a change in how things are done, and in a way, they got it. That’s why there are no cameras on this ship.”

“I am not one of the ones who would say that,” Sagara answered, very cold now. “My wife was killed in the rebels’ second bombing of Halla.”

Park felt as if he had struck her. All the wind was sucked out of her lungs; she nearly let go of his belt.

They walked for just a moment in silence. Then Park managed to say, very faintly: “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”

“It’s not in my file,” Sagara said, his voice still cold—but detached, as if he were making a report on someone else. “I made sure of that.” When she said nothing, he continued: “She was a transcriber; a data collector. She and thirty-two of her colleagues were killed when the terrorists destroyed ISF’s archives. They were writers, researchers, academics. The best in the galaxy. All of that knowledge and light—snuffed out in less than a minute.” He paused for a moment, still faceless, still unreadable. It felt as if the corridor had chilled by several degrees. “ISF thinks we lost one hundred years of secret histories and future innovations in that bombing. They’re still trying to tally the amount of data that was lost. They won’t say it, but they don’t know how long it will take the tech sector to recover.” Another pause. Then: “No one recovers from something like that.”