Park pulled her shoes on; the straps gave a satisfying magnetic click. “You believe me?”

Boone didn’t answer. “We’ve got to keep it quiet,” he said instead. “Don’t tell fucking anyone. If we have another manhunt like we did for Holt, all hell’s going to break loose. So we get this done quietly. Got it?”

“Where’s Fulbreech?”

“Off somewhere. He’s looking, too.”

She felt a lurch of dismay, and also relief—twice the amount of people looking meant they might find evidence to validate her, or twice the humiliation if she was again proven wrong and nothing turned up. She lowered herself to the floor carefully, as if her legs had atrophied, and said, “I combed every part of Deck B that I could think of. Where are we supposed to look next?”

“Every place you didn’t think of,” Boone answered, scowling.

“Boone,” she said when he turned away.

“What?”

She tried not to falter under his gaze; she felt pinned to the spot. His eyes were hot and scalding, like the sweep of a spotlight. “I don’t know if it was really—if I saw correctly,” Park said. “I’m only acting off of what I believed I saw.”

“I know,” Boone said. “And if that were the case, I’d say you were crazy and tell Chanur to feed you some of your pills until we got home.”

She waited, a kind of realization rolling around tightly in her brain. “But?”

He turned his back to her. In the strange, unnatural light, his body looked like a sliver of empty space, a jagged shape in the air. “But you’re not the only one,” Boone said. “I saw him, too. The fucker murdered Wick.”

18.

Park felt as if she’d been kicked in the chest. “What did you say?” Her own voice sounded foreign to her—it lacked, disconcertingly, any of the emotion she was feeling within. It did not sound as if she were shocked, or horrified, or even sad; and she remembered then what Boone had said to Fulbreech, about her lacking a human heart.

But Boone himself merely looked impatient, as if he were relaying some mundane chore she needed to get done rather than the death of his own commander. “The guy killed Wick,” he repeated. “In our room. I saw him running off just as I got there, but I had to help Wick, and—well. It was too late by then. I told Sagara, but he doesn’t believe me. Or you, for that matter. So he’s put everybody on lockdown and wants to interrogate us one by one.” He shook his head. “But fuck that. I’m not sitting in a cell, waiting for a fucking murderer to get me next.”