He ignored me, gaze pinned to the window. He’d said nothing the whole time we’d shared the cabin space, just stared morosely out at the vast lack of scenery around us. A couple of times, he’d caught me watching as he scrubbed at his jack sockets, and stopped abruptly with a tightening look on his face. But even then, he said nothing.

I shrugged, was about to swing out onto the railed decking, then thought better of it. I crossed the cabin and propped myself against the glass, interrupting Mikhail Petkovski’s field of vision. He blinked up at me, momentarily surprised out of his self-absorption.

“You know,” I said cheerfully. “You got lucky in the mother stakes. But out there, it’s all guys like me. And we don’t give a flying fuck whether you live or die. You don’t get off your arse and start taking an interest, no one else is going to.”

He snorted. “The fuck’s it got to do with—”

Someone more street would have read my eyes, but this one was too washed out with the wirewant, too puffed up with maternal life support.

I reached easily for his throat, dug in and hauled him out of the seat.

“See what I mean? Who’s going to stop me crushing your larynx now?”

He croaked. “Ma—”

“She can’t hear you. She’s busy up there, earning a living for you both.” I gathered him in. “Mikhail, you are infinitely less important in the scheme of things than her efforts have led you to believe.”

He reached up and tried to unpin my fingers. I ignored the feeble prisings and dug in deeper. He started to look genuinely frightened.

“The way you’re headed,” I told him in conversational tones, “you’re going to end up on a spare-parts tray under low lighting. That’s the only use you are to men like me, and no one else is going to get in our way when we come for you, because you’ve given no one a reason to care. Is that what you want to be? Spare parts and a two-minute rinse and flush?”

He jerked and flapped, face turning purple. Shook his head in violent denial. I held him a couple of moments longer, then loosened my grip and dumped him back in the chair. He gagged and coughed, eyes wide on me and flooded with tears. One hand crept up to massage his throat where I’d marked it. I nodded.

“All this, Mikhail? Going on all around you? This is life.” I leaned closer over him and he flinched. “Take an interest. While you still can.”