Julie tried to talk again, struggled, stopped, tried again.

“Who are you?”

“Yeah, we haven’t officially met, have we? My name’s Miller. I used to be a detective for Star Helix Security back on Ceres. Your parents contracted with us, only it was really more a friends-in-high-places thing. I was supposed to track you down, grab you, ship you back down the well.”

“Kidnap job?” she said. Her voice was stronger. Her gaze seemed more focused.

“Pretty standard,” Miller said, then sighed. “I kind of cocked it up, though.”

Her eyes fluttered closed, but she kept talking.

“Something happened to me.”

“Yeah. It did.”

“I’m scared.”

“No, no, no. Don’t be scared. It’s all right. In an ass-backward kind of way, but it’s all right. Look, right now the whole station is heading back for Earth. Really fast.”

“I dreamed I was racing. I was going home.”

“Yeah, we need to stop that.”

Her eyes opened again. She looked lost, anguished, alone. A tear streaked down from the corner of her eye, glowing blue.

“Give me your hand,” Miller said. “No, really, I need you to hold something for me.”

She lifted her hand slowly, seaweed in a soft current. He took his hand terminal, settled it in her palm, pressed her thumb to the dead man’s switch.

“Just hold that there. Don’t let it up.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“Long story, just don’t let up.”

His suit alarms shrieked at him when he undid his helmet seals. He turned them off. The air was strange: acetate and cumin and a deep, powerful musk that made him think of hibernating animals. Julie watched him as he stripped off his gloves. Right then, the protomolecule was latching on to him, burrowing into his skin and eyes, getting ready to do to him what it had done to everyone on Eros. He didn’t care. He took the hand terminal back and then laced his fingers through hers.

“You’re driving this bus, Julie,” he said. “Do you know that? I mean, can you tell?”

Her fingers were cool in his, but not cold.

“I can feel… something,” she said. “I’m hungry? Not hungry, but… I want something. I want to go back to Earth.”

“We can’t do that. I need you to change course,” Miller replied. What had Holden said? Give her Venus.“Head for Venus instead.”

“That’s not what it wants,” she said.

“It’s what we’ve got on offer,” Miller said. Then, a moment later: “We can’t go home. We need to go to Venus.”

She was quiet for a long moment.

“You’re a fighter, Julie. You’ve never let anyone call your shots for you. Don’t start now. If we go to Earth-”

“It’ll eat them too. The same way it ate me.”

“Yeah.”

She looked up at him.

“Yeah,” he said again. “Like that.”

“What happens on Venus?”

“We die maybe. I don’t know. But we don’t take a lot of people with us, and we make sure no one gets a hold of this crap,” he said, gesturing at the grotto around them. “And if we don’t die, then… well, that’ll be interesting.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“You can. The thing that’s doing all this? You’re smarter than it is. You’re in control. Take us to Venus.”

The fireflies swirled around them, the blue light pulsing slightly: bright and dim, bright and dim. Miller saw it in her face when she made the decision. All around them, the lights went bright, the grotto flooding in soft blue, and then dimmed back to where they had been before. Miller felt something catch at the back of his neck like the first warning of a sore throat. He wondered if he’d have time to deactivate the bomb. And then he looked at Julie. Juliette Andromeda Mao. OPA pilot. Heir to the Mao-Kwikowski corporate throne. The seed crystal of a future beyond anything he’d ever dreamed. He’d have plenty of time.

“I’m afraid,” she said.

“Don’t be,” he said.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said.

“No one ever does. And, look, you don’t have to do this alone,” he said.

“I can feel something in the back of my mind. It wants something I don’t understand. It’s so big.”

Reflexively, he kissed the back of her hand. There was an ache starting deep in his belly. A sense of illness. A moment’s nausea. The first pangs of his transformation into Eros.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re gonna be fine.”

Chapter Fifty-Five: Holden

Holden dreamed.

He’d been a lucid dreamer most of his life, so when he found himself sitting in his parents’ kitchen in the old house in Montana, talking to Naomi, he knew. He couldn’t quite understand what she was saying, but she kept pushing her hair out of her eyes as she munched cookies and drank tea. And while he found that he wasn’t ever able to pick a cookie up and take a bite out of it, he could smell them, and the memory of Mother Elise’s chocolate chip oatmeal cookies was a very good one.

It was a good dream.

The kitchen strobed red once, and something changed. Holden felt the wrongness of it, felt the dream slipping from warm memory into nightmare. He tried to say something to Naomi but couldn’t form the words. The room strobed red again, but she didn’t seem to notice. He got up and went to the kitchen window and looked out. When the room strobed a third time, he saw what was causing it. Meteors were falling out of the sky, leaving behind them fiery trails the color of blood. He somehow knew they were chunks of Eros as it crashed through the atmosphere. Miller had failed. The nuclear attack had failed.

Julie had come home.

He turned around to tell Naomi to run, but black tendrils had burst through the floor and wrapped her up, pierced her body in multiple places. They poured from her mouth and eyes.

Holden tried to run to her, to help her, but he couldn’t move, and when he looked down, he saw that the tendrils had come up and grabbed him too. One wrapped around his waist and held him. Another pressed into his mouth.

He woke with a yell in a dark room that was strobing with red light. Something was holding him around the waist. In a panic he began clawing at it, threatening to tear a fingernail loose on his left hand, before his rational mind reminded him where he was. On the ops deck, in his chair, belted down in zero g.

He popped his finger into his mouth, trying to soothe the abused fingertip he’d damaged on one of the chair buckles, and took a few deep breaths through his nose. The deck was empty. Naomi was asleep down in her cabin. Alex and Amos were off duty and presumably sleeping too. They’d spent almost two days without rest during the high-g chase of Eros. Holden had ordered everyone to get some shut-eye and had volunteered to take first watch.

And then had promptly fallen asleep. Not good.

The room flashed red again. Holden shook his head to clear the last of the sleep away, and refocused his attention on his console. A red warning light pulsed, and he tapped the screen to open up the menu. It was his threat panel. Someone was hitting them with a targeting laser.

He opened up the threat display and turned on the active sensors. The only ship within millions of kilometers was the Ravi,and it was the ship that was targeting them. According to the automatic logs, it had just started a few seconds earlier.

He reached out to activate the comm and call the Ravias his incoming-message light flickered on. He opened the connection, and a second later, McBride’s voice said, “ Rocinante,cease maneuvering, open your outer airlock door, and prepare to be boarded.”

Holden frowned at his console. Was that a weird joke?

“McBride, this is Holden. Uh, what?”

Her reply was in a clipped tone that was not encouraging.

“Holden, open your outer airlock and prepare for boarding. If I see a single defensive system wake up, I will fire on your ship. Is that understood?”

“No,” he said, not quite able to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “It’s not understood. And I’m not going to let you board me. What the hell is going on?”