Holden’s face had gone pale. He looked from Clarissa to Anna and back and blew out a long breath.

“Um,” he said. “Wow. Okay. We may not be going home right away, though. Is that cool?”

Clarissa held out her hand, astounded by its weight. It took them all a moment to understand what she was doing. Then Holden—the man she’d moved heaven and earth to humiliate and murder—took her hand.

“Pleased to meet you,” she croaked.

They installed a medical restraint cuff to her ankle set to sedate her on a signal from any of the crew, or if it detected any of the products of her artificial glands, or if she left the crew decks of the ship. It was three kilos of formed yellow plastic that clung to her leg like a barnacle. The transfer came during the memorial service. Captain Michio Pa, her face still bandaged from the fighting, spoke in glowing terms about Carlos Baca and Samantha Rosenberg and a dozen other names and commended their ashes to the void. Then each of the commanders of the other ships in the flotilla took their turns, standing before the cameras on the decks of their own ships, speaking a few words, moving on. No one mentioned Ashford, locked away and sedated. No one mentioned her.

It was the last ceremony before the exodus. Before the return. Clarissa watched it on her hand terminal when she wasn’t looking at the screen that showed the shuttle’s exterior view. The alien station was inert now. It didn’t glow, didn’t react, didn’t read to the sensors as anything more than a huge slug of mixed metals and carbonate structures floating in a starless void.

“They’re not all going back, you know,” Alex said. “The Martian team is plannin’ to stay here, run surveys on all the gates. See what’s on the other side.”

“I didn’t know that,” Clarissa said.

“Yeah. This right now,” the pilot said, gesturing toward the screen where a UN captain was speaking earnestly into the camera, her eyes hard as marbles and her jaw set against the sorrow of listing the names of the dead. “This is the still point. Before, this was all fear. After this, it’ll all be greed. But thisc” He sighed. “Well, it’s a nice moment, anyway.”

“It is,” Clarissa said.

“So, just to check, are you still plannin’ to kill the captain? Because, you know, if you are it seems like you at least owe us a warning.”

“I’m not,” she said.

“And if you were?”

“I’d still say I wasn’t. But I’m not.”

“Fair enough.”

“Okay, Alex,” Holden said from the back. “Are we there yet?”

“Just about to knock,” Alex said. He tapped on the control panel, and on the screen the Rocinante’s exterior lights came on. The ship glowed gold and silver in the blackness, like seeing a whole city from above. “Okay, folks. We’re home.”

Clarissa’s bunk was larger than her quarters in the Cerisier, smaller than the one from the Prince. She wasn’t sharing it with anyone, though. It was hers as much as anything was.

All she had for clothing was a jumpsuit with the name Tachiimprinted in the weave. All her toiletries were the standard ship issue. Nothing was hers. Nothing was her. She kept to her room, going out to the galley and the head when she needed to. It wasn’t fear, exactly, so much as the sense of wanting to stay out of the way. It wasn’t her ship, it was theirs. She wasn’t one of them, and she didn’t deserve to be. She was a paid passenger, and not a fare they’d even wanted. The awareness of that weighed on her.

Over time, the bunk began to feel more like her cell on the Behemoththan anything else. That was enough to drive her out a little. Only a little, though. She’d seen the galley before in simulations, when she’d been planning how to destroy it, where to place her override. It looked different in person. Not smaller or larger, exactly, but different. The crew moved through the space going from one place to another, passing through in the way she couldn’t. They ate their meals and had their meetings, ignoring her like she was a ghost. Like she’d already lost her place in the world.

“Well,” Holden said, his voice grim, “we have a major problem. We’re out of coffee.”

“We still got beer,” Amos said.

“Yes,” Holden said. “But beer is not coffee. I’ve put in a request with the Behemoth, but I haven’t heard back, and I can’t see going into the vast and unknown void without coffee.”

Alex looked over at Clarissa and grinned.

“The captain doesn’t like the fake coffee the Rocimakes,” he said. “Gives him gas.”

Clarissa didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure she was supposed to.

“It does not,” Holden said. “That was one time.”

“More than once, Cap’n,” Amos said. “And no offense, but it does smell like a squirrel crawled up your ass and died there.”

“Okay,” Holden said, “you’ve got no room to complain. As I recall, I was the one who cleaned your bunk after that experiment with vodka goulash.”

“He’s got a point,” Alex said. “That was damn nasty.”

“I just about shat out my intestinal lining, that’s true,” Amos said, his expression philosophical, “but I’d still put that against the captain’s coffee farts.”

Alex made a fake gagging noise, and Amos buzzed his lips against his palm, making a rude sound. Naomi looked from one to the other like she didn’t know whether to laugh or smack them.

“I don’t get gas,” Holden said. “I just like the taste of real coffee better.”

Naomi put her hand on Clarissa’s forearm and leaned close. Her smile was gentle and unexpected.

“Have I mentioned how nice it is to have another woman on the ship?” she asked.

It was a joke. Clarissa understood that. But it was a joke that included her, and her tears surprised her.

“I appreciate your saying all that about Bull,” a man’s voice said. Clarissa, moving through the ship, didn’t recognize it. An unfamiliar voice in a spaceship caught the attention like a strange sound in her bedroom. She paused. “He was a friend for a lot of years, andc and I’ll miss him.”

She shifted, angled back toward the other crew cabins. Holden’s door was open, and he sat in his crash couch, looking up at his monitor. Instead of the tactical display of the ships, the stations, the Rings, a man’s face dominated the screen. She recognized Fred Johnson, traitor to Earth and head of the Outer Planets Alliance. The Butcher of Anderson Station. He looked old, his hair almost all gone to white, and his eyes the yellow color of old ivory.

“I asked a lot from him,” the recording went on. “He gave a lot back to me. Itc it got me thinking. I have a bad habit, Captain, of asking more than people can give sometimes. Of demanding more than I can fairly expect. I’m wondering if I might have done something like that with you.”

“Gee, you think?” Holden said to the screen, though as far as she could see he wasn’t recording.

“If I did, I apologize. Just between us. One commander to another. I regret some of the decisions I’ve made. I figure you can relate to that in your own way.

“I’ve decided to keep the Behemothin place. We’re sending out soil and supplies to start farming on the drum. It does mean the OPA’s military fleet just lost its big kahuna. But it looks like we’ve got a thousand planets opening up for exploration, and having the only gas station on the turnpike is too sweet a position to walk away from. If you and your crew want to help out with the effort, escort some ships from Ganymede out to the Ring, there might be a few contracts in it for you. So that’s the official part. Talk about it with the others, and let me know what decisions you come to.”

Fred Johnson nodded once to the camera, and the screen fell to the blue emptiness and split circle of the OPA’s default. Holden looked over his shoulder. She saw him see her.