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“And I’ll get back to work”

At the doorway, Bobbie paused She looked small in the wide frame A doorfra s about the yacht that wasn’t tastefully obscene

“What happened with her?”

“Who?”

“Your daughter”

Avasarala closed her ter to her until she stopped It took about three hours He sat on the counter and went through all the songs we’d sung to them when they were little Eventually, Ashanti let him lead her to her room and tuck her into bed”

“You hated hi able to help her when you couldn’t”

“You’re catching on, Sergeant”

Bobbie licked her lips

“I want to hurt so to wind up being rieve in our oays,” Avasarala said “For what it’s worth, you’ll never kill enough people to keep your platoon froh people that one of thehed the words Avasarala could al the ideas one way and then another Soren had been an idiot to underestimate this woman But Soren had been an idiot in a lot of ways When at length she spoke, her voice was light and conversational, as if her words weren’t profound

“No harh”

“It’s e do,” Avasarala said

The ht be going to salute, but instead, she lumbered out toward the complimentary bar in the wide common area There was a fountain out there with sprays of water drifting down fake bronze sculptures of horses and underdressed women If that didn’twould

Avasarala thuain

“This is Jaain

“At least you lost that fking beard,” she said to no one

Chapter Thirty-Six: Prax

Prax reht, the one he remembered as his first In the absence of further evidence, he ith it He’d been in second for lab Sitting there aled hy exactly his results were so badly off He’d rechecked his calculations, read through his lab notes The error was more than sloppy technique could explain, and his technique wasn’t even sloppy

And then he’d noticed that one of the reagents was chiral, and he knehat had happened He hadn’t figured anything wrong but he had assuent was taken froenerated de novo Instead of being uniformly left-handed, it had been a ht had left hi from ear to ear

It had been a failure, but it was a failure he understood, and thatwhat should have been clear had taken hi

The four days since he had sent the broadcast, he’d hardly slept Instead, he’d read through the co to a few, asking questions of people all over the syste out to hi For two days, he hadn’t slept, borne up on the euphoria of feeling effective When he had slept, he’d drea Mei