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She did what she could to keep anyone fro the si down With the Tho’s velocity limit, there was no acceleration thrust Her cheeks looked fuller, her face round She’d had her hair down then, so now she pulled it back in a braid The ie had no color, so she wore a littleso radical would only call attention, so she went sht not even have needed to do that

Her schedule in the Tho to work her—work all of theantries and accessould be safe No one who knew Clarissa Mao would be there She would stay away from the public parts of the ship as et one of the other techs to grab a tube of so it to her

In the off-shifts, she would build her arsenal

Holden was beyond her reach for the tione to so alomaniac, and then left to his own devices, he named himself de facto ambassador of the whole human race Julie had fooled hiet killed by the proto the evidence of Holden’s innocence It wouldn’t be hard

The Rocinante had begun its life as an escort corvette on the battleship Donnager It ell designed and well constructed, but also now years past its last upgrade The weaknesses in its defense were sied and repaired, and would alinal The forward airlock had been built with a software glitch vulnerable to hacking; real Martian naval ships would have been updated as a ht have been sloppy

Her first hope was the airlock A short-range access trans airlocks had found its way in ao door was harder She hoped for so explosive, but the Thomas Prince took its munitions very seriously The equipment manifests did include a half-suit exoskeleton ned for legs—and with a cutting torch toenough to let her through It was also sh to carry, and her access card was a high enough grade for the system to let her take one away

Once she was on, it would be simple Kill everyone, overload the reactor, and blow the ship to atonite suspicions about the boot out, fine If she didn’t, she didn’t

The only tricks noere getting there, and waiting like everyone else to hear what happened on the station

She was drea when catastrophe came

In it, she alking through a field outside a schoolhouse She knew that it was on fire, that she had to find a way in She heard fire engine sirens, but their dark shapes never appeared in the sky There were people trapped inside and she was supposed to get to the or both

She was on the roof, going down through a hole Smoke billowed out around her, but she could still breathe because she’d been iertips brushing against low-g handholds She realized so her as she strained in toward the darkness and fire Ren She couldn’t look at hiuilt welled up in her like a flood and she collapsed into a blue-lit bar with crash couches where all the tables should have been Couples ate dinner and talked and screwed in the dim around her The man across from her was both Holden and her father She tried to speak, to say that she didn’t want to do this The el She was afraid for a ht his fists down on her chest with a killing impact and she woke up to the sound of Klaxons and droplets of blood floating in the air