Page 47 (1/2)

“Is there a time?”

“Yes”

“How long?”

She saw We don’t talk about it floating in his eyes When he spoke, his voice was ser More vulnerable “Soon”

“How soon?”

He looked away

“Very”

She’d known, back then, that there were hard-core OPA factions on Ceres, but it hadn’t bothered her Radical OPA was still OPA, and that ot drunk and started fights,the prices it would pay for ore, the sense of being under siege put Belters on the side of Belters first And after shipping with Rokku for a while, talk of killing Earthers and Martians became a kind of white noise

The birth had been hard Thirty hours of labor The muscles of her abdo, had shredded theeia Station, she ht have died, and the baby with her But the medical coray-haired woman with a cathedral of tattoos on her hands and ar little tunes in Swahili and Arabic Naootten the woman’s name If she’d ever known it

Filip had drawn his first, exhausted, angry breath at five in the one into the complex The pediatric autodoc scanned hiest five seconds of Naomi’s life, and declared the baby safely within standard error The gray-haired wo

It hadn’t occurred to her then to wonder where Marco was She had assu area soars as soon as news of her came Of her and their son Maybe that had even been true

“Do we need to be there, or is off station enough?” Naomi asked

“Off station at minimum Better to be there, but not here solid”

“And where are we going?”

“Hungaria cluster” They were a group of h albedo No station, but an open-access storage facility As close to the inner planets as Belt rocks got