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Karal, herup a wo nearby Truth was the ship was new enough it didn’t need it, but it ork Wings, who’d first hunted her back on Ceres, came out from his quarters in a Martian naval unifors saw Karal and Sárta standing together The flicker of jealousy that passed over him had been the same since humans came down from the trees

“Hey, y’all,” Wings said in a fake drawl “Víse mé! Bin Marteño, sa sa? Howdy, howdy, howdy!”

Karal chuckled and Sárta looked annoyed Wings stepped through the narrow hall with an affected bowlegged gait Naoive him room

“You got nothing better to do than play dress up?” Sárta asked

“Don’t wait underwater,” Karal said “Heard we’re taking prisoners first Liano, he ran whispers to Ceres Tightbeam Hamechie about the prisoners”

“Not how I heard it,” Wings said, too quickly and more to Sárta than Karal “I heard it’s only one Sakai And even that…” He shrugged

“Even that?” Sárta said, and er

“Everyone kno it is,” Wings said “Sometimes they tell dead men they’ll live Karal, you were there Andrew and Chuchu? All about how help’s co and then so sorry, so sad?”

“Esa died soldiers,” Karal said, but the point hit home It was in his hands and the corners of his mouth And then, like he realized his mistake, he looked over to Naomi She kept her expression blank and bored, her attention on the sea through it The cascade of implications couldn’t reach her face

Sakai had been the naineer on Tycho, and if this was the saht, or they wouldn’t have called him a prisoner She blew the hair up out of her eyes, shifted over to a new seaain

“Back to work, yeah?” Karal said

Wings grunted his derision, but went back to his quarters to do as he’d been told Karal and Sárta went back to flirting, but the one, and pretty soon it was only Karal and Nao time

While she worked, pressing the plastic into the seaain, she tried to fit the new infors Marco had hoped she would bring the Rocinante to Ceres But Sakai had known that the ship needed repair, and must have passed that information up to leadership

She’d thought that Marco had wanted her ship because of who and what she was And maybe that was part of it Or maybe what he’d really wanted was private access to a ship that would be expected and welcome at Tycho Station For what, she didn’t know The way he nested plans inside his plans, he ht have had half a dozen uses for the Roci and for her And er Were they afraid Fred would execute hi else

Either way, she knew more now than she’d known before, and, like the bent hasp on the toolbox, it gave her options she hadn’t had She wondered what Jim or Amos or Alex would have done in her place, how they would have taken this one piece of information and used it An acadeata would do, and it wasn’t so any of them could have done