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If Katria had any objections, she kept them to herself

“Great So, look This could have gone better We kicked your ass and you’re pissed now, I get that If you want to be part of the revolution, great, we’d love to have you But you run all your ops through Saba’s group That’s nonnegotiable Anything else, and we’re killing you and hiding your bodies in the fertilizer-recycling system”

Bobbie grabbed the front of Katria’s shirt and picked her back up to her feet, then kept lifting until they were eye to eye

“Do we understand each other?”

To her surprise, Katria laughed There was a brightness in her eyes that looked like fever “We do indeed,” the wo partner’s salute or the threat of retribution Bobbie really wished she could tell the difference

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Drummer

It was easy to forget so the starving years, they’d been so like a dream A promised land without the land Hoates to whatever systeic to them then A sense of the unprecedented

Time had worn that shine away Drummer had spent more time in the last decade on People’s Home and Independence and Guardian than on ships or asteroid stations They’d become so familiar that they’d bled back in her h the corridors and chambers had been present since her childhood, even if she hadn’t been on them Like a city often mentioned, but not visited until adulthood She had to remind herself that as always this way Had always been Cities had been falling under siege since the time there were cities Mortars had fallen on schools Soldiers had stormed hospitals Bombs had set churches and parks and children on fire Homes had been lost before now

The tactical display floating over the table was off by orders of nitude If it had been to scale, Independence would have been too s code was larger than the ship icon A sht smaller than a crumb of bread that meant a city where two hundred thousand people, more or less, lived and worked, raised children, divorced andsunward from it, the evacuation ships—even smaller—that carried as many people as would fit away from the theater of battle She looked at them and saw all the other times children had been carried away fro and that could not be stopped: London, Beijing, Denver History, she reminded herself, was peppered with moments like this one It only felt different because this was her city, a void city, and this had never happened before

She had repurposed the central traffic-control station of People’s Hoineers, some of them union, most of them EMC, sat at the desks where civilians usually were Feeds to the war rooms on Earth and Mars showed siht delay The screens that usually listed inco ships with approach vectors and expected tinals froes of the major observation stations shohen fresh data strea froes fros for time delay—an hour and twenty-three minutes—and a composite of the ene lazily toward the point where the battle would begin Maybe had begun Maybe had started and ended in the hour and twenty-three e to them

“The, ah, the resolution will get better as we get the signal bounce,” the EMC technician said She was younger than Dru on Tycho, with red hair pulled back in a bun and a wide, doughy face On Earth and Mars, other technicians were probably having the saeneral “It’s a trade-off, of course, between inals and the better inforet the extra feeds”

“I just need to knohat’s happening,” Drummer said

Avasarala, who still hadn’t e of the room Ad forward like an overeager schoolgirl at the first lecture of term She’d come as a forward observer, thein it A bulb of what sht out so that the ad on the control board Drummer walked to her less because she wanted to talk than because she had to move

“Mada to her

“Admiral”