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Singh couldn’t sleep that night He was exhausted, but whenever he closed his eyes, Holden was there, squinting through his injured eyes, pointing with his broken hand And the enigma of the bullet, the threat and mystery it represented They defied him to sleep

In the ave up, put on a robe, and ordered a pot of tea delivered fro through the station records for other docu to suggest that the ame to deflect attention from his terrorism But file after file, report after report, confi

rmed him Even when there was no other witness to what he’d seen, there was at least a history to show that his claims had been consistent

It would have been so much easier if James Holden were only a madman

Your eet to dictate where history begins, and what parts of it don’t count

He knew the story of Laconia’s founding He’d been there for it, though he’d been a child at the tiates to the thirteen hundred worlds had opened, and the probes had gone through They’d brought back reports of the different systes that they’d seen All humanity had seen the opportunity of new lands, of neorlds to inhabit, but alone of theer that expansion would bring The chaos and violence as humanity pressed out past the limits of civilization The choke point of the slow zone and the endless wars it would generate The unanticipated environmental collapses made worse by the lack of a central response And he alone had the will to solve the problem

Froates, he chose Laconia because of the orbital construction platforms He found the live culture of the protomolecule that he could use to harness Laconia’s power He found Dr Cortazár to lead the research and development And he took a third of the Martian Navy as the seed that would grow to become the world tree The fraction of hu order to hu the peace that would last forever The end of all wars Singh doubted none of it Holden’s version wasn’t incompatible, even if it chose a different emphasis Holden himself had used the protomolecule on Ilus—or been used by it—to turn on the ancient mechanisms Only he had done it haphazardly, and with terrible results Duarte had done it carefully, and to glorious effect

He sipped his tea It hadn’t quite gone cold, but it wasn’t as warm as he’d expected Holden was a proble the terrorist network on Medina He was also the key to thethat had appeared on the Te station He was singular in all huht places at soLaconia’s history taught, it was the power of the right person at the right moment

Singh had always known that the history of Laconia and the history of Sol system were connected He’d never felt those common roots more deeply than now The sense that his world and Holden’s were part of a single, much vaster story The er fras that had killed them, and then vanished

The things that had returned

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Amos

I was thinking about the recyclers,” Peaches said She sounded tired She always sounded a little tired, but this was more

“Yeah?” he said

They were alone in the bunk She was sitting up, paring her toenails with a little knife he’d found for her So about her meds made them thicker and yellow He kneas ih she never said anything

His hands iined what it would feel like to snap her neck The tension first, then the grinding feeling of cartilage ripping as it gave way He saw the look of betrayal in her eyes as the life went out of them It was as clear as if he’d actually done it