Текст книги "Abaddon's Gate"
Автор книги: James S.A. Corey
Соавторы: Daniel Abraham
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Abaddon’s Gate BY JAMES S. A. COREY
For Walter Jon Williams, who showed us how to do it, and for Carrie Vaughn, who made sure we didn’t screw it up too badly
Prologue: Manéo
Manéo Jung-Espinoza—Néo to his friends back on Ceres Station—huddled in the cockpit of the little ship he’d christened the Y Que. After almost three months, there were maybe fifty hours left before he made history. The food had run out two days before. The only water that was left to drink was half a liter of recycled piss that had already gone through him more times than he could count. Everything he could turn off, he’d turned off. The reactor was shut down. He still had passive monitors, but no active sensors. The only light in the cockpit came from the backsplash of the display terminals. The blanket he’d wrapped himself in, corners tucked into his restraints so it wouldn’t float away, wasn’t even powered. His broadcast and tightbeam transmitters were both shut off, and he’d slagged the transponder even before he’d painted the name on her hull. He hadn’t flown this far just to have some kind of accidental blip alert the flotillas that he was coming.
Fifty hours—less than that—and the only thing he had to do was not be seen. And not run into anything, but that part was in las manos de Dios.
His cousin Evita had been the one who introduced him to the underground society of slingshots. That was three years ago, just before his fifteenth birthday. He’d been hanging at his family hole, his mother gone to work at the water treatment plant, his father at a meeting with the grid maintenance group that he oversaw, and Néo had stayed home, cutting school for the fourth time in a month. When the system announced someone waiting at the door, he’d figured it was school security busting him for being truant. Instead, Evita was there.
She was two years older, and his mother’s sister’s kid. A real Belter. They had the same long, thin bodies, but she was fromthere. He’d had a thing for Evita since the first time he saw her. He’d had dreams about what she’d look like with her clothes off. What it would feel like to kiss her. Now here she was, and the place to himself. His heart was going three times standard before he opened the door.
“Esá, unokabátya,” she said, smiling and shrugging with one hand.
“Hoy,” he’d said, trying to act cool and calm. He’d grown up in the massive city in space that was Ceres Station just the way she had, but his father had the low, squat frame that marked him as an Earther. He had as much right to the cosmopolitan slang of the Belt as she had, but it sounded natural on her. When he said it, it was like he was putting on someone else’s jacket.
“Some coyos meeting down portside. Silvestari Campos back,” she said, her hip cocked, her mouth soft as a pillow, and her lips shining. “Mit?”
“Que no?” he’d said. “Got nothing better.”
He’d figured out afterward that she’d brought him because Mila Sana, a horse-faced Martian girl a little younger than him, had a thing, and they all thought it was funny to watch the ugly inner girl padding around after the half-breed, but by then he didn’t care. He’d met Silvestari Campos and he’d heard of slingshotting.
Went like this: Some coyo put together a boat. Maybe it was salvage. Maybe it was fabbed. Probably at least some of it was stolen. Didn’t need to be much more than a torch drive, a crash couch, and enough air and water to get the job done. Then it was all about plotting the trajectory. Without an Epstein, torch drive burned pellets too fast to get anyone anywhere. At least not without help. The trick was to plot it so that the burn—and the best only ever used one burn—would put the ship through a gravity assist, suck up the velocity of a planet or moon, and head out as deep as the push would take them. Then figure out how to get back without getting dead. Whole thing got tracked by a double-encrypted black net as hard to break as anything that the Loca Greiga or Golden Bough had on offer. Maybe they ran it. It was illegal as hell, and somebody was taking the bets. Dangerous, which was the point. And then when you got back, everyone knew who you were. You could lounge around in the warehouse party and drink whatever you wanted and talk however you wanted and drape your hand on Evita Jung’s right tit and she wouldn’t even move it off.
And just like that, Néo, who hadn’t ever cared about anything very much, developed an ambition.
“The thing people have to remember is that the Ring isn’t magical,” the Martian woman said. Néo had spent a lot of time in the past months watching the newsfeeds about the Ring, and so far he liked her the best. Pretty face. Nice accent. She wasn’t as thick as an Earther, but she didn’t belong to the Belt either. Like him. “We don’t understand it yet, and we may not for decades. But the last two years have given us some of the most interesting and exciting breakthroughs in materials technology since the wheel. Within the next ten or fifteen years, we’re going to start seeing the applications of what we’ve learned from watching the protomolecule, and it will—”
“Fruit. Of. A poisoned. Tree,” the old, leathery-looking coyo beside her said. “We cannot allow ourselves to forget that this was built from mass murder. The criminals and monsters at Protogen and Mao-Kwik released this weapon on a population of innocents. That slaughter began all of this, and profiting from it makes us all complicit.”
The feed cut to the moderator, who smiled and shook his head at the leathery one.
“Rabbi Kimble,” the moderator said, “we’ve had contact with an undisputed alien artifact that took over Eros Station, spent a little over a year preparing itself in the vicious pressure cooker of Venus, then launched a massive complex of structures just outside the orbit of Uranus and built a thousand-kilometer-wide ring. You can’t be suggesting that we are morally required to ignore those facts.”
“Himmler’s hypothermia experiments at Dachau—” the leathery coyo began, wagging his finger in the air, but now it was the pretty Martian’s turn to interrupt.
“Can we move past the 1940s, please?” she said, smiling in a way that said, I’m being friendly but shut the fuck up. “We’re not talking about space Nazis here. This is the single most important event in human history. Protogen’s role in it was terrible, and they’ve been punished for it. But now we have to—”
“Not spaceNazis!” the old coyo yelled. “The Nazis aren’t from space. They are right here among us. They are the beasts of our worst nature. By profiting from these discoveries, we legitimizethe path by which we came to them.”
The pretty one rolled her eyes and looked at the moderator like she wanted help. The moderator shrugged at her, which only made the old one angrier.
“The Ring is a temptation to sin,” the old coyo shouted. There were little flecks of white at the corners of his mouth that the video editor had chosen to leave visible.
“We don’t know what it is,” the pretty one said. “Given that it was intended to do its work on primordial Earth with single-celled organisms and wound up on Venus with an infinitely more complex substrate, it probably doesn’t work at all, but I can say that temptation and sin have nothing to do with it.”
“They are victims. Your ‘complex substrate’? It is the corrupted bodies of the innocent!”
Néo turned down the feed volume and just watched them gesture at each other for a while.
It had taken him months to plan out the trajectory of the Y Que, finding the time when Jupiter, Europa, and Saturn were all in the right positions. The window was so narrow it had been like throwing a dart from a half klick away and pinning a fruit fly’s wing with it. Europa had been the trick. A close pass on the Jovian moon, then down so close to the gas giant that there was almost drag. Then out again for the long trip past Saturn, sucking more juice out of its orbital velocity, and then farther out into the black, not accelerating again, but going faster than anyone would imagine a little converted rock hopper could manage. Through millions of klicks of vacuum to hit a bull’s-eye smaller than a mosquito’s asshole.
Néo imagined the expressions of all the science and military ships parked around the Ring when a little ship, no transponder and flying ballistic, appeared out of nowhere and shot straight through the Ring at a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers per hour. After that, he’d have to move fast. He didn’t have enough fuel left to kill all his velocity, but he’d slow down enough that they could get a rescue ship to him.
He’d do some time in slam, that was sure. Maybe two years, if the magistrates were being pissy. It was worth it, though. Just the messages from the black net where all his friends were tracking him with the constant and rising chorus of holy shit it’s going to workmade it worth it. He was going down in history. In a hundred years, people were still going to be talking about the biggest-balled slingshot ever. He’d lost months building the Y Que, more than that in transit, then jail time after. It was worth it. He was going to live forever.
Twenty hours.
The biggest danger was the flotilla surrounding the Ring. Earth and Mars had kicked each other’s navies into creaky old men months ago, but what was left was mostly around the Ring. Or else down in the inner planets, but Néo didn’t care about them. There were maybe twenty or thirty big military ships watching each other while every science vessel in the system peeked and listened and floated gently a couple thousand klicks from the Ring. All the navy muscle there to make sure no one touched. Scared, all of them. Even with all that metal and ceramic crammed into the same little corner of space, even with the relatively tiny thousand klicks across what was the inner face of the Ring, the chances that he’d run into anything were trivial. There was a lot more nothing than something. And if he did hit one of the flotilla ships, he wasn’t going to be around to worry about it, so he just gave it up to the Virgin and started setting up the high-speed camera. When it finally happened, it would be so fast, he wouldn’t even know whether he’d made the mark until he analyzed the data. And he was making sure there was going to be a record. He turned his transmitters back on.
“Hoy,” he said into the camera, “Néo here. Néo solo. Captain and crew of souverän Belt-racer Y Que. Mielista me. Got six hours until biggest slipper since God made man. Es pa mi mama, the sweet Sophia Brun, and Jesus our Lord and Savior. Watch close. Blink it and miss, que sa?”
He watched the file. He looked like crap. He probably had time; he could shave the ratty little beard off and at least tie back his hair. He wished now he’d kept up with his daily exercises so he wouldn’t look so chicken-shouldered. Too late now. Still, he could mess with the camera angle. He was ballistic. Wasn’t like there was any thrust gravity to worry about.
He tried again from two other angles until his vanity was satisfied, then switched to the external cameras. His introduction was a little over ten seconds long. He’d start the broadcast twenty seconds out, then switch to the exterior cameras. More than a thousand frames per second, and it still might miss the Ring between images. He had to hope for the best. Wasn’t like he could get another camera now, even if a better one existed.
He drank the rest of his water and wished that he’d packed just a little more food. A tube of protein slush would have gone down really well. It’d be done soon. He’d be in some Earther or Martian brig where there would be a decent toilet and water to drink and prisoner’s rations. He was almost looking forward to it.
His sleeping comm array woke up and squawked about a tightbeam. He opened the connection. The encryption meant it was from the black net, and sent long enough ago that it would reach him here. Someone besides him was showing off.
Evita was still beautiful, but more like a woman now than she’d been when he’d started getting money and salvage to build the Y Que. Another five years, she’d be plain. He’d still have a thing for her, though.
“Esá, unokabátya,” she said. “Eyes of the world. Toda auge. Mine too.”
She smiled, and just for a second, he thought maybe she’d lift her shirt. For good luck. The tightbeam dropped.
Two hours.
“I repeat, this is Martian frigate Luciento the unidentified ship approaching the Ring. Respond immediately or we will open fire.”
Three minutes. They’d seen him too soon. The Ring was still three minutes away, and they weren’t supposed to see him until he had less than one.
Néo cleared his throat.
“No need, que sa? No need. This is the Y Que, racer out sa Ceres Station.”
“Your transponder isn’t on, Y Que.”
“Busted, yeah? Need some help with that.”
“Your radio’s working just fine, but I’m not hearing a distress beacon.”
“Not distressed,” he said, pulling the syllables out for every extra second. He could keep them talking. “Ballistic is all. Can fire up the reactor, but it’s going to take a couple minutes. Maybe you can come give a hand, eh?”
“You are in restricted space, Y Que,” the Martian said, and Néo felt the grin growing on his face.
“No harm,” he said. “No harm. Surrender. Just got to get slowed down a little. Firing it up in a few seconds. Hold your piss.”
“You have ten seconds to change trajectory away from the Ring or we will open fire.”
The fear felt like victory. He was doing it. He was on target for the Ring and it was freaking them out. One minute. He started warming up the reactor. At this point, he wasn’t even lying anymore. The full suite of sensors started their boot sequence.
“Don’t fire,” he said, as he made a private jacking-off motion. “Please, sir, please don’t shoot me. I’m slowing down as fast as I can.”
“You have five seconds, Y Que.”
He had thirty seconds. The friend-or-foe screens popped up as soon as the full ship system was on. The Lucienwas going to pass close by. Maybe seven hundred klicks. No wonder they’d seen him. At that distance, the Y Quewould light up the threat boards like it was Christmas. Just bad luck, that.
“You can shoot if you want, but I’m stopping as fast as I can,” he said.
The status alarm sounded. Two new dots appeared on the display. Hijo de putahad actually launched torpedoes.
Fifteen seconds. He was going to make it. He started broadcast and the exterior camera. The Ring was out there somewhere, its thousand-kilometer span still too small and dark to make out with the naked eye. There was only the vast spill of stars.
“Hold fire!” he shouted at the Martian frigate. “Hold fire!”
Three seconds. The torpedoes were gaining fast.
One second.
As one, the stars all blinked out.
Néo tapped the monitor. Nothing. Friend-or-foe didn’t show anything. No frigate. No torpedoes. Nothing.
“Now that,” he said to no one and nothing, “is weird.”
On the monitor, something glimmered blue and he pulled himself closer, as if being a few inches closer to the screen would make it all make sense.
The sensors that triggered the high-g alert took five hundredths of a second to trip. The alert, hardwired, took another three hundredths of a second to react, pushing power to the red LED and the emergency Klaxon. The little console telltale that pegged out with a ninety-nine-g deceleration warning took a glacial half second to excite its light-emitting diodes. But by that time Néo was already a red smear inside the cockpit, the ship’s deceleration throwing him forward through the screen and into the far bulkhead in less time than it took a synapse to fire. For five long seconds, the ship creaked and strained, not just stopping, but being stopped.
In the unbroken darkness, the exterior high-speed camera kept up its broadcast, sending out a thousand frames per second of nothing.
And then, of something else.
Chapter One: Holden
When he’d been a boy back on Earth, living under the open blue of sky, one of his mothers had spent three years suffering uncontrolled migraines. Seeing her pale and sweating with pain had been hard, but the halo symptoms that led into it had almost been worse. She’d be cleaning the house or working through contracts for her law practice and then her left hand would start to clench, curling against itself until the veins and tendons seemed to creak with the strain. Next her eyes lost their focus, pupils dilating until her blue eyes had gone black. It was like watching someone having a seizure, and he always thought thistime, she’d die from it.
He’d been six at the time, and he’d never told any of his parents how much the migraines unnerved him, or how much he dreaded them, even when things seemed good. The fear had become familiar. Almost expected. It should have taken the edge off the terror, and maybe it did, but what replaced it was a sense of being trapped. The assault could come at any time, and it could not be avoided.
It poisoned everything, even if it was only a little bit.
It felt like being haunted.
“The house always wins,” Holden shouted.
He and the crew—Alex, Amos, Naomi—sat at a private table in the VIP lounge of Ceres’ most expensive hotel. Even there, the bells, whistles, and digitized voices of the slot machines were loud enough to drown out most casual conversation. The few frequencies they weren’t dominating were neatly filled in by the high-pitched clatter of the pachinko machines and the low bass rumble of a band playing on one of the casino’s three stages. All of it added up to a wall of sound that left Holden’s guts vibrating and his ears ringing.
“What?” Amos yelled back at him.
“In the end, the house always wins!”
Amos stared down at an enormous pile of chips in front of him. He and Alex were counting and dividing them in preparation for their next foray out to the gaming tables. At a glance, Holden guessed they’d won something like fifteen thousand Ceres new yen in just the last hour. It made an impressive stack. If they could quit now, they’d be ahead. But, of course, they wouldn’t quit now.
“Okay,” Amos said. “What?”
Holden smiled and shrugged. “Nothing.”
If his crew wanted to lose a few thousand bucks blowing off steam at the blackjack tables, who was he to interfere? The truth was it wouldn’t even put a dent in the payout from their most recent contract, and that was only one of three contracts they’d completed in the last four months. It was going to be a very flush year.
Holden had made a lot of mistakes over the last three years. Deciding to quit his job as the OPA’s bagman and become an independent contractor wasn’t one of them. In the months since he’d put up his shingle as a freelance courier and escort ship, the Rocinantehad taken seven jobs, and all of them had been profitable. They’d spent money refitting the ship bow to stern. She’d had a tough couple of years, and she’d needed some love.
When that was done and they still had more money in their general account than they knew what to do with, Holden had asked for a crew wish list. Naomi had paid to have a bulkhead in their quarters cut out to join the two rooms. They now had a bed large enough for two people and plenty of room to walk around it. Alex had pointed out the difficulty in buying new military-grade torpedoes for the ship, and had requested a keel-mounted rail gun for the Roci. It would give them more punch than the point defense cannons, and its only ammunition requirements were two-pound tungsten slugs. Amos had spent thirty grand during a stopover on Callisto, buying them some after-market engine upgrades. When Holden pointed out that the Rociwas already capable of accelerating fast enough to kill her crew and asked why they’d need to upgrade her, Amos had replied, “Because this shit is awesome.” Holden had just nodded and smiled and paid the bill.
Even after the initial giddy rush of spending, they had enough to pay themselves salaries that were five times what they’d made on the Canterburyand keep the ship in water, air, and fuel pellets for the next decade.
Probably, it was temporary. There would be dry times too when no work came their way and they’d have to economize and make do. That just wasn’t today.
Amos and Alex had finished counting their chips and were shouting to Naomi about the finer points of blackjack, trying to get her to join them at the tables. Holden waved at the waiter, who darted over to take his order. No ordering from a table screen here in the VIP lounge.
“What do you have in a scotch that came from actual grain?” Holden asked.
“We have several Ganymede distillations,” the waiter said. He’d learned the trick of being heard over the racket without straining. He smiled at Holden. “But for the discriminating gentleman from Earth, we also have a few bottles of sixteen-year Lagavulin we keep aside.”
“You mean, like, actual scotch from Scotland?”
“From the island of Islay, to be precise,” the waiter replied. “It’s twelve hundred a bottle.”
“I want that.”
“Yes sir, and four glasses.” The waiter tipped his head and headed off to the bar.
“We’re going to play blackjack now,” Naomi said, laughing. Amos was pulling a stack of chips out of his tray and pushing them across the table to her. “Want to come?”
The band in the next room stopped playing, and the background noise dropped to an almost tolerable level for a few seconds before someone started piping Muzak across the casino PA.
“Guys, wait a few minutes,” Holden said. “I’ve bought a bottle of something nice, and I want to have one last toast before we go our separate ways for the night.”
Amos looked impatient right up until the bottle arrived, and then spent several seconds cooing over the label. “Yeah, okay, this was worth waiting for.”
Holden poured out a shot for each of them, then held his glass up. “To the best ship and crew anyone has ever had the privilege of serving with, and to getting paid.”
“To getting paid!” Amos echoed, and then the shots disappeared.
“God damn, Cap,” Alex said, then picked up the bottle to look it over. “Can we put some of this on the Roci? You can take it out of my salary.”
“Seconded,” Naomi said, then took the bottle and poured out four more shots.
For a few minutes, the stacks of chips and the lure of the card tables were forgotten. Which was all Holden had wanted. Just to keep these people together for a few moments longer. On every other ship he’d ever served on, hitting port was a chance to get away from the same faces for a few days. Not anymore. Not with this crew. He stifled an urge to say a maudlin, I love you guys!by drinking another shot of scotch.
“One last hit for the road,” Amos said, picking up the bottle.
“Gonna hit the head,” Holden replied, and pushed away from the table. He weaved a bit more than he expected on his walk to the restroom. The scotch had gone to his brain fast.
The restrooms in the VIP lounge were lush. No rows of urinals and sinks here. Instead, half a dozen doors that led to private facilities with their own toilet and sink. Holden pushed his way into one and latched it behind him. The noise level dropped almost to nothing as soon as the door closed. A little like stepping outside the world. It was probably designed that way. He was glad whoever built the casino had allowed for a place of relative calm. He wouldn’t have been shocked to see a slot machine over the sink.
He put one hand on the wall to steady himself while he did his business. He was mid-stream when the room brightened for a moment and the chrome handle on the toilet reflected a faint blue light. The fear hit him in the gut.
Again.
“I swear to God,” Holden said, pausing to finish and then zip up. “Miller, you better not be there when I turn around.”
He turned around.
Miller was there.
“Hey,” the dead man started.
“‘We need to talk,’” Holden finished for him, then walked to the sink to wash his hands. A tiny blue firefly followed him and landed on the counter. Holden smashed it with his palm, but when he lifted his hand nothing was there.
In the mirror, Miller’s reflection shrugged. When he moved, it was with a sickening jerkiness, like a clockwork ticking through its motions. Human and inhuman both.
“Everyone’s here at once,” the dead man said. “I don’t want to talk about what happened to Julie.”
Holden pulled a towel out of the basket next to the sink, then leaned against the counter facing Miller and slowly dried his hands. He was trembling, the same as he always did. The sense of threat and evil was crawling up his spine, just the same way it always did. Holden hated it.
Detective Miller smiled, distracted by something Holden couldn’t see.
The man had worked security on Ceres, been fired, and gone off hunting on his own, searching for a missing girl. He’d saved Holden’s life once. Holden had watched when the asteroid station Miller and thousands of victims of the alien protomolecule had been trapped on crashed into Venus. Including Julie Mao, the girl Miller had searched for and then found too late. For a year, the alien artifact had suffered and worked its incomprehensible design under the clouds of Venus. When it rose, hauling massive structures up from the depths and flying out past the orbit of Neptune like some titanic sea creature translated to the void, Miller rose with it.
And now everything he said was madness.
“Holden,” Miller said, not talking to him. Describing him. “Yeah, that makes sense. You’re not one of them. Hey, you have to listen to me.”
“Then you have to say something. This shit is out of hand. You’ve been doing your random appearing act for almost a year now, and you’ve never said even one thing that made sense. Not one.”
Miller waved the comment away. The old man was starting to breathe faster, panting like he’d run a race. Beads of sweat glistened on his pale, gray-tinged skin.
“So there was this unlicensed brothel down in sector eighteen. We went in thinking we’d have fifteen, twenty in the box. More, maybe. Got there, and the place was stripped to the stone. I’m supposed to think about that. It means something.”
“What do you want from me?” Holden said. “Just tell me what you want, all right?”
“I’m not crazy,” Miller said. “When I’m crazy, they kill me. God, did they kill me?” Miller’s mouth formed a small O, and he began to suck air in. His lips were darkening, the blood under the skin turning black. He put a hand on Holden’s shoulder, and it felt too heavy. Too solid. Like Miller had been remade with iron instead of bones. “It’s all gone pear-shaped. We got there, but it’s empty. The whole sky’s empty.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Miller leaned close. His breath smelled like acetate fumes. His eyes locked on Holden, eyebrows raised, asking him if he understood.
“You’ve got to help me,” Miller said. The blood vessels in his eyes were almost black. “They know I find things. They know you help me.”
“You’re dead,” Holden said, the words coming out of him without consideration or planning.
“Everyone’s dead,” Miller said. He took his hand from Holden’s shoulder and turned away. Confusion troubled his brow. “Almost. Almost.”
Holden’s terminal buzzed at him, and he took it out of his pocket. Naomi had sent did you fall in? Holden began typing out a reply, then stopped when he realized he’d have no idea what to say.
When Miller spoke, his voice was small, almost childlike with wonder and amazement.
“Fuck. It happened,” Miller said.
“What happened?” Holden said.
A door banged as someone else went into a neighboring stall, and Miller was gone. The smell of ozone and some rich organic volatiles like a spice shop gone rancid were all the evidence that he had been there. And that might only have been in Holden’s imagination.
Holden stood for a moment, waiting for the coppery taste to leave his mouth. Waiting for his heartbeat to slow back down to normal. Doing what he always did in the aftermath. When the worst had passed, he rinsed his face with cold water and dried it with a soft towel. The distant, muffled sound of the gambling decks rose to a frenzy. A jackpot.
He wouldn’t tell them. Naomi, Alex, Amos. They deserved to have their pleasure without the thing that had been Miller intruding on it. Holden recognized that the impulse to keep it from them was irrational, but it felt so powerfully like protecting them that he didn’t question it much. Whatever Miller had become, Holden was going to stand between it and the Roci.
He studied his reflection until it was perfect. The carefree, slightly drunk captain of a successful independent ship on shore leave. Easy. Happy. He went back out to the pandemonium of the casino.
For a moment, it was like stepping back in time. The casinos on Eros. The death box. The lights felt a little too bright, the noises sounded a little too loud. Holden made his way back to the table and poured himself another shot. He could nurse this one for a while. He’d enjoy the flavor and the night. Someone behind him shrieked their laughter. Only laughter.
A few minutes later, Naomi appeared, stepping out of the bustle and chaos like serenity in a female form. The half-drunken, expansive love he’d felt earlier came back as he watched her make her way toward him. They’d shipped together on the Canterburyfor years before he’d found himself falling in love with her. Looking back, every morning he’d woken up with someone else had been a lost opportunity to breathe Naomi’s air. He couldn’t imagine what he’d been thinking. He shifted to the side, making room for her.
“They cleaned you out?” he asked.
“Alex,” she said. “They cleaned Alex out. I gave him my chips.”
“You are a woman of tremendous generosity,” he said with a grin.
Naomi’s dark eyes softened into a sympathetic expression.
“Miller showed up again?” she asked, leaning close to be heard over the noise.
“It’s a little unsettling how easily you see through me.”
“You’re pretty legible. And this wouldn’t be Miller’s first bathroom ambush. Did he make any more sense this time?”
“No,” Holden said. “He’s like talking to an electrical problem. Half the time I’m not sure he even knows I’m there.”
