Void
Author: Veronica Roth
Date: 2023-06-26 00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2023 by Veronica Roth

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle
www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781662516221 (digital)

Cover design by Caroline Teagle Johnson

Cover image: ©Mina De La O / Getty; ©sarayut Thaneerat / Getty

Aboard the interstellar transport Redundancy, at the edge of the gap that separated Centauri from Sol, Ace was dozing on a cot in the break room when the terminal buzzed against her cheek. She sat up, for a moment forgetting what had woken her. Her dream had been a tangle of bright light and buzzers and the churn of machinery. The phantom scent of astringent lingered in her nose.

Birdie sat in the corner, a mug of yellow tea clutched to her chest, her eyes unfocused. Across from her, Mingxia drank amber liquid from a plastic cup and tapped at a word game on her terminal. They were at the end of the “night” shift—night being an artificial concept out here in the void—and on their way to bed. Ace would be on call for another hour.

“You filling in for Steve?” Mingxia asked Ace without looking up from her game.

“Yeah.” Ace yawned and looked at Steve’s terminal, the glass cloudy where her cheek had pressed into it. It said:

WASTE DISPOSAL

CABIN 284-C

“Gotta go deal with yet another busted toilet.”

“It’s always the toilets,” Mingxia replied with a flourish of her hand as she finished her puzzle.

Birdie sipped her tea, her eyes still unfocused.

“All right there, Bird?” Ace tied her sneakers.

“Birdie” wasn’t her real name; she was named after a moon, but Ace had forgotten which one. The maintenance staff called her “Birdie” because of her big, round eyes and her tendency to flit from task to task.

“Oh,” Birdie said in her airy voice. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

She sounded strange—distant—but then, Birdie always was a little strange. Steve had said she was grieving some kind of loss, though he wasn’t specific about what it was.

Grief wasn’t uncommon among the maintenance staff. No one sought a job on an interstellar transport ship because their life was working out as planned.

“Almost done with this run already, huh?” Ace said. She didn’t know enough about Birdie to have a real conversation, so she was stuck with small talk. “What is it the Jovians say? ‘Joy is the thief of time, and time is the thief of joy’?”

“Next time I need an obscure Jovian phrase for one of these puzzles, I know who I’m coming to.” Mingxia poured a shot of whiskey—not really whiskey, of course, but they all called it that anyway—in a mug and set it on the table in front of an empty chair. “For when you get back, Ace.”

Ace grinned and stepped out of the room.

Her striped sneakers squeaked as she walked to the elevator. They were in vogue on Earth when she bought them—a few months ago for her, a few decades ago on Earth. One of their teenage passengers had recently exclaimed over the sneakers being “vintage” and offered to buy them right off her feet.

Ace took the elevator to the Passenger Deck, her tool belt slung low on her hips. Before the doors opened, she tied her hair back and tried to look professional.

The Redundancy was a marvel when it was first constructed—adrift above Mars, or was it Ganymede? She couldn’t remember. All the ship’s materials were synthetic, designed by engineers at the MatSci Institute back on Earth. The floors were springy and durable but made to look like wood; the walls were designed to capture dust particles and deflect moisture, but they looked like dark-blue velvet. There was a huge fish tank in the Port-Aft elevator bank with robotic crabs and angelfish weaving in and out of holographic plants.

Now, though the ship was still a marvel to Ace, it likely looked out of date to its passengers, for whom technology and aesthetics had changed dramatically since its construction. No matter. There was still only one Redundancy.

She knocked on the door to 284-C, and an elderly man answered. She’d looked up his name on her way there: Harry Magnussen. He wore a fuzzy purple sweater that looked familiar, like something she’d seen in a movie, and his eyes crinkled at the corners. For a long moment he just stared at her, and she wondered if she knew him from somewhere.

“Ace. Thank you for coming,” he said.

The use of her name startled her, but only for a second. The maintenance staff had their names stitched on their coveralls, just under the left shoulder.

He stepped back to let Ace into his cabin. It was one of the nicer passenger cabins, but there was no room to spare on a spaceship like the Redundancy. There was a queen-size bed with rumpled sheets, a faux porthole that projected an image of the stars, and a desk with a large terminal perched on top of it. On a charge pad next to the terminal was a little gold pin shaped like a flower—a peony, maybe, or a chrysanthemum.

None of it was any of her business, of course. Her business lay beyond the narrow doorway next to the headboard—in the bathroom.

“You said the issue’s with your waste disposal unit, Mr. Magnussen?”

“You mean my toilet?” Mr. Magnussen’s ocher eyes sparkled. “You can call it what it is, you know—I’m not squeamish.”

Harry Magnussen had a faint Earth-born accent—odd for someone they’d picked up on Centauri, since the two planets were 4.25 light-years apart.

Ace smiled. “They do like us to use delicate euphemisms when possible for our more . . . sensitive passengers.”

Mr. Magnussen laughed and gestured toward the bathroom. Ace stepped into it. It was cramped: a sink wedged next to a toilet, a shower stall, and a locked cabinet for toiletries. The lid on the toilet was closed, thankfully—most people discovered their waste disposal units were broken after trying to dispose of waste, after all.

Mr. Magnussen watched from the doorway as Ace crouched in front of the toilet, reached beneath it for the emergency shutoff latch, and gave it a flick. The toilet flushed, the light above it turning from red to green.

“Well,” Mr. Magnussen said, “I feel a bit silly now.”

“Oh, don’t. Most of our toilet-related distress calls involve that stupid latch.” Ace stood and smiled a little. “Whoever engineered this ship shouldn’t have made them so easy to trigger by accident.”

“Still, I’m sorry for the trouble,” Mr. Magnussen said. “Can I offer you a sip of brandy in recompense?”

“That’s really not necess—”

“I insist.” Before Ace could object again, Mr. Magnussen disappeared back into his cabin. Ace stepped out of the bathroom and watched him fumble in the drawers beneath his bed for a pair of delicate crystal glasses and a decanter full of honey-colored liquid. He poured a splash of it into each glass, then offered her one.

“This’ll be over one hundred years old by now,” he said. “I don’t know how to do that math, but I brought it with me from Earth when I was young.”

“Wow,” she said. “On the Redundancy?”

“Is there any other shuttle between systems?” Mr. Magnussen perched on the edge of his bed and touched his glass to hers.

Ace had been on the Redundancy from the beginning. She wasn’t sure how to quantify the time. She was roughly thirty-five Standard years old, according to the deterioration of her cells. The Redundancy hadn’t been operating that long in the relative time of the void—its floors were still unworn in most places, the tree trunks in the Arboretum still narrow, the equipment still, for the most part, original. But to its current passengers, Ace was ancient; she had seen the rise of the Inner Planet Alliance, the Sol System Confederacy and its subsequent splintering into smaller clusters—Jovian, Terran, USAD (United Stations Adrift)—like cells multiplying and dividing. She had wagered—sometimes in her mind, sometimes with the other maintenance crew—on the outcomes of a handful of wars. Once, she had lost a healthy portion of her wages when the Redundancy left Callisto just as Mars attacked the Venusian cloud cities—she’d arrived at Proxima Centauri B to discover that Venus had intercepted the Martian warships and blasted them into particles, and Mars had surrendered before the war even began. She had seen passengers with screens buried in their palms, and then suspended over their eyes, and then lighting up their pockets, and then projected directly into their occipital lobes, only for the cycle to begin again, perhaps in a different order. She saw all this in bits and pieces, as she arrived at a planet to pick up passengers or departed it after dropping them off; she saw them as a god might, ageless and detached from the flow of time. She hadn’t realized when she took this job how it would make her into something other, something distinct from humanity yet still technically human, but it had. The Maintenance Deck of the ship had become a series of time capsules, with each new crew member bringing relics of their particular age. The Redundancy was a museum.

She didn’t like interacting with passengers.

“So you’ve been on board before.” She felt uneasy. “Have we met?”

Mr. Magnussen flapped a hand at her. “I was barely more than a child then.”

Maybe that was why he’d seemed familiar. Based on his age, he had to have been on the Redundancy no more than two turns ago. She searched his face, trying to find the soft-cheeked boy inside the weathered old man, but it was impossible. She had seen too many faces.

“What brings you back?” She sipped the brandy. It was sweet, but it burned her lips, which were always chapped at this point in the voyage. They were just two day cycles away from entering Sol System and dropping off their first passengers.

“Nostalgia. I loved this journey when I first took it,” Mr. Magnussen said with a smile. “I wanted to share it with my wife, before . . .” He paused and tipped his head a little. “Well. Before the end of our lives, whenever that should be.”

Warmth bloomed in Ace’s chest. Not everyone enjoyed the trip. They found it tedious, as if the ability to traverse solar systems were not among humanity’s greatest achievements. But Harry Magnussen seemed to appreciate it, as Ace did.

“Well.” She tapped her glass against his. “Cheers. To your sophomore voyage.”

Mr. Magnussen’s eyes twinkled. “Cheers.”

Ace was adrift when the next call came.

She flexed an arm, a hand. Turned herself not toward the bright spark of Sol, and not toward Proxima Centauri, but toward void.

She felt a familiar horror. It was so empty out there that the darkness wrapped around you like a blanket, smothering. Odd that you could be in the expanse to define all expanses—what the astropoets called the “Big Empty”—and still feel claustrophobic, but the mind was not built to comprehend such endlessness. Humans liked containers.

But Ace was used to the horror. She let her eyes go a little unfocused, and stretched her arms out wide, and the void became not closeness but distance and depth. An unexplored ocean full of light she couldn’t see.

The cable pulled taut, and she waited there at the end of her tether, her mind silent.

“Sorry to interrupt your swim, Ace,” Georgina said in her ear. “But you’re getting pinged hard. Red light and everything.”

Ace sighed. “Reel me in.”

Tension pulled at the belt around her midsection where the tether was attached in two places—redundancy, always redundancy—and she floated toward the ship. From the outside, it was a bulky mass of dull metal constructed without concern for either aesthetics or aerodynamics, since neither was relevant in space.

Moments later she stepped into the empty hatch. The doors closed behind her, pressure returned to the little compartment, and the magnets on her boots reactivated. She flexed her knees a little to absorb the impact. They couldn’t get full Earth gravity out here, but they got enough to give a little weight to things, not quite enough to eliminate the necessity of a handful of morning supplements and a daily hour of exercise, even for janitors.

As she stripped off the bright-orange suit—fitted for Georgina, so it was a little big for Ace—she considered what kind of janitorial emergency had led to her getting a red alert on her comm, forfuckssake. Another busted toilet?

She stepped out of the compartment and into the warm recycled air of the Maintenance Deck. Georgina was there with Ace’s comm in one hand, her other hand playing with her plastic nose ring. Ace took the comm from her, stuck it in her ear, and twisted it so it settled into the right place.

“Ace here,” she said. “What’s the word?”

“Miss Vance, we have been attempting to summon you for three minutes.” The tight, clipped voice was distinct, even though the person in question didn’t identify themselves. This was the Upper Deck concierge, Tertio Polaris.

Ace was off the clock, so the apology she gave was perfunctory: “Yeah, sorry—I was using the facilities.” Not technically a lie.

“I require your presence in the Arboretum. Bring your Code 128B kit.”

Ace had to search her memory for what, exactly, a 128B kit was. She came up empty.

A sigh on the other end, and then: “A dead body, Miss Vance. There’s a dead body in the Arboretum.”

The main difference between the Code 128B kit and any other biohazard kit was a folded-up body bag and a cart.

Ace rolled the cart up to the Arboretum, having swapped out her sneakers for her boots at the Trash Pit—the decontamination specialists’ nickname for their sleeping quarters—and ridden the service elevator up to midship.

The Arboretum was smack-dab in the middle of the Redundancy, and it was a riot of green that never failed to dazzle her. It was mostly full of pine and blue spruce trees bioengineered to emit more oxygen—and take in more carbon dioxide—than the standard Earthen variety. There were vanity plants here and there, mostly herbs in lightweight plastic pots, or favorite foods from the kitchen staff, sweet potatoes and snow peas and raspberries. There was a gardenia plant at the end of one curled walkway, and on her worst days Ace liked to kneel over it and suck in a few breaths to get the smell of waste and disinfectant out of her sinuses. Everything grew not in soil—dust was a constant problem in space, and loose earth would only add to it—but in a pool of hydroponic fluid, the roots supported by spiderlike structures beneath a sturdy glass panel that made up the floor.

Tertio flagged her down right away. He was ecru-pale and wore his crew uniform buttoned up to his throat, his black hair plastered to his head. Ace had to admit he looked good that way, but the uniform’s shade of blue green pretty much looked good on everyone, so that wasn’t saying much. He had been born in the clouds of Venus, so he was built a little sturdier than she was. He liked things just so, every button buttoned, every tie tied, every protocol followed to the letter.

“There you are,” Tertio said to her. “Prompt as ever, Miss Vance.”

“Unclench, Polaris. I’m not even on duty yet.”

“Hm.” He turned away with a gesture for her to follow. “Come on, then.”

He led the way into the trees. He looked suited to this place, with its neat rows of trunks, all evenly spaced. The blue-gray needles stabbed her arms and cheeks as she pushed the kit past them, its wheels squeaking a little as she went. She spotted the raspberry bush off to the right, and she knew they were near the Aft-Starboard wall.

When she saw the body, it took her a moment to register that the man was dead. He looked like he could be asleep. His head rested near the trunk of the tree, and the blood pooling at the base of his throat could almost have been a neckerchief.

He wore a fuzzy purple sweater. Harry Magnussen.

She saw their brandy glasses touching, and the careful movement of his hands as he opened the drawers under his bed. Those hands bore little resemblance to the white, papery ones folded across his stomach now.

“Miss Vance?”

Ace looked at Tertio. She had forgotten he was there.

“Don’t you want to examine his body?” she said. “For clues?”

“Clues?”

“Someone killed him.” She felt frantic. “Maybe their fingerprints are on him.”

“Do you think we retain a database of passengers’ fingerprints? Or employ a ship detective?”

She hadn’t thought about it until that moment. But the Redundancy was an apolitical entity, with its passengers subject to the laws of their particular destinations. They wouldn’t employ a detective even if there were enough crime on board to justify one.

“I think,” she said to Tertio, “that you don’t want to fly around with a murderer on board, and we have two days left until we enter Sol System.”

Tertio cleared his throat a little. “As it happens, I don’t. But the task of investigating this murder has unfortunately fallen to the person best acquainted with our guests.”

“Ah. So . . . you.”

“Yes. I have documented the scene, and I have requested the ship’s logs for everyone who has been in the Arboretum within the last half day.”

The Arboretum was one of the most popular places on ship, which meant most of the passengers had passed through here in the last half day. He might as well have just gone through the ship’s manifest in alphabetical order.

“So,” Tertio went on, “it’s no longer necessary to . . . leave it here.”

“Him,” Ace said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said ‘it.’ He’s a person. And he was nice.”

She crouched next to the body and looked at Harry’s face. That nose, high and narrow, crooked at the bridge. That little scar through the lip, as though he’d gotten a cleft palate corrected but couldn’t afford to get the scar fixed—odd, for somebody on board the Redundancy. He was definitely wealthy, like most of the passengers here. Maybe the scar was why his pale lips were set a little off, as if over crooked teeth.

“You can narrow your list down further,” she said. “I responded to a maintenance request in his cabin just a few hours ago.”

“Do you remember when, exactly?”

She shrugged. “Check Steve’s log.”

Tertio squinted at her. Technically, if she took one of Steve’s shifts, she was supposed to clear it with her supervisor, and it was supposed to register on her own log. But instead of reprimanding her, Tertio took out his terminal and started typing. Ace turned back to Mr. Magnussen.

Judging by how thick his wrist was, he’d been born in full gravity, or close to it. That made sense, given the Earth-born accent she’d heard earlier. She wrapped her fingers around Mr. Magnussen’s arm, picked it up, and set it down again.

“Five Standard hours ago,” Tertio reported. “What are you doing?”

“He’s still flexible,” Ace said, nodding to his wrist, which was easy to bend forward and back. She demonstrated this again. “That means he was killed within the last hour or two.”

She set Harry’s hand down and eyed the pool of blood around him. This was going to take a while. She hated dealing with blood.

Gloves first, she thought, and she opened up the kit to fish out a pair. She’d just snapped the elastic around her wrist when she realized Tertio was staring at her.

“What?”

“You know more about corpses than I was expecting.”

“I don’t have some kind of dark past, if that’s what you’re thinking.” A lot of the staff on the Redundancy had been in one kind of trouble or another before they were hired—why else would someone volunteer to detach themselves from the flow of time for meager pay and shitty accommodations? “I just love detective serials. Haven’t you watched Frontier Justice?”

“I have not.”

No surprise there. Tertio Polaris was the type to refuse himself even harmless indulgences if they weren’t productive in some way.

She got the body bag out of the kit and unfolded it next to Harry. It was a dark-brown, slick material—probably designed to disguise blood.

“Sorry, Harry,” she whispered to the body before she touched it. “I’ll try to make it quick.”

She went to the feet first and dragged them to the side so they were on top of the body bag. The flexibility of his still-cooling flesh was actually an encumbrance—it was like trying to wrestle a snake into a sack.

“You know, he came with only his wife,” she said as she tried to slide Harry’s shoulders to the side. She slipped a little in the blood and gritted her teeth.

Tertio wasn’t paying attention to her struggle. He was reading something on his tablet. “Why is that interesting?”

“Most people take this journey in a big pack. So that means he never had kids—or if he did, he’s okay with leaving them behind forever.”

Ace was already starting to sweat. She had to push Mr. Magnussen up to grab the body bag beneath him and slide it toward her. Meanwhile, Tertio was still on his damn terminal. On it she saw a list of names—the people who had been in the Arboretum in the last few hours, she was sure. But they were too small for her to read.

“Thank you for your insights,” Tertio said. “If you could please pick up the pace, however, I’d like to open the Arboretum to our guests before lunch. We can’t afford for anyone to panic.”

That was true. There was a big supply of sedatives on board the Redundancy—Ace had helped load them into the med bay before they set out. Georgina had also told her they could put them in the air supply to gas everyone, if necessary. Better for everyone to get knocked out than to enact some kind of Lord of the Flies scenario out here in the void.

“So who was here?” she asked, nodding to Tertio’s terminal.

He clutched it to his chest. “I’m not sure why you need to know that information.”

Ace sat back on her heels and rolled her eyes.

“The maintenance staff doesn’t like you,” she said. “You’ve got a stick up your ass, and you always address them by their full names. If you go down there and accuse them of murder, it’s not gonna go well for you.”

Tertio glanced down at his terminal, and then back at her.

“Fine,” he said, after a few moments of considering her. “It’s a short list. Two passengers and two maintenance staff: Nova Magnussen, Colman Procyon—”

She made a face. Georgina had once described Colman Procyon—well-known mining magnate—as every entitled wealthy man she’d ever met mashed together into one. Nova Magnussen, meanwhile, was sharp-tongued and had no compunctions about wasting food, which was one of the highest crimes among the Redundancy’s staff.

“Callisto Hart and Abdi Fomelhaut.”

“Abdi?” She frowned. “He never comes to the Arboretum.”

“Apparently he does.” Tertio looked at his watch. “If you can find a way to casually ask them why they were here at that time, I would appreciate it. And if you could hurry things along . . .”

Tertio’s comm lit up red. He stepped away to take the call as Ace finished easing Mr. Magnussen’s legs into the body bag. She was finally zipping up the bag when Mr. Magnussen’s head flopped to the side and something fell out of his mouth. It rolled away from him, and Ace lunged for it to keep it from getting lost in the trees. It was hard and circular. A ring.

It was a peculiar color, not any metal she recognized. Black and gray, streaked like limestone. A simple band, like a wedding band, only Harry was already wearing a wedding band, slim and silver, on his left hand.

“Why the hell,” she said to Mr. Magnussen, “did you have this in your mouth?”

She glanced over her shoulder. Tertio had turned away from her, his hands on his hips, so he didn’t see the ring.

She tucked it into her pocket.

She wheeled the body down to storage at a jog, having first stopped in the Arboretum’s maintenance area to spray her blood-caked boots with cleaning foam. Mr. Magnussen’s body wasn’t the only set of human remains the Redundancy was transporting between solar systems—there were always a few coffins or urns on the passenger craft, sometimes accompanied by family and sometimes ferried from Proxima Centauri B to one of the Terran worlds for burial by a courier service. Sunni, the sour-faced man who kept the keys for the storage area, helped her slide the body onto an empty shelf and strap it down for the rest of the voyage.

She was exhausted when she was finally done, but there was no time to rest. She wanted to get to Nova Magnussen before Tertio finished searching her room.

Tertio hadn’t told her that was where he was headed, but she had watched enough episodes of Frontier Justice to know the perpetrator of a murder was usually the spouse. So she rode the elevator up to the Passenger Deck, just as she had the night before.

The second hallway on the right had deep-red walls with devil’s ivy spilling down every alcove, each plant lit from above by a grow light fixed to the wall. Abdi was the ship gardener in charge of interior plants, but he never went into the Arboretum—he was allergic to pine.

Well, she thought, remembering Tertio’s list of suspects, so he claims, anyway.

She turned another corner and saw a few people surrounding one of the cabin doors: two security officers and a graying woman in a floral robe whom Ace recognized as Mrs. Nova Magnussen. She had the height and frailty of a Centaurian native, towering over the Terran guards like a fast-growing sapling bent in the wind. Her skin, though light brown, was ashen. Her hands shook where they clasped her elbows. Ace tried to see if she was wearing a wedding band, but her left hand wasn’t visible from this angle.

Ace inched closer, and saw Tertio inside the cabin, directing his assistant—she was new, so Ace didn’t remember her name—to search under the bed while Tertio himself went through the drawers. Now was the time to act. While Tertio was distracted.

Ace cleared her throat. “Mrs. Magnussen?”

The woman turned, and her eyes skipped down to the “ACE” stitched on Ace’s chest. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry to bother you.” Ace hadn’t figured out how to explain her presence here. She just knew that she had an opportunity, and she didn’t trust Tertio to handle the situation with any finesse. “My name is Ace. I’m the one who transported your husband’s body to storage. I wanted to let you know that he was handled with care, and, uh . . .”

“Oh.” The word was soft. “Now is not really a good time.”

Nova looked into her cabin, where Tertio was kneeling in front of one of the drawers next to the bed, picking through socks and scarves. Ace didn’t know what she expected to see in Nova’s eyes—anger, perhaps, at being so ill treated on the morning of her husband’s murder? Fear that Tertio would find something that would implicate her in the crime? Both?—but Nova’s eyes had the look of someone staring at something far away from her. Her hair was flattened on one side from sleep, and she still had creases from a pillowcase under her sunspotted cheekbone.

“Of course,” Ace said. “I just wanted to return your wedding bands to you.”

Nova focused on her then. Ace offered the rings to her, and Nova reached for them, but hesitated. Over her shoulder, Ace saw Tertio open a drawer stacked with IV bags. The medicine they held was the color of celery.

She hadn’t realized that Harry—or Nova—was sick.

“I think you’re mistaken,” Nova said, picking up the simple silver band that Ace had found on Harry Magnussen’s finger. She clasped it in her fist. “This one belonged to Harry—but that one I’ve never seen before.”

Ace glanced at Nova’s ring finger, now that she had turned toward Ace. The band she already wore on her ring finger matched the one that had been on Harry’s, pale silver.

The small, glittering ring that had been in Harry’s mouth was still in Ace’s palm.

“Are you certain?” Ace asked. “You’re sure this isn’t . . . something he gave you a long time ago? Maybe a gift he was about to give you?”

Nova picked up the ring in question and examined it. It looked too big to fit on her slim Centaurian fingers, even if it was meant for a thumb.

“This looks like . . . compressed silicate.” Ace’s expression must have been blank, because Nova added, “It’s not usually used for rings. Too fragile. Harry always wants—” Her breath caught. She held her fist against her stomach, clasping the wedding band close. “Harry always wanted . . . for me to have the best.”

She offered the ring back to Ace.

“Maybe it was an old sample. For a while, he was considering investing in a mine on Saturn’s rings.” She shook her head. “Or . . . maybe he just picked it up somewhere.” Her face crumpled suddenly. “I don’t understand why would anyone kill him when he was—”

She choked on a sob.

Tertio, the master of bad timing, chose that moment to step into the hallway. Fortunately for Ace, he didn’t even look at her. He was holding a slim metal thing inlaid with delicate pearlescent flowers.

“I believe when you boarded this vessel, you signed a document stating you had brought no weapons aboard.” Tertio’s expression was grave as he pressed a small button on the metal object’s side and a blade flicked out. “Given that . . . do you care to explain this, Mrs. Magnussen?”

Ace flopped onto her bed, her boots still on. Projected on the wall between the bunks in the Trash Pit was an episode of Frontier Justice.

Frontier Justice was a detective serial about a hardened widow trying to keep the peace in an unruly settlement at the founding of Proxima Centauri B. The lead actress had died on Proxima two decades ago, so there were only fifty-two episodes. Ace watched them all over and over again. She’d gotten the others hooked too.

Georgina was there, wedged between Mingxia and Steve. Bells was on the top bunk with Gunther—judging by the muffled lip-smacking, they were making out already—and Birdie had dragged a chair in from the break room to sit in the aisle between the bunks. She didn’t usually come to these showings, and the look in her eyes suggested she wasn’t really at this one either.

Though Tertio was convinced the matter of Mr. Magnussen’s murder was resolved, with Nova Magnussen in custody, Ace wasn’t so sure. She had checked the maintenance log earlier that day to find out why Birdie and Abdi were in the Arboretum when Mr. Magnussen died. To her relief, Birdie had been responding to an equipment failure at the Port-Fore quadrant. Abdi, though, was supposed to be monitoring the plants on the Activities Deck at around the time of the murder.

“Absolute mayhem at dinner today,” Georgina said during the opening titles. “Everyone and their mother knows about Nova Magnussen getting arrested, and to hear them tell it, they knew something was off about her from the beginning.”

“Was it the way she never finished her goddamn oranges?” Gunther asked, his voice a little slurred. Bells whispered something to him, and he laughed.

“I didn’t mind that so much, myself,” Georgina said. “Took them right off her plate, most nights.”

“I’m surprised she doesn’t have scurvy yet,” Mingxia said.

“There’s still time,” Gunther said. “One and a half ‘days’ to Sol.”

The opening titles were finished and the crime scene was laid out: a dead body tethered to the construction site by a tube of breathable air, but there were no marks on him, and he hadn’t suffocated. The way the man was floating, arms outstretched, leashed to the half-built structure, made Ace’s heart leap with panic for just a few seconds before she reminded herself of drifting in the void. Silent.

“Do you guys know why Abdi was in the Arboretum the other morning?” she asked, trying to affect a casual tone. It worked, mostly. “I thought he was allergic to pine.”

“Oh, he definitely is,” Georgina said. “Remember that one turn we tried to hang pine boughs in the break room for the winter holidays and he couldn’t stop coughing?”

“So the Arboretum would basically kill him,” Ace said.

“Probably,” Georgina said. “Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering,” Ace said. “I couldn’t remember if he actually couldn’t stand the pine boughs or if he just hates fun.”

Georgina huffed a laugh. They were always razzing the Greenies—maintenance staff who worked with the plants aboard the Redundancy—here in the Trash Pit.

They kept watching the episode. Ace still had Mr. Magnussen’s ring, and she was turning it in her fingers, over and over, letting it catch the light of Frontier Justice with every rotation. There was a hint of sparkle in the compressed dust. She wondered where it had come from. Saturn’s rings, like Nova said? Or somewhere else?

“I don’t think Nova Magnussen did it,” she said idly, and almost without meaning to.

“It’s always the spouse, Ace,” Georgina said.

The investigator on Frontier Justice—her name was I-Jun, but everyone on the show called her “June”—was suiting up in the air lock. It was the first serial where the space scenes were actually shot in space; you could tell by the way June’s hair lifted away from her scalp if she didn’t pin it down.

“You didn’t see her,” Ace said, thinking of Nova Magnussen’s fist clenched against her stomach, like a pit of grief had opened up there and she needed to seal it shut. “She looked like . . . I don’t know. I can’t describe it. And she’d never seen this ring before. It definitely wouldn’t have fit on her fingers.”

“Let me see it,” Birdie said.

Ace handed it over, and Birdie squinted her big eyes at it. She’d only been on the Redundancy for two turns. Everyone had steered clear of her on her first one, because she had been a “one and done”—only signed up for one voyage. There was no point in getting to know someone who you were just going to drop off planetside and leave for decades, after all. But then she’d renewed her contract for five more “years” and spent most of her next turn sleeping, not socializing.

“I think it’s Saturnine,” Birdie said. “From Saturn’s rings, I mean.”

Ace had never been to Saturn’s rings. It wasn’t one of the stops on the Redundancy’s route through Sol System, for one thing, and for another, there wasn’t much to do out there if you weren’t harvesting ice or mining hydrogen. But it seemed Nova Magnussen was right: the ring was from where Harry Magnussen had intended to invest.

“The wife said something about him getting involved with mining,” Ace said. “Maybe Tertio is so busy looking at the wife that he’s not even considering other options.”

“Tertio doesn’t give a shit if it’s the wife or not,” Georgina pointed out. “He’s an uptight prick who just wants to ass-kiss his way into another promotion. So he’ll keep them all calm, off-load our passengers, and move on with his life.”

“Shut up, this is my favorite part,” Bells said from the top bunk.

June had dragged the body back into the ship and she was starting her analysis of it, scanning from head to toe with expert assessments that no one around her could match.

Watching her, Ace felt out of her depth. But when she thought about the ring toppling out of Harry Magnussen’s mouth, and the little glass of brandy he had offered her, she knew she had to try.

Ace couldn’t sleep.

She tried to imagine herself adrift in Georgina’s suit, facing the wall of black that was the void between stars, but thoughts of Harry Magnussen kept tugging her back like a tether. She rolled over and contemplated the tiny bottle of sedatives that she kept on the shelf next to her bed. It had been a long time since she’d taken one. Years. Or almost a century, depending on how you kept time.

Her throat tight, she rolled out of bed and put on her coveralls and shoes. There were two people she needed to talk to: Colman Procyon, titan of industry, and Abdi Fomelhaut, pine-allergy curmudgeon. After a moment of consideration, she looked up Abdi in the maintenance log.

The Redundancy’s system showed that Abdi was on the Activities Deck, the courtyard right across from Fitness Center C. Ace raked her fingers through her hair and walked to the elevator.

Like every other person on the Redundancy, she was required to do an hour of exercise per day to mitigate the effects of space travel—significant decreases in bone and muscle density among them. For her it was just a part of life. Her parents had moved her all over Sol System as a child, rarely to places with full gravity. So she was familiar with the fitness centers, and with the Arboretum, though she steered clear of the rest of the Activities Deck.

Fitness Center C was just another in a long line of themed exercise spaces, this one catering to cycling. There was a class in session when Ace reached it, the heavy beats and scratching sounds unfamiliar to her—probably some new Centaurian genre; lately they seemed to love anything that didn’t remind them of the Terran planets, though she was sure they would swing back to nostalgia soon enough.

Across from the closed fitness-center door was a little courtyard of plants no larger than one of the ship’s water tanks. Standing in the middle of it was a man with dark skin and silver studs in a long line down his earlobe. Abdi.

“Hey,” she said to him. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

Apart from the pine allergy, all she knew about Abdi Fomelhaut was that he was good with plants, and that he was almost always sneering. Some people came to the Redundancy to escape the great tragedies of their lives, and some people came because they hated humanity; Abdi seemed to be one of the latter.

“What?” he replied without looking up. He was crouched next to a fern, a pair of shears in hand. Ace contemplated the shears. Passengers weren’t allowed to bring blades aboard, but the maintenance staff had access to plenty of sharp objects. Was Abdi trimming that fern with a murder weapon?

“Are you going to talk, or are you going to continue wasting my time?” Abdi asked as he clipped a wilted leaf from the fern and tucked it into a pouch at his side.

“I . . . wanted to know where you were yesterday morning. Before breakfast.”

Abdi looked up at her. He had dark circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept well.

“I’m sure you’ve already checked the logs,” he said. “So you know I was working on this very level. I always take the dark shift.”

“There was an . . . anomaly. I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation . . .”

Abdi’s hand tightened around the shears. She considered that if she screamed, the people riding stationary cycles in Fitness Center C would likely not hear her over their horrible music.

“You know what? I’m sure Tertio has asked you already,” she said unsteadily. “I just thought you’d rather talk to me, but—hey, why did I think that? I’ll just leave you to—”

“Is this about that murdered passenger?”

“Um,” she said. “Maybe. I don’t really think—”

“Tertio didn’t need to talk to me because he already knows where I was. He saw me there.” He stood and brushed off his knees, though there was no soil. “I’m surprised he didn’t tell you that.”

“He’s sort of . . .” She paused. She was about to say that Tertio didn’t want her working on this investigation with him, but that wasn’t true, was it? He’d given her the list of suspects. So why hadn’t he told her that he could provide Abdi with an alibi?

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m surprised too.”

Abdi stuck his shears in a holster on his belt and sighed.

“Come on, I’ll show you,” he said. “But you have to promise not to tell anyone. Not even those obnoxious friends of yours. Okay?”

The smart thing to do, given how jumpy she felt, would be to make some excuse and bolt. But Ace was a curious person, and now that Abdi’s shears were tucked away, she was starting to feel silly for thinking he would stab her with them right here on the Activities Deck where spandexed passengers could walk by at any moment.

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

In a lonely corner of the Arboretum, right at the edge of the tree line, was a pair of bright-green bushes with big, floppy leaves. Growing from a stalk right in the middle of one of them was a ball of blue flowers.

“It’s a hydrangea,” Abdi said.

He was wearing a filtration mask over his nose and mouth, but his eyes were still red and watery from the nearby pines. He took off one of his gloves and touched the cluster of small flowers with his fingertips. His eyes softened.

“You couldn’t grow them outside the Arboretum where the air isn’t trying to kill you?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Soil composition affects the color of the flowers,” he said. “The acidity in the growth solution here, which is just right for the spruce trees, is also right for producing blue hydrangeas.”

“And you just had to have them,” she supplied.

Abdi didn’t answer. He just kept caressing the flower with gentle fingers. Maybe she had judged him too quickly—maybe he wasn’t here because he hated humanity. Or maybe that wasn’t the only reason.

“They were someone’s favorite,” she guessed. “Someone you care about?”

“My late wife.”

She nodded. Abdi withdrew his hand and pulled on his glove again.

“Are you satisfied?” His gruff tone had returned. Now she recognized it as grief.

“Sort of,” she said. “You said you saw Tertio here? In the Arboretum?”

Abdi nodded. “He was . . . disheveled. Which is odd, for Polaris. I know he saw me, but he didn’t say anything, just hurried away, fast.”

“And you didn’t see anything else? Or hear anything?”

“If I did, I would have reported it,” he replied curtly. “Now, if you’re done playacting as June Park, I’ll be returning to work.”

He walked away. It took her a few seconds to realize he’d just referenced Frontier Justice.

Tertio answered his door with his jacket unbuttoned, which was as much of a shock to Ace’s system as seeing him naked would have been. His hair was still neat as a pin.

He really could have benefited from some rumpling, she thought, and then she pushed that thought aside as hard as she could.

“Well?” he said. He was already fastening his buttons again, from the one right beneath his Adam’s apple on down to his belly button.

Tertio had started on the Redundancy as a manager and advanced after the unfortunate death of the previous Upper Deck concierge. He had never once called her “Ace,” though there had been a disastrous moment when he’d called her by her given name, “Acantha,” and she gave him such a look of disgust that he never attempted it again. Now she was always “Miss Vance.” But she didn’t know him, not really.

“I don’t think Mrs. Magnussen did it,” she said, and she watched his reaction carefully.

He sighed and leaned into his doorframe. She peered over his shoulder at his cramped quarters. Tertio lived on the Service Personnel Deck, right between maintenance and facilities, and he was important enough to get his own room, but it was more like a closet. And it wasn’t as tidy as she might have expected. A pile of clothes hung over the back of his desk chair. His sheets and blankets were in a tangle at the foot of his bed. There was a poster on his wall, black with an imposing-looking woman on it. Above her head was a splash of white script too messy for Ace to read, and beneath it, the name Alessandra Adrastea—an old movie poster.

“We found a knife in her room,” Tertio said.

“Did you match it up to the wound in Harry’s throat?”

“I don’t know how I would manage that if I tried. Do I need to remind you that I’m not actually equipped with the knowledge to investigate a murder?”

“Listen.” Ace leaned a little closer than she felt comfortable with—given that she’d just found out he’d lied to her about his whereabouts on the morning of the murder—but she didn’t want to be overheard. Tertio’s neighbor, the Activities Deck concierge, was sitting at his desk just an arm’s length away, though he had a game helmet on and was digging at the air in front of his face like a burrowing animal.

“I found a ring on Mr. Magnussen’s person,” she said.

“You what?” Tertio pulled away from the doorframe. “You stole from a passenger on board this ship? You stole from a dead man?”

“I didn’t steal from him. I tried to give the ring back to Nova Magnussen; that’s why I was there when you arrested her,” Ace said. “Only she didn’t recognize it. It was too big for her fingers and too cheap to be a present for someone of her . . . stature.”

Tertio was still gaping at her. As she waited for him to get a grip, Ace sorted through what she knew about Tertio. He’d gone to private school on Venus, one of the most exclusive secondary schools in Sol System. His mother had passed while giving birth to her second child—who didn’t survive the experience—and he never spoke of his father. The one and only time she’d ever seen him drunk was on the anniversary of his mother’s death.

It wasn’t much, for one of the people she’d known the longest on the Redundancy.

His mouth closed, then popped open once more before he spoke again.

“I fail to see the significance of this,” he said.

“It was in his mouth,” Ace said. “Whoever killed him must have put it there after he died. Which seems like a message, doesn’t it?”

She couldn’t read anything in his expression. No unease, no guilt, no disgust, nothing. Just Tertio Polaris processing information as he always did, a man of efficient calculations. Why had he lied to her about being in the Arboretum? Had he seen something he wasn’t supposed to? Or done something?

“Maybe Mr. Magnussen was having a dalliance with the woman who possessed that ring, and Nova found out,” Tertio suggested. “And she stuck the ring in his mouth as a kind of . . . retaliatory gesture.”

“I’m telling you, she didn’t recognize it.”

“You and I are not gifted with seeing into the minds of killers.”

Ace sighed. “Don’t you want to be thorough, Polaris? Cross every ‘i,’ dot every ‘t’?”

“You’re getting that wrong just to irritate me.”

“Maybe.” Ace let herself smile a little. She could be charming when she tried. “Please?”

Tertio leaned his head into the doorframe, knocking a strand of his dark hair askew. “As it happens . . . there is something I found strange. The medicine I discovered in their room . . .” He half shrugged. “It was ThanEase.”

The name sounded familiar, but Ace couldn’t place it.

“You know, we provide regular news updates when we’re within range of inhabited planets,” Tertio said. “You may want to familiarize yourself with the basics of culture so that you can continue to communicate with our passengers when necessary.”

Ace narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m a janitor. I’ll leave the communication to you, thanks.”

“ThanEase is a euthanasia protocol administered to people with terminal diseases. It offers one Standard month of painless vitality before a person coasts off into whatever comes next,” Tertio said. “Harry Magnussen had taken three doses of it when he was murdered. Meaning whoever killed him went to all that effort just to deprive him of the mere twenty-seven days of life he had left.”

“Or they didn’t know he was dying.”

“Or,” Tertio said, nodding, “they didn’t know he was dying.”

She slid her hand into her pocket to turn the ring over in her fingers again. Mrs. Magnussen had said something about investing in mining. Birdie had said the ring was Saturnine.

“Colman Procyon works in mining,” she said.

“No,” Tertio said. “I’m not going to allow you to harass a passenger on board this ship when we have a viable suspect in custody—”

“I’m not going to ‘harass’ him. I’m going to ask him if he knows what the ring is made of and see if he recognizes it.” She frowned at Tertio. “Other people like me, you know. They usually don’t mind talking to me.”

“What do you mean, ‘other people’ like you?”

Ace waved this off. “I’m going, Polaris. If you won’t give me his cabin number, I’ll get it from Georgina. She keeps having to spelunk in the garbage chutes to unclog them anyway; she knows everything.”

The wall against her shoulder hummed as the ship’s humidifier kicked on, sending moisture through the filtration system. Even still, she had to rub petroleum jelly onto her knees, elbows, and lips every night to keep them from cracking. But that was life in the void.

“He’s in 246-D.” Tertio stepped into the hallway, and Ace stepped back automatically, to keep the distance between them the same. He brought his door closed behind him. “I’m coming with you.”

Colman Procyon wasn’t in Cabin 246-D, but his wife, who answered the door with gray, glistening mud slathered over her forehead and cheeks, told them to check the smoking lounge. The herbal smell of Proxima Eucalyptus Variant lingered in the hallway even after she closed the door.

The so-called smoking lounge was on the Activities Deck, Starboard-Aft. It involved only flavored vapor, since actual smoke on an enclosed self-sustaining ship like the Redundancy would be catastrophic. Still, she felt uneasy from the moment she stepped into the room, inhaling all the competing odors—tobacco, menthol, lemonade, even bubble gum—at once. The room was dark, the walls paneled in deep gray-brown to match the floor, and filtration curtains hung here and there to create private spaces. Light piano music tinkled somewhere, just loud enough to discourage eavesdropping. This place was a relic of the Roaring Twenties revival that had been going on Earthside when the Redundancy was first constructed. The last time Ace visited Earth—last year in void time but decades ago in Standard—a place like this would have been embarrassingly dated. Everything was Modernist-Futurist now. Well—not “now” anymore. By the time she returned, they would be on to something new, or back to the old.

Tertio waved a hand in front of his face to dispel the vapor and nodded to a corner booth, where parted curtains exposed just a sliver of a man’s face. He was in his twenties, pale as powder sand, and the sort of handsome a person bought in a doctor’s office. The blond streak at the front of his hairline was too perfect to be natural, and pinched in his fingers was a vapor stick made to look like a cigar. He was talking to an older gentleman with similar features.

“I’ll handle the father,” Tertio said. “Don’t dawdle, and be careful.”

Tertio’s expression was grave. He led the way to the back of the room, paused when he was in speaking distance of the two men, and cleared his throat.

“Pardon me,” he said. “Mr. Procyon, might I have a word?”

The elder Mr. Procyon stood and moved away from the booth with Tertio, leaving Ace and Colman alone in the dim corner.

“Don’t tell me Polaris has a girlfriend,” Colman said to her, and he bit down on his vapor stick while he looked her over.

“We’re coworkers,” Ace replied. When she envisioned this moment, she had imagined herself being warm and charming, but something about Colman made her want to shrivel up. “I’m on the janitorial staff here.”

“Fascinating,” Colman said.

“It can be,” she said, defensive. And then, seeing her opportunity: “This journey presented me with my very first crime scene, for example.”

“Ah.” Colman leaned forward. He wore the artfully draped fabrics that she had noticed seemed to be in vogue with young Proximans now, across all genders. One of the drapes—a scarf, perhaps?—slipped from Colman’s rounded shoulder, exposing a hickey at the base of his throat. He caught her staring at it, smirked, and put the scarf back in place.

“That must have been downright traumatic,” he said.

“I fainted several times,” Ace said, and Colman laughed. There—now she’d engaged him.

“Would you like to sit for a moment until your coworker returns?”

Something in Ace’s mind reminded her not to get too close to suspects—something that sounded a lot like June’s voice in Frontier Justice. But she ignored it and sat down next to Colman. The elder Mr. Procyon’s vapor stick was still resting on the edge of the low table. She bumped it with her knee as she crossed her legs.

“You work in mining, right?” she said.

“Now that’s downright unsettling,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ve heard of me. I’ll have to blush.”

“We maintenance staff do like to gossip, and you provide fascinating material.”

Colman puffed on his vapor stick and leaned back. His arm snaked across the top of the booth, so it was right above her shoulder but not touching her. “Yes, my family made its name around Saturn, and my father expanded to Proxima. Not as successful there, I’m afraid.”

“Well, maybe you can help me with something, regardless.” She took the ring out of her pocket and offered it to him, taking note of his expression. “Can you tell me what this is made of?”

His eyes narrowed. He plucked the ring from her hand and slipped it on a finger. It was too small to fit past the first knuckle. His knuckle was a little discolored, splitting at the creases the way hers did in the dry ship air. He tapped the ring with a fingernail.

“It’s resin,” he said. “Earth-made. Basically a carnival toy. You didn’t think it was valuable, did you?”

“No. But I did hear it was Saturnine.”

Colman smiled a little. “Saturnine. Who told you that?” He drew another breath of tobacco-flavored vapor into his lungs and released it through his nostrils. “Hope it wasn’t Polaris giving you a romantic bauble.”

“It was him, come to think of it. He told me that right after I did a striptease for him,” Ace replied. Colman seemed to respond to a sour tone. Sure enough, he smiled again, and she took another chance. “Do you want to know what else my friends are saying about you?”

“Oh, absolutely. I hang on your every word.”

“Mrs. Magnussen told me Harry was pursuing some mining business, so they’re saying you two were working together, and maybe something went wrong,” she said. “Some of them think you’re his actual killer.”

At that, Colman laughed, full-throated, like a bullfrog.

“They’re right, of course. We were very much in bed together.” Colman winked. “In a manner of speaking.” He blew a ring of vapor toward the curtains, and then another one, as if to impress her. “As to the rest, well. My lips are sealed.”

He took the ring off the tip of his finger and held it out to her.

“That’s a novelty ring,” he said. “A replica of a ring from an old movie—can’t remember the name. Something and Something.”

She took it, but before she could pull away, he wrapped his hand around hers.

“So do you believe these rumors your friends are spreading about my character?” he said. “Or were you simply reporting the latest gossip?”

Tertio was walking back with the elder Mr. Procyon now. She had to try the more direct route.

“What were you doing in the Arboretum yesterday morning?” she said. At the moment she spoke, the tinkling of the piano disappeared, so her question came out too loud. All around the room, faces turned in her direction, like bats’ eyes glittering in the dark.

“Killing Harry Magnussen, obviously,” Colman said with an arched eyebrow.

“Colman,” the elder Mr. Procyon said, in a warning tone.

“Please,” Colman said. “If the ship’s janitor wants to play detective, why not let her?” He reached into his pocket and took out a familiar golden object. He offered it to her.

“Harry Magnussen’s illegal recording device,” he said. “I hope you find out more than I did.”

She held it close to her face. It was shaped like a flower. A peony, maybe. Plush and round, with delicate petals rendered in metal. She had seen it in Harry Magnussen’s cabin, the day he died.

When she sat down in the Upper Deck control room a half hour later, her hands were still shaking a little, and both she and Tertio were pretending not to notice.

The room was right down the hall from the Arboretum, so the smell of pine and mineral solution and the faintest whiff of flowers was in the air, though the floors had gone from faux wood to metal grate, as they did in all maintenance areas. The greenish light above the door was flickering; the wiring in this part of the ship was deteriorating faster than elsewhere.

Tertio had sent a summons out to the technical staff, and Birdie had answered, looking pale and sad eyed as usual. Not for the first time, Ace wondered what—or whom—she was mourning.

Birdie had led them to the control room without asking questions, spinning her key ring around her finger as she walked. She hadn’t asked questions as she connected the recording device and pulled up the most recent file, either. In fact, the set of her mouth was grim, as if she’d seen it coming.

“I could just go detain him,” Tertio offered.

“He wouldn’t have handed this over if he was actually guilty.” Ace tilted her head. “Or if evidence of his guilt was still on it, I should say. He could have altered it.”

The visual footage paired with the audio file was grainy and uninteresting, just a chest-high shot of the Arboretum. Dense, furred branches and the curve of a walking path. The trees had been sparser when they were first planted. Ace tried to remember how long she’d been on the Redundancy, in void time. Less than a decade? More? Enough time for a forest to fill in and for a man to grow old and die right under her nose, but what did that even mean out here?

A man’s chest appeared in frame. She wouldn’t have recognized it as Colman’s if not for the way his shoulders rounded. Apart from that, the visual footage was unimportant, irrelevant, but the audio was crisp. She could hear the hum of the filtration system and the quiet bubbling of the mineral solution beneath the trees, and the voices of two men.

Tertio sat beside her at the control panel. He reached across her to twist the volume knob, and the humming and bubbling got louder, but the voices did too.

“. . . Now, as I told you before, I am meeting an old friend here and would prefer that meeting to remain private—” Ace would have recognized the voice anywhere as Harry Magnussen’s. Gentle and sweet, even when he was impatient, as he clearly was now.

“Yes, I’m well aware of your ‘old friend’ on board this vessel. Is your wife?” She recognized this voice as Colman’s. Like his good looks, his voice was standard, neither high nor low, clear nor rough.

“Is that a threat, my dear boy?”

“It’s not yet, though it could become one if you don’t give me a better reason for screwing me over.”

“I told you—”

“You told me ‘personal matters necessitated a withdrawal.’ That’s really all you have to say?”

“Oh, there are a great many things I could say. But they are, unfortunately, none of your business.”

“Your ‘business’ became my business the moment you promised your support,” Colman replied. “The only reason we’re even on this journey is because of—”

“Now that is simply not true, and you know it,” Harry said. “Your mother just told me the other night that you wanted to migrate for the good of your marriage—”

“Shut up,” Colman snapped. “My mother doesn’t know the half of it. You’ve ruined me, old man. Ruined me, gone back on your promises, and all you can say is ‘personal reasons.’”

“Hasn’t anyone ever told you,” Harry said, “to keep your promises between your teeth?”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, nothing. Just content yourself with knowing that you’ll only have to bear your hatred of me for another few—”

Colman came closer, so he filled the frame. Then: chaotic movement. A scuffling sound, and a cry of pain. The image turned sideways, the trees growing to the right—Harry Magnussen was on the ground, but only for a few seconds before he shifted and started to right himself. Colman’s polished shoes were walking out of frame. Tertio paused the footage, but Ace kept staring at the screen.

“Keep your promises between your teeth,” she said, and then added: “. . . so you can bite them back as needed.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The ring was between Harry’s teeth,” she said. “Because the ring was a promise he didn’t keep—a promise he ‘bit back.’”

“So . . . Colman did do it?”

She shook her head.

“No, it’s a Jovian phrase. An old one. Jovians love their little poems.” Ace leaned back in her seat. “A young Proximan like Colman wouldn’t have known it, and clearly he didn’t know it.”

“Could he have asked someone about it?”

“At 0600 hours, between having this conversation and committing a murder?” She shook her head. “No time. Is there anything else on there?”

Tertio tapped the screen once, twice. “No, that’s the most recent file.”

There was something tickling the back of her mind.

“I don’t think he did this,” Ace said.

She thought back to Colman in the smoking lounge. He had put the ring on his index finger. His knuckles—she had thought they were split from the dry air, but now it seemed clear that he had punched Harry Magnussen and walked away. That’s a novelty ring. A replica of a ring from an old movie.

“Hey, Tertio,” she said, her voice sounding odd to her ears. “You know that movie poster you have on your wall?”

“The space noir?”

“Yeah, that one. What’s the title of it, again?”

“Jovian and Jovial,” he said. “Why?”

His eyes reminded her of the deep-brown ripples that wrapped around the ethereal blue of the Orion Nebula. She thought of his quick fingers buttoning his jacket and tried to imagine them wrapped around a knife. She couldn’t.

Maybe it was stupid. But she just . . . couldn’t.

“Why did you lie to me?” she asked him. “About being in the Arboretum when Mr. Magnussen was killed?”

He stared at her.

“Abdi told me he saw you,” she said. “Please don’t try to pretend he’s lying.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Tertio said softly. “I’m just . . .” He sighed. “I’m embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?”

“I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” he said. “So sometimes I go to the Arboretum and sit on one of the benches. It’s peaceful there. The night Harry Magnussen died, I fell asleep on one—slept through the start of my shift.” He shook his head. “If I hadn’t been asleep . . . maybe I would have heard something. Seen something.”

“He would still be dead, Tertio,” she said. “And maybe you would be too.”

“I was irresponsible,” he said, his voice hardening.

“You were human.” She shrugged. “Honestly, it’s nice to know you mess things up just like the rest of us.”

“I’m sorry I lied to you,” he said. “I just knew I didn’t do it, so there wasn’t any point in investigating me.”

Maybe life in the void should have eradicated her faith in humanity. Separation from time tended to do that to people. All the little struggles of people’s lives—and the great ones—became meaningless. Empires fell and rose, governments rebuilt themselves and collapsed, borders shifted, power flowed in and out, and still the Redundancy flew its endless circuit between star systems. The one thing that was constant was people fucking up what they’d made.

But they kept making things, didn’t they? They kept trying. And so did she.

She looked over her shoulder, where a moment before, Birdie had been standing with her pale hands clasped in front of her. She was gone.

“Uh,” Ace said. “Where’s Birdie?”

Tertio shrugged. “She must have gone back to work. Want me to ping her?”

Ace heard Colman Procyon’s voice in her ear again. Saw his eyes glinting as he held the ring up to look at it.

Saturnine. Who told you that?

Birdie’s eyes glinting as she held the ring up to look at it.

Let me see it.

“Go find Colman,” she said. “Just—keep an eye on him. In case I’m wrong.”

“In case you’re wrong about what?”

Everything, she thought. But all she said was “Just do it, Polaris.” And she broke into a run.

Time in the void was relative. This had never been more true than on the elevator ride from the Upper Deck to the Maintenance Deck. Ace poked the button, already lit, as if that would speed things along. It didn’t.

The doors opened to the smell of chemicals and the harsh overhead lights reflecting fuzzily off the metal wall panels. Everything here was familiar: the cool temperature of the light, the gush of water through the wall pipes, the sound her boots made when she ran on the metal grate floor . . . and the path from the elevator bank to the break room.

Her legs burned. She was grateful for the mandatory hour of exercise, but it wasn’t quite enough—she hadn’t sprinted anywhere in months. Years. Since before the Redundancy.

Georgina was dropping a cube of sweetener into her coffee when Ace opened the door. She was the only one in the break room.

“Ace, what the hell are you—”

“Birdie?” she asked.

“You just missed her,” Georgina replied. “She said she was going for a swim. I told her she could borrow my suit.”

Muscles protesting, Ace turned and ran again, this time hullward. She could have sworn she felt the contours of the metal grate floor under her feet, the chill of the air on her toes. She blinked tears from her eyes and rounded the corner, sprinting down the hall to the air lock. This felt too familiar.

The door to the air lock was already closed. She threw herself at it, pounding on it with her fists, and looked through the window at the air lock chamber.

Birdie was standing before the air lock door, which was still closed—for the moment. She was wearing her teal coveralls. No drift suit in sight. Clasped in Birdie’s right hand was what looked like a crumpled photograph.

Ace tried to open the door, but when she looked down, she saw the end of the metal rod Birdie had shoved across the jamb to keep it from opening.

“Birdie!” she called out. Birdie’s shoulders twitched, but she didn’t turn around. Ace tried again: “Callisto.”

This time, Birdie looked over her shoulder at Ace. She wasn’t crying, but she didn’t look right either. She was so pale—so tired.

“So you knew Harry,” Ace said. She had Birdie’s attention, but she didn’t know what to say, exactly. She just knew that she needed to keep Birdie from opening the hatch doors.

“He seemed nice,” Ace said. “I mean—I guess that’s a dumb thing to say. You wouldn’t have hurt him if he was really that nice.”

Birdie laughed, a thready little thing that almost didn’t register through the heavy door that separated them.

“Maybe I would,” she said. “You don’t really know, do you?”

“I could. If you’d explain.”

“You only just started talking to me, you know.” Birdie’s fist tightened around the photograph she held. “This is my third turn, and you didn’t even remember that I had a fiancé, before. Nobody really did. Steve, maybe.” She tilted her head. “Tell Steve goodbye for me, would you?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ignore you. You should talk to Steve yourself.”

“I’m not mad.” Birdie didn’t sound mad. She sounded remote. “He used to call me a slip of a thing. Always quiet and always watching. I think . . . I think he thought it was mysterious, at first. He couldn’t get enough of me. But sometimes what you think is a shroud of mystery is just a fucking shroud.”

“Harry? Are you talking about Harry?”

“Of course I am!” Birdie’s yell was sudden and strange. Her eyes lit up with it. “Harry badgered me for weeks to run away with him. His parents had arranged some kind of . . . business-deal sham of a marriage. He wanted to escape it. I thought it was so romantic. He only had a small amount of money squirreled away, so he got me a job on this ship to pay my way. Then, when he found out I was knocked up, he bolted. I couldn’t bring myself to live on the same planet as the man who abandoned me. Harry Magnussen. Such a nice man.”

Ace looked more carefully at the photograph in Birdie’s hand. No, not a photograph.

A sonogram.

“I lost it,” Birdie said softly. “It was my fault. Babies don’t develop right in space.”

Ace had never been much good at science. She knew that ammonia combined with bleach made a toxic gas; that soap could mix with both oil and water. And she knew that, though space travel didn’t affect fertilization, it wasn’t good for fetuses. They needed full gravity. Protection from radiation.

Ace felt heavy, looking at the sonogram.

“And then he had the audacity,” Birdie went on, “to bring his new wife here. Like he’d forgotten all about me.”

Ace leaned her head into the glass. Time was relative. Harry Magnussen must have been no older than twenty-two when he first boarded the Redundancy, and no younger than eighty-two when he boarded it again. Sixty years was an entire lifetime. More than a lifetime, depending on what you were allotted. Time enough for him to think fondly of his romantic adventure across solar systems, to let the hard edges of his memory wear down all soft and warm.

“He was dying,” Ace said. “He was dying, and this was where he most wanted to go. Doesn’t sound like he forgot you.”

A shiver passed through Birdie’s chin. Her chest.

“Listen to me.” Ace pressed a palm to the glass, marking it with her fingerprints. “You don’t want to go out this way.”

“You don’t actually know what I want.”

“I know what you don’t,” Ace said, digging her forehead into the door. “Just . . . just listen to me. My parents died in a mining accident when I was a kid, out near Ganymede. They were in drift and something malfunctioned. Their suits stopped working. Do you know what happens in drift when your suit doesn’t do its job?”

She was barefoot and running—

“Little bubbles form in your blood—they inflate you to twice your original size.”

She was staring into the void as they reeled her parents in.

“You look like a nightmare version of you. That’s the way people remember you. What they see when they close their eyes.”

She let her hand fall.

“You lost people, Callisto,” she said. “Big losses. I know. I’ve felt them too. And I almost did this—what you want to do. It feels like . . . like there’s just no point, without them. Out in the void, you know more than most people how insignificant we are. What’s one more bloated body adrift? Just matter converting to matter. Stardust to stardust.”

She met Birdie’s eyes, insistent.

“Only—out here we’re also impossibly big,” she said. “Bigger than time. We watch kingdoms rise and fall. Names change. Fashions change. A thousand tiny cataclysms pass us by, and we see better than anybody, you know? That all things pass.”

Birdie’s big, round eyes softened a little.

“Don’t make me remember you that way,” Ace said. “Come back in, and—let it pass.”

They waited for a long stretch of time. Like a tide receding, or a moon creeping across the sky by fractions too tiny to observe in the moment. An eternity, really, depending on how tiny you allowed time to be. A millisecond was nothing compared to an hour, and an hour was nothing compared to an eon. It was all relative in the void.

Birdie’s fist relaxed, and the sonogram fell to the ground.

Ace stood in the air lock chamber, later, with Georgina’s bright-orange suit in front of her. It was difficult, but not impossible, to get into a drift suit on your own. It fastened up the back, for one thing, but Ace was flexible enough to twist her arms behind her and do up the last few straps.

She went through the checklist again: suit, boots, helmet, backup oxygen, tether, backup tether. Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy—that was the mantra for space travel, the mantra for which the Redundancy was named. They thought it would be comforting to passengers. Soothing.

She was about to step into the suit when the door opened, and Tertio Polaris stepped into the chamber. He wore his teal uniform buttoned up to the throat, as usual, and his dark hair combed away from his face neatly. The only thing that had changed about him, as far as she could tell, was that he’d let her see he was human.

“I don’t understand why you do this,” he said. “How you can call it ‘swimming,’ like it’s a fun activity. Especially now that I know . . .”

He trailed off. She raised an eyebrow. The story she’d told Birdie had made its way from the ship’s surveillance systems—useless in the Arboretum, thanks to the trees, but fully functional on the Maintenance Deck—to the staff rumor mill, and now everyone knew it.

“Especially now that you know it’s how my parents died?” she said. “You can say it, you know.”

“I don’t know how near it is, for you.”

“It’s a solar system away, Polaris.” Her lips quirked into a smile. “At first I did it to make myself hurt. To see what they saw, at the end.” She shrugged. “But then . . . I realized that what’s out there is oblivious to us. There’s no menace to it, because there’s no intent. We’re just fragile, and we break sometimes. And time keeps moving. I don’t know. I think it’s comforting—our smallness is comforting to me.”

Tertio’s eyes were as dark as space. They held each other’s gaze for just a moment, and then she broke it, nudging at Georgina’s suit with her toe. “Help me get into this, will you?”

So Tertio held the suit for her while she stepped into it, and he lifted it so it didn’t sag around her calves when she stepped into the boots. He even picked up the helmet to put on her head, but hesitated before he did it.

“Birdie’s all right, you know,” Tertio said. “Detained, and ready to be taken into Earth custody when we arrive, but all right. Earth is a decent place to go to prison, these days. At least, it was last time I checked.”

“And Mrs. Magnussen?”

“Free, and everyone’s insisting they knew she was innocent all along.” Tertio rolled his eyes a little. “I can’t wait to drop these assholes off.”

“Did you just . . . imply that our passengers are anything less than the very best customers a person could ask for?” Ace faked a gasp. “Why, Tertio! I never.”

In response, Tertio put the helmet over her head and twisted it so it locked.

“Come watch Frontier Justice with us tonight, okay?” she said, her voice muffled by the helmet.

To her surprise, Tertio touched his forehead to her visor, so he was all she could see, and said, “All right.”

Ace drifted in the void. She turned away from the ship and swallowed the horror of emptiness like a shot of whiskey that burned all the way down.

It was strange how an ache that had persisted for years could just . . . subside. Just like that. Matter not disappearing, just . . . transforming.

They would enter Sol System tomorrow. They would coast past Jupiter with its big swirling eye; land on Mars Station, adrift over the dusty red planet, to unload passengers; and then continue on to Earth, the big blue marble from which all humans originated.

Sol System had been Ace’s home once, in the time before the void. Her parents took her all around the system, from job to job, so she adjusted to the pull of every gravity, every combination of elegant medications that kept her healthy, every configuration of stars and planets imaginable. When her parents died, they left her with no home but them to speak of, and they were gone. They left her with nothing.

But the void was also nothing, and now it contained her entire world.

And so all things passed, eventually. Even pain.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2019 Nelson Fitch

Veronica Roth is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Divergent series, Arch-Conspirator, Poster Girl, Chosen Ones, the Carve the Mark duology, and the short story collection The End and Other Beginnings. Her stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including the Amazon Original Stories collection Forward, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, Lightspeed magazine, and Catapult.

Table of Contents

- TITLE PAGE
- COPYRIGHT PAGE
- VOID
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR