Back at the cart, something was happening. Teresa couldn’t tell what it was at first. Her mind tried to make it into the two guards wrestling with each other, except one of them toppled out the side of the cart and fell into the snow. The violence in the cart kept going on. In her peripheral vision, she saw Holden step in front of Muskrat, his arms still lifted, but Ilich wasn’t paying attention to that now.
“Captain Erder! Report!” Ilich barked, but no one answered. Instead, the guard still in the cart shrieked once. Something wet snapped, and the screaming stopped. Everything was perfectly still. Ilich took a step toward the cart, then another.
Timothy boiled out from the shadows behind the cart, sprinting through the snow. His eyes were black, his skin gray. Ilich fired and a smear of blackness appeared on Timothy’s bare ribs. He hit Ilich like he’d fallen from a great height and sent the man’s legs up in the air as Timothy bore his torso down into the snow.
It had all happened too fast. She didn’t know if the pistol belonged to one of the guards or if he’d taken it from Ilich. Only that it looked smaller in Timothy’s hand. Muskrat barked happily and wagged her tail, scattering the snow.
Holden slowly let down his arms. “Amos?”
Timothy—Amos—stood up over Ilich and went perfectly still for a moment, then said, “Hey, Cap. You look like shit.” Below him, Ilich gasped, the wind knocked out of him by the violence of Timothy’s charge.
“You’ve been prettier yourself, one time and another.”
“Well, you know how it is.” Amos turned his dark eyes to her and nodded down at the snow where Ilich lay, still wheezing. “Hey there, Tiny. This guy a friend of yours?”
Teresa started to say yes, and then no, and then she understood what he was asking.
“No,” she said. “He’s not on my side.”
“All right,” Amos said, and fired the pistol twice. The muzzle flash was the brightest thing in the world.
“How did you find us?” Holden asked, swaying on his feet.
“This asshole,” Amos said. “I been tracking him every time he came out from the compound over there. Figured sooner or later, I’d get a shot at him. You made a good distraction.”
“Did you have to kill him?” Holden asked.
“Just evening up the score, is all. Are you sure you’re okay, Cap? You seem kind of fucked.”
A dozen questions pressed at Teresa’s mind—where have you been living, how did you survive without any of your things, how badly are you hurt, why aren’t you dead—but what came out of her mouth was, “Aren’t you cold?”
Amos looked at her, thought about the question. Snowflakes were landing on his bare chest and melting there. The hole in his ribs where he’d been shot wasn’t bleeding. After a moment, he shrugged. “I’ll live.”
Before Teresa could say anything more, a powerful, deep roar came from somewhere high above them. Her first thought was that they’d started an avalanche. She imagined herself and all the others wiped away by tons of snow rushing down the mountain. But then she saw the lights in the sky.
Amos took her elbow, leaned close, and shouted in her ear, “We should get back to the tree line.”
She let herself be led, Holden and Muskrat following close behind, as a huge ship fell from the sky. The plumes of its maneuvering thrusters melted the snow in the clearing away in an instant and set the security cart rolling. Teresa huddled back among the dormant trees, her hands over her ears, until the roaring stopped and Amos tapped her shoulder.
The ship was a fast-attack frigate. A very old Martian design. Its sides were a patchwork of different plating materials. Steam rose all around it, and the cooling metal and carbon-silicate lace ticked and popped. Teresa walked out toward it with a sense of awe and joy and profound accomplishment. She’d done it.
The airlock opened, and a man in no kind of uniform looked down into the darkness and the mist and the snowfall.
“Who’s there?” the man’s voice called.
“Alex?” Holden shouted.
Almost conversationally, the voice said, “Well, holy shit.”
A rickety metal stair ladder descended. Holden went up first, his steps unsteady at first, but more sure the higher he went. Muskrat paced at the bottom of the stair anxiously.
“I don’t know,” Teresa said to her. “This is why I told you to stay in my rooms.”
“Go on up,” Amos said. “I got this.”
Teresa put her hands on the bright metal and climbed up toward the hands of strangers reaching out to help her aboard. And behind her Amos, balancing without his hands because his arms were filled with dog. The black wound on his side didn’t appear to bother him. The man waiting for them laughed when he saw Muskrat, and the dog wagged uncertainly at first.
The locker room seemed to be on its side, Holden and a bald, dark-skinned man embracing and grinning at each other. Timothy—no, Amos hauled up the ladder, and the airlock door closed behind her.
She’d practiced for this moment. I’m Teresa Duarte, and I’m giving you back this prisoner in exchange for passage out of Laconia. Now that it had arrived, it seemed like that was all just given.
“You got to come up to the flight deck,” the dark-skinned man said. Alex, Holden had called him. “We gotta get out of here, but I’m not letting either of you two sons of bitches out of my sight.”
Teresa followed them, unsure what else to do. Amos walked with her through the sideways lift and flight deck. A beautiful older woman with curly white hair pulled down almost over her eyes was waiting there. When she saw Holden, she took a long, shuddering breath. The prisoner took her hand.
“All right,” Alex said. “Everybody strap in. We’re off this mudball.”
A rough cheer rose all around her, and Teresa surprised herself by joining in. Amos took her by the shoulder and led her to an ancient-looking, thoroughly disreputable crash couch.
“You’re gonna need to strap in, Tiny. I got an idea what to do with this one,” he said, pointing a thick thumb at Muskrat. “So you just stay here with Naomi and the captain.”
“Naomi,” Teresa said. “That’s Naomi Nagata?”
“And this is the Rocinante,” Amos said. “And I don’t know who most of the rest of these people are, but one way or another, we’re home.”
And then he was gone, leading Muskrat into the belly of the ship and leaving her to stare up into the monitor. It felt strange, like she was in a dream, but also mundane as walking down a slightly unfamiliar hallway. She was here. She was leaving.
The ship shuddered, hissed, started to rise up.
“You want me to kick on the main drive?” Alex asked over the sound of the thrusters burning. “I could slag that whole palace if you want.”
“No,” Holden said, “leave it be. We still have friends there. Elvi, for one.”
“Oh,” Alex said. “Should we go get her?”
“No,” Holden said. “She’s where she needs to be.”
The Rocinante rose, pushing Teresa back into the cool, blue gel of the couch. The ship shuddered and hummed as it rose, and then when they were high enough from the ground, a new, deeper thrum began, and they leaped upward. Into the darkness of space. Leaving everything behind. She closed her eyes, trying to decide what she felt. If she felt anything, or maybe everything all at once.
Her home, everything she’d ever known, was falling away behind her, and all she was certain of was that she never wanted to go back. The princess was getting hell and gone from fairyland.
A sharp alert caught her attention at the same moment the pilot—Alex—said something obscene. She looked over at him, and his face was ashen.
“Alex?” the woman said.
“We been target locked,” Alex said. “We took too long. It’s the Whirlwind.”
Chapter Forty-Nine: Naomi
Because the Rocinante was built to land on its belly, Holden stepped onto the flight-deck wall. He looked thin. More than thin, he looked like he’d been ill for months. The lines around his mouth were deeper than they’d been, and his grin looked less like his usual easy joy and more like surprise that anything good had actually happened. He looked bruised at heart, but only that. Not broken. He didn’t look broken.
He met her eyes, and something in her chest that she didn’t know could relax relaxed. She took a long, shuddering breath. Jim took her hand. She’d thought that would never happen again, and here he was, touching her again.
“Hey,” he said, too softly for anyone to hear but her.
“Hey,” she said back.
Amos, behind him, looked wrong. His skin was gray and his eyes were a uniform black. She’d seen kids on Pallas affect the same look with dyes and scleral tattooing, but on Amos it didn’t look like an edgy fashion choice.
Also, he was carrying a big black dog with a gray muzzle and a perplexed expression. The girl beside him seemed familiar, but not so much that Naomi could place her. There would be time for stories later.
Alex climbed up to his crash couch, grinning. “All right. Everybody strap in. We’re off this mudball.”
The crew cheered, not quite drunk with success, but maybe a little tipsy. Or maybe that was just her. Holden slipped into one of the other couches, staying close to the girl. Protective of her.
Slowly the ship tilted back to its normal, upright position.