The open foyer to the Ruiz space mansion was exactly as it was when I visited before. The sleek shining walls swept outward, the dazzling radiance of the three steps to the wide doors. Glass displays of ancient art stood to greet visitors with a mix of the beautiful and the mundane.

The biggest difference was the active gunfight.

The velvet settee lay in shreds across the floor, and several display cases sat sideways as barricades. Ceramic shards of a the porcelain God littered the floor. Above, a red light flashed with alarm, and the exits into the ship proper were all closed.

A bullet struck Lauder in the chest and he staggered back. A goon stepped forward to protect him but took a shot to the skull and dropped like a sack of bricks.

“Stand down, Sam!” shouted Lauder, apparently unfazed by being shot.

Sam shouted, “You both tried to fuck me over, Lauder.”

Lauder cast me a furious glance, and I shrugged. Honestly, I had expected Sam to last a little longer before going completely unhinged. “He wants an equal share,” I said.

“Split it three ways,” shouted Sam. It was, honestly, the most reasonable any of the potential crime bosses had been, which is why I knew it would never work.

Our position was poor. Maurice and Retch stayed mostly hidden behind the outer airlock door, but I didn’t fit. It was only a matter of time before Sam decided to start taking shots my direction. I still didn’t see Saint Jerome, but I didn’t like my chances from him, either.

I glanced back at Lauder and spotted the gateway terminal. That terminal—or its equivalent in Onegee—had been the death of my parents. This was the room, and the event flashed before my eyes like it had happened yesterday. One second I was a wealthy aristocrat’s son, the next I was an unwanted orphan. That fateful day I’d made the decision to murder my own parents—along with hundreds of others on that ship—all in the name of saving Nicodemia. Saving Trinity.

Maybe Trinity really was my god. It was the higher power for which I sacrificed everything. Maybe one day there would be a reckoning for all my sins on that day and all the sins I’ve committed since.

But not today.

I drew my pistol. “Maurice, Retch, I need you two to get to that door on the left. It’s got some cover, and you should be able to pry it open. I’ll cover you.”

By the time I finished talking, Retch had already reached the door. Maurice shrugged at me and did his best crouch-run. When Sam—who hunkered down behind a shattered display case—spotted him, I fired a couple shots to get his attention.

Unfortunately, that got his attention.

“Demarco,” he growled.

“How come all the other would-be crime bosses want to hire me and you just want me dead?”

In response, he fired. I dove out of the way, making the best of the cover a shattered display case could make for me. The distraction left an opportunity for Lauder and his remaining guy to duck out of the airlock into the relative cover of the room.

Sam unleashed a barrage of bullets. I ran. Behind me, the airlock started to cycle. I dove into cover with Maurice and Retch.

“The ship is locked down,” Retch said, wrenching the door’s control panel open. “But Mo’s going to show me how to get through.”

“Just get the door open.” I popped my head out of cover and took in a glimpse of the surroundings. From there, I saw Saint Jerome, bleeding by the red door on the right. He shifted. Still alive, then. “We need to get out of here fast. Sam’s backed into a corner. He finally figured out he can’t trust anyone.”

The airlock door slammed shut. Beck would join the party soon, and I wasn’t sure we wanted to be around for that. The display above the airlock showed two other chambers were occupied. It would take them time to work their way through the system, whoever they were. Maybe too long.

Maurice said, “This yacht is built on the chassis of a Mark IV Cruiseliner. Standard stuff. These systems all have an open mode that they use during construction and big maintenance activities.”

The words didn’t sink in right away. His voice was chatter in the background of a gunfight. I fired two more shots at Sam, hoping to take the raging idiot out before he got anyone else killed.

“Thing is,” Maurice told Retch, “open mode isn’t supposed to be available post construction. It’s dangerous. Right now we’re in lockdown, and if the airlock blew we’d suck void in one, maybe two rooms. Everyone else on the ship would be safe.”

“But if all the bulkheads are all open,” Retch said, “everyone’s doomed?”

“That’s right, and that’s never a state an occupied ship should be in.”

Lauder’s last bodyguard took a bullet to the neck, pasting the wall with spinal fluid and blood. His body fell to become a grisly work of art on a broken display case.

Retch said, “You know how to override the lockdown?”

“All we have to do is bypass the system and revert the ship to maintenance mode.” With that, he flipped the pins on the console, pressed the hard reset, and said, “Please let this work.”

All the lights went dark.

And Maurice’s words sunk into my head. I said, “Did you say this was a Mark IV?”

I should have recognized it. I knew there was something familiar about the layout of the ship. This was the same design that I’d been in so many years ago. It was the ship where my parents died. This was the ship that failed to properly section off to compartmentalize during the disaster. This ship ruined my life.

Maurice had just shown how to override every safety measure aboard the ship. He’d overridden the bulkheads.

The overhead lights flared to life in a shocking white. The door slid open, as did the others in the room. As we hurried through, the airlock cycled again.

Beck’s voice rang down the hall, “Enough!”

I drew to a halt.

Silence hung in the air. All gunfire stopped. For the span of one held breath, nothing moved in the entire ship. It was the peace of the endless void—the deep echoing silence before the roaring cataclysm.

Tap, tap, tap, of Beck’s heels in the entryway. She didn’t have a line of sight to me, but she would soon. “None of you are welcome on this ship. Lauder, you’re here for a painting that isn’t yours. Did you think it wouldn’t be defended? Jerome? You think you can cut a deal with my boss? You’re wrong. She’s already made her decision. We’re leaving, and you’re not coming with. Take what’s left of your goons and go. We’ll let you live, and that’s generous. Demarco.” Her voice broke, and the powerful demeanor shattered. “Demarco. We need to talk.”

I met Maurice’s eyes and saw the fear there. “We need to go,” I whispered.

“Not until I see Violet,” said the old man.

“Retch, you—” But Retch wasn’t there. He’d disappeared while Beck was speaking. “Fine.” I waved Maurice forward, further into the belly of the ship. As quietly as we could, we hurried down the weaving passages.

Now that I knew the truth, it was impossible not to recognize the ship for what it was—the same model I’d flown in before. There was the passage where I chased my sister on that last day she had functioning legs. Over behind that was the cabin where the adults gathered for drinks and gambling. My father had been an avid gambler. That memory rattled in my brain after a decade of suppression. He’d been losing that day. He’d lost a lot of days.

Maybe I was more like him than I thought.

Because I knew my way around the ship, I knew exactly where to go. Violet’s central art display sat where the ship’s biggest lounge met the helm. With Maurice at my heel, I stalked directly to it, rounding the corner to find two of Violet’s guards blocking the path.

“I’m here to speak with the boss,” I said.

After a brief pause, a voice from the other room said, “Make him leave his weapon.”

I flipped my pistol around and handed it to the guard handle first. He took it and waved me through.

“Welcome back, Mr. Demarco,” Violet said. She lounged on one of the red sofas, a bowl of grapes at her side. “Forgive the confiscation, but we can’t have anyone firing weapons in here.”

“No, I suppose not,” I said, walking into the center of the room. From there I had a good line of sight to each entrance, as well as the bulk of Violet’s collected art. “This is where you keep the real stuff, isn’t it?”

Maurice followed me into the center of the room, and when Violet saw him, she smiled. “Maurice Ribar. So lovely to see you again. My husband felt very highly of you and your skills.”

“He’s a good man,” Maurice said.

“He was, wasn’t he?” Violet’s back stiffened. “If only he’d been just a little smarter.”

“Or a little stupider. It would have been a good plan if he just hadn’t tried to be so damn smart about it.”

A sliver of a smile crossed Violet’s lips before it faded. She approached Maurice. “What is it you came for, Mr. Ribar?”

“I came to apologize. I should never have agreed to the job. I knew it was dangerous. Then, when things started to seem off, I should have called the whole thing down. I didn’t stand up to your husband, and that caused a whole pile of trouble. When we fled to this station, well, I think we were fleeing the humiliation of all our stupid decisions more than any real retaliation from law enforcement.”

I saw the flicker of a frown cross Violet’s brow, and everything I suspected about their job fell into place.

“You don’t need to apologize, Maurice,” I said strolling slowly across the room. “Violet here knew everything all along.”

Violet picked up a half-empty glass of champaign and took a sip, raising an eyebrow with a question.

“She was working with Trey Vitez,” I said. “The forger. You see, not only did the job go south once you breached the ship, but it was the wrong ship to start, full of Trey’s masterful forgeries. The real transport ship was somewhere else entirely, being taken wholesale by Violet.” I gestured at the art all around. “You see here the entire contents of that transport, minus a few valuables to pay for the ship itself and a few other luxury items.”

Maurice’s eyes narrowed.

I continued, “Violet fed the wrong telemetry data to her husband. Were you having an affair with Trey?” She didn’t bother answering. “It doesn’t really matter if you were, for this to work, you needed Richard’s trust. Your husband didn’t know about any affair. He trusted you completely. When you fed him the data, it shortened the intercept window. What you weren’t counting on was the team continuing the mission, even after things went south. They’d always been so professional.”

“They got greedy,” Violet said.

Maurice gestured at the art all around them. “Says you.”

I walked to the tall wooden box with the faded painting of the bubble landscape. Pulling it open, I revealed the full triptych of The Garden of Earthly Delights. It was even more breathtaking together in one piece. “The false ship crashed, but the idea was to keep enough forged art intact that inspectors would assume the real ship crashed. Meanwhile you and yours make off with the real thing, keeping everything aboard. You make your way across the stars, visiting all the colony planets and luxury stations you’ve always wanted to see. The art becomes a commodity for you, both in its beauty and its value to those poor art-starved elites of the outer planets.”

Violet took another sip of her champaign.

“What I don’t figure, then, is why you’d have Trey Vitez killed.”

This time, she stopped with her wine halfway to her mouth. “Excuse me?”

“Trey Vitez, murdered. Why?”

After a long pause, she said, “I would never have murdered him. You were right. We had an affair. It was years ago, and it was a mistake, but he meant everything to me at the time. The theft of the art was exactly as you said, but it all went wrong. Trey chose to flee rather than circle back as we had agreed. He felt a life of wealth on a station somewhere out in the void was preferable to risking himself for me.” She swallowed another gulp of wine as if it were a bitter medicine. “But I didn’t murder him.”

“I did,” Beck said, stepping into the room from a side door. “I murdered him and if I had a chance I would do it again.”

“You what?” said Violet.

Beck’s lips smiled but her eyes stayed entirely flat. “You never knew. All this time, and after all that vetting. You never knew who I really was, did you?”

Violet’s lips tightened to a thin line.

“Hector Chance had a daughter,” I said.

“My mother waited for him to return. She waited and waited. Nobody ever told her he’d died. Nobody told her he had lapsed back into his criminal habits. We still had financial problems. Worse with him gone.” Beck ran a finger along an ancient Ming vase. “She left a letter when she killed herself, you know. A letter to him. She didn’t even mention me.”

“How did you discover what your father had done?” I asked.

“I bounced around foster care for a few years until I aged out, but one of my foster parents was a journalist. He showed me how to dig through articles using facial recognition. That’s when I found the old information about my father. From there, I was able to track down the rest of the crew and learn what happened. I learned about how he was betrayed.”

“I’m sorry,” Maurice said. “I’m so sorry.”

Beck raised a black metal gun, but before she pulled the trigger I stepped between them.

“That’s enough,” I said. “Maurice is a decent man.”

“A decent man wouldn’t have gotten my father killed,” she said. “A decent man would have at least told his wife of his death.”

Maurice said, “She has a point.”

“You’re not helping,” I growled.

To me, Beck said, “You know what it’s like.” Her voice held a hint of desperation. “When you’re a kid in that stage where you hate your parents more than anyone else in the world. Where all your teenage angst and anger gets directed at them and then one day they’re gone. Dead. Murdered. Where does all that anger go? Do you turn in on yourself? Do you impotently hate the parents who left you?”

“Or do you hate the people responsible for killing them?” I said. “I get it.”

“But you chose to hate yourself, didn’t you?”

Had I? Beck’s rage was apparent, but my own? Mine boiled deep inside my gut. “It’s different.”

“Not even a little.” Beck crossed the room and placed a finger on my chest. “You’ve hated yourself all these years, Demarco. Why not turn that rage outward?”

“Because I’m the one who killed my parents. There’s no such thing as ‘outward’.”

She took a step back and tilted her head to one side. Her eyes bored a hole right down into my soul, and it hurt. “It must be hard being you.”

“A lot easier than you think.” I met her gaze. “Let Maurice go, Beck. He has a family. He has kids.”

For a long time, she didn’t move. The noise of a commotion outside the room almost drowned out the pounding of my heart. Beck held the tension of all those years on her shoulders. Clenched it in her jaws. Letting Maurice go took everything from her. Her revenge, her identity. Her mother and father. Everything.

I’d given up all those things without a fight. In all my stubbornness, I’d abandoned the things that should have mattered to me. Why were the bulkheads all open in the ship that killed my parents? Why did the landing come in so hot? I may have pressed the button that killed my family, but I didn’t create the conditions that made that button-press possible. Maybe there was something in Beck’s attitude that I could learn from.

Maybe I needed to start thinking about revenge.

Or justice.

Beck lowered her gun. “You’re right,” she said. “I need to let this go.”

I drew a deep breath. “The police are on their way.”

She smiled. “Not if someone blocked the final airlock.”

They couldn’t override the airlock. Trinity would hold them to the rules, so they’d be stuck until someone unblocked the last lock. “What’s happened to Lauder and the Saint?”

“Gone by the time I got through.”

“All right.” I looked around at the art. “Where’s Violet?”

“This ship is full of secret passages. She knows them all.”

The main entrances to the room stood wide open. A tense silence hung around the whole gallery. Where Violet had been standing, another door hung open. Her way out. It might be ours as well.

“We need to leave,” I said. “Whoever wins is going to come here for the art.”

Gunshots rang through the hall. Violet’s two guards dropped in a spray of blood.

Saint Jerome and Frank Lauder stepped into the room side by side. They leveled their weapons at Beck.

“Drop the weapon, sweetie,” said Lauder. “It would be a shame to make a mess among all this art and culture.”