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.
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  “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.”