“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.