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?”