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“I don't know a whole lot about it,” Ivan said. “I wasn't there. I was in kindergarten. Twenty AU away.”

“You must have heard about it,” Ida said. She had regained enough of her control to sit down at last in her long-abandoned chair, laying her arms on the rests and feeling herself in a position of power. “You're intimate with all three survivors.”

“I haven't asked Abby about it,” Ivan said. “Constance won't talk about it. Mattie only gave me the short story.”

“I want to know anyway,” Ida said.

Ivan leaned back in his chair, mimicking her posture. Ida wondered if he was even conscious he was doing it. The hours of interrogation were starting to show on his face, in the rhythmless pattering of his right hand.

“Fine,” he said. “Once upon a time, there were three little children.”

Condescension. Ida could not stop the way her jaw set itself, but she let him continue.

“There was Constance, the eldest, practical and sensible. Abby, the middle child, restless and angry. And Mattie, the youngest, playful and clever.” Ivan's sarcasm was starting to fade into a different cadence, the true cadence of a fairy tale. “Mattie's parents were only teenagers when they had him; that was why the System took him away. Constance's mother didn't have a husband or a partner willing to help her raise her daughter; that's why the System took her away. Abigail—I don't know why they took Abigail away from home.

“These three little children met on Miranda, in the house of a System administrator who fostered children not because he wanted to but because ostentatiously doing so made it more likely he would be promoted off of the icy little moon. He and his wife didn't like children, and they didn't want them. They especially didn't like Mattie.”

Absent its mockery, the story, along with the way it was told, was somehow fascinating, and Ida was reminded all over again that Leontios Ivanov was a dangerous man.

“Little Mattie had quick fingers and bad compulsions. One day they thought he had stolen something from them—a piece of jewelry, maybe—and maybe he had. Mattie doesn't remember anymore. They were very angry.”

He paused, and in his silence Ida read between the lines how the System administrators had expressed their anger.

“Constance took Mattie out of the house and hid him in the nearby quarries while Abby distracted the System. Constance went back for their sister, leaving Mattie to hide in the quarries. And so he hid. But when Connie made it back to the house, the house was ablaze. It burned hot enough to destroy the house and the bodies inside completely so that nothing was left of anything but unidentifiable ashes.”

“Arson,” Ida said.

“Arson,” Ivan confirmed.

Ida leaned forward slightly. “With rocket fuel,” she told him. The investigation had been positive on that front.

Ivan took a deep breath. “With rocket fuel,” he agreed. “Abby left the foster system after that. Constance and Mattie stayed in it and stayed together, and from what I heard, every other place where they were fostered was kind and loving. But Abby never came back. And Constance hasn't spoken to Abby since.”

“Abby set the fire,” said Ida.

“Yes,” Ivan said.

“So what you're telling me,” said Ida, and leaned her elbows onto the table, “is that Abigail Hunter has reason to hate the System, killed two people at the age of nine, enjoys setting fires—”

“Enjoys?”

“—and certainly has terrorist connections,” Ida finished.

Ivan said, slipping back into the precise, hard enunciation he seemed to adopt when frustrated, “The way you've organized the information, Ida,
leadingly,
I see what you're driving at, but you know what I think?”

“Tell me,” Ida said. “I've been wondering.”

Ivan could not get his elbows up on the table because of the chains, but he leaned forward anyway. The shadow of that mocking smile was back on his lips. “I think,” he said, “that you're looking for a particular answer—that I have a connection, direct or otherwise, to the Mallt-y-Nos—and you're finding that answer even where it is not.”

Her fury again, her fury at her failure, at the threat of more failure, at Althea Bastet defying her and Ivan defying her as well, rose up in her chest. She would find a way to break him. She would have to find a way to break him. And she would break him.

“Where is Abby now, Ivan?” Ida asked, her voice soft, just loud enough to travel across the short space separating them.

“I don't know,” Ivan said in a voice just as soft, their whispered conversation seeming even quieter in the vast empty space of the white room. “I never know. Mattie and I don't find Abigail; she finds us.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Ivan, “that Abby doesn't let anyone know where she is, and I have no way to contact her. She's a ghost, Ida. Everywhere and nowhere at once. You will never find her.”

“Don't antagonize her,” Domitian said after Ida had gone.

“I wasn't antagonizing her,” said Althea. She was already rattled from the furious way Ida had looked at her; to have Domitian warning her about her behavior added another level of uncertainty and fear.

Domitian did not reply to her defensive retort. Instead, he said, “I'm going to arrange for you and Gagnon to have shortened sleep shifts.”

“What? Why?”

“Because of what you just explained to Miss Stays. If it's possible that Ivanov might be able to influence the computer without us knowing, it's even more important that the ship be repaired swiftly. I can't help you”—Althea thought she heard a trace of frustration in his tone—“but Gagnon can. I want the two of you working without pause on this machine. I want it fixed.”

“I
have
been working on her nonstop,” Althea said.

This time, when he looked at her, she could see the frustration clearly. “Then explain to me what you need me to do to help, Althea,” he said. “I want this ship fixed.”

On very rare occasions Althea found the good sense to know when to shut up. “Longer shifts will help,” she said. He glanced at her dolefully as if he knew she was humoring him, but he nodded.

“I'm going to go work on her now,” Althea said. She wanted little more than to be out of the piloting room, which still somehow seemed to hold the oppressive presence of Ida Stays even though she had left. Althea hardly waited for Domitian's acknowledging nod to escape.

Ida's interrogation would end soon, and so Althea went straight for the computer terminal outside Ivanov's cell. She would be guarding him again.

Once she got there, she found a message waiting for her from Gagnon.

“u conspire against my sleep,” it said, and concluded with “:(”

Twelve years of upper-level education, two doctorates, and a high-ranking System research position. Althea had witnessed Gagnon's elegant theories, his brilliance with mathematics. Yet he could not obey simple rules of spelling and grammar. Althea shook her head at him, though he could not see her. “Yes,” she replied, then added for good measure, “>:)”

A moment later she relented. “Go to bed,” she typed, and sent it.

Gagnon replied in short order: “promise u won't wake me up again”

“Cross my heart,” Althea answered, and that was the end of it.

Domitian led Ivanov back to his cell perhaps an hour later. Althea had little desire to interact with him that night, and it seemed Ivanov felt the same, because he did not bother her while she sat there and worked. She wondered if he had been able to fall asleep but dismissed the thought with some annoyance.

Some hours later she got the message.

She was back to the robotic arms, trying to trace the origin of the malfunction in them. Several times she thought she caught tantalizing hints of what had gone wrong, only to follow them into nothing, bits of junk code, false leads. At first she was annoyed when the message appeared: being a System priority message, it automatically took up half the screen, banishing her workspace to a narrow area that made it nearly impossible to see what she was trying to do. She lost her place in the lines of code. But when she read the message the System had sent, for the first time since Ivanov and Gale had come on board, the
Ananke
was banished from her thoughts.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

Rustling from the room behind her. “What is it?” Ivanov asked. It seemed he had not been asleep.

Althea could scarcely believe what she was reading. And so, when Ivan said again, “
Althea
. What happened?” she answered without thinking.

“Titania is in rebellion,” she said. “The System says it's being led by the Mallt-y-Nos.”

Ida was woken from a dead sleep by pounding on her door.

For a moment, in the space between sleep and waking, memory of the knock on the door to the white room that had interrupted her session with Ivan overlapped with the sound of the door being pounded on now, and she was caught up in her old annoyance and a strange and dreadful anticipation of failure.

She rose from her bed, shaking off her sleep and her confusion, and answered the door disheveled. “What is it?” she demanded when she opened it and found Domitian standing there.

He blinked at her. She was wearing nothing but the long shirt she wore to bed, but she did not have patience for his reaction. Before she could prompt him again, he said, “There's been an attack on Titania by the Mallt-y-Nos.”

She immediately left the door to stride over to the computer terminal embedded in the wall, which was wedged awkwardly up against one of the oddly shaped room's unexpected corners. A touch of her finger woke the screen, and immediately a message from the System appeared.

Titania was in open rebellion.

For a moment Ida could do no more than try to absorb that one of Uranus's moons had rebelled against the System. It was disastrous. It was infuriating. The System, she knew, would quash it, and easily. Titania was but one moon. But what was troubling was not that it might succeed but that it had happened at all.

The System had also sent to her the surveillance footage on account of her rank in the intelligence branch. Ida let it play and watched as a crowd of people, native Titanians from the look of them, advanced on a System building ringed with System military. There was no sound to the footage, and Ida watched their mouths move noiselessly, their faces twisted in rage without voice. As she watched, one of them threw a bottle with a rag stuffed into it at the building or at the standing soldiers. It shattered and sent liquid fire crawling up the System soldiers, up the walls of the System building. A Molotov cocktail. The System soldiers raised their rifles. The unarmed crowd recoiled as the System fired into them, screaming without sound on the silent tape.

When Ida broke her attention away from the surveillance tape, leaving it still playing on one side of the screen, and looked at the rest of the message, there was another surprise awaiting her. At the very moment rebel forces had attacked System strongholds all over the moon, it seemed, a message had been broadcast out to the entire solar system. It had been broadcast on all frequencies, including System ones. Everyone in the Uranian system had heard. No doubt the message had traveled all the way to Neptune and the dwarf planets as well. Perhaps it had even made it to Jupiter.

The message had said, THE WILD HUNT BEGINS.

It had been signed “The Mallt-y-Nos.”

Ida supposed that most people would feel horror, or fear, or dread. She felt only the start of exultation. The stakes had risen for her, for the System, but with the rising of the stakes had come opportunity.

Domitian was still standing in the doorway. “Come in and close the door,” she ordered, and he obeyed while her mind raced.

It would put Ida's head on the block even more if she was wrong, but she knew that she was never wrong. What was a little more risk when her success was certain?

What was a little more risk to prove herself? What was a little more risk to win?

She wondered if Ivan had known this attack would come. She wondered if he had sat across from her, and looked at her with those blue eyes open and innocent, and known all the time, counting down in his head the days until this began.

“This changes things,” Ida said, and heard her voice sound as calm as she herself was not.

“Yes, ma'am,” said Domitian.

She doubted that he understood the half of it. If the Mallt-y-Nos had struck her first blow, the System would be ready for war. Already their message said that they were deploying the full force of their military to the outer planets to quell Titania and to defend against further uprisings or whatever else the Mallt-y-Nos might have planned. But it wouldn't be enough. They'd be ready to take more risks in return for something to use against the Mallt-y-Nos. Ida did not doubt that the System would be willing to risk the
Ananke
's secrecy for its own security.

“I was going to take Ivanov off the
Ananke
for purposes that are absolutely necessary to my interrogation,” Ida said. “This has made it all the more imperative that I break him. And yet I cannot take him from this ship.”

“Miss Stays, Doctor Bastet…”

“Is no doubt correct in what she does,” Ida said sweetly. She could be magnanimous now, when she was about to get what she wanted. “Don't mistake me. I am only saying that if I cannot take him off the ship, it makes sense to bring my work here.”

A pause. Perhaps Domitian was waiting for her to elaborate. Ida wanted him to ask.

“How so, Miss Stays?” Domitian asked.

“I was going to interrogate Constance Harper and Milla Ivanov,” said Ida. She would have liked to speak to Gale and Hunter, but Gale was dead and Hunter missing. Harper and Doctor Ivanov, though, were in her grasp.