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Domitian's lips were set in a hard line. She was having an effect.

“The Mallt-y-Nos,” continued Ida, and resumed her steady stalking back and forth, “destroyed a System military craft out by Neptune headed to quell rioting on Triton, which she also doubtless started. The Mallt-y-Nos is a bomber first and foremost: the fastest, brightest kind of murder with the highest amount of victims. Half a dozen minor bombings are attributable to her before the System came to know her from the Martian attack, and doubtless there are many more we don't know of—government buildings, military compounds, banks, one of which put Ceres's economy into a depression for months after its destruction—she's targeted them all. She is a poison in the System, a disease, a virus, and if we don't find her soon, she may infect every part of it. And now we know that she is planning another attack. That attack could even be on a ship like this one. Do you understand?” Ida asked, speaking each word like a strike against Domitian's stillness. “Do you
understand
why she must be found?”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Domitian.

She stopped again to take another breath, to consider him before moving on to the next stage of her performance.

“Matthew Gale and Leontios Ivanov are currently our best leads on the Mallt-y-Nos,” Ida said. Domitian's expression hardly changed, but Ida saw the confusion nonetheless; doubtless he had read the two men's files and had seen that the System did not share her opinion.

Ida moved, turning to square her shoulders parallel to his, and said plainly, “What I am about to tell you is classified information. Matthew Gale and Leontios Ivanov know the Mallt-y-Nos. They know her name. They know her face. They can tell us who she is.”

Domitian's chin had lifted slowly in understanding.

“And you,” said Ida, calm and controlled, her fury bubbling over into cruelty, “let one of them get away.”

Domitian took it.

He stood there and took it, and Ida let the silence stretch, aching and agonized. She was outwardly cold and still and pleased inside that he had bent so easily at her sharpened words.

Domitian said, “However I may assist you, Miss Stays, I am happy to do so.”

He had broken. He was humble. Ida relented, and Ida smiled.

“You are in a position to help me a good deal,” she said. “For the time being I will be conducting the interrogation on board the
Ananke
. If it is feasible, for the safety of your ship and the expediency of my interrogation, I will leave before then, but most likely I will remain on board until the
Ananke
reaches Pluto. I have with me all the equipment I need. I only need a room.”

“We have rooms,” Domitian said, and led her out of the docking bay and into the
Ananke
's hall.

They left the vast, echoing docking bay and stepped into a narrow, wire- and pipe-choked hall where there was not quite enough space for her and Domitian to walk abreast and fluorescent lights flickered overhead. Computer terminals every ten yards or so glowed among the tangled pipes, with dark holographic terminals sunk into alcoves in the walls beside them, and the whole effect was almost claustrophobic, as though Ida were walking through the veins of some great creature meant for blood and not the steady click of her low black heels.

“The rooms I'm going to show you won't be used until we've passed Pluto,” Domitian explained, and his low voice seemed louder and fuller outside the echoing emptiness of the hold, “once the experiments begin.”

“Are all the rooms identical?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Then I'd like the one that's the largest,” said Ida. “The most imposing.”

“I was just about to take you there, Miss Stays,” Domitian said. “May I ask how the interrogation will proceed?”

“I assure you that my interrogation will in no way impede the running of your ship,” Ida said immediately.

“I was only curious, Miss Stays.”

Again Ida was pleasantly surprised by him. She said, “Legally, I am not permitted to use truth drugs until after I catch him in a lie that directly impedes my investigation. So I will begin by simply conversing with him.” She had little doubt she would be able to catch Ivanov in such a lie, and without much effort. Ivanov would be chained to a chair for hours at a time, filmed, and attached to a polygraph; the psychological effects of that alone would trip him up eventually. But even more than that, Ida had studied him, had watched selections of the years' worth of footage of every moment of his childhood up to the age of twenty, had studied the sparser footage of the last ten years, when he had been working actively as a con man. She understood how Ivanov thought, how he worked. She knew how he lied.

“I will, and I think soon, be authorized to use the Aletheia,” she said, and thought of the truth serum sitting in little glass vials in a little box in her little ship. “But I hope to break him without needing to resort to drugs that way.”

It was more satisfying in the end to break someone with nothing but words.

They had come to a door. It was no different from any of the other doors they had passed, but Domitian had stopped beside it, waiting for her to finish speaking, and so it had to be the one. “Is this the door?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Domitian said, and reached for the handle. Ida reached out and laid one hand on his, noting abstractly that her hand was small and her fingers slender against the weathered skin of his strong hand. She saw that he noticed it, too.

“Before we go in,” Ida said with a gentle smile, “I want to assure you that I will not attempt to interfere with your authority on this ship. I am simply here for an interrogation.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” Domitian said. He had gray eyes. She smiled more widely, and he opened the door.

The room inside was vast and empty and white. Ida took one wondering step into its wide brightness, the entire thing nearly half the size of the
Ananke
's hold and so much brighter; each of the identical white panels that made up walls and ceiling and floor was lit from behind, and the whole room was as bright and blindingly white as if that could hide the fact that it was entirely empty. She was small in that room, small and exposed, and a camera blinked at her from the corner, the eye of the ship—of the System—watching.

She turned to Domitian and did not have to feign pleasure now.

“It's perfect,” she said.

There was some sort of awful arrhythmic drumming sound coming from behind Althea, slightly muffled, and its inconstancy jarred her thoughts out of code and drew her attention from the computer to the closed cell behind her.

Briefly abandoning her interrupted work, Althea accessed the video stream from the camera inside the cell, which, fortunately, continued to work, and peered at it. In the image before her, Ivanov had moved to sit on the narrow cot with its flat bare mattress. His shoulder was pressed against the wall out of necessity, the cot was so narrow, and Althea found the source of that uneven, frustrating pattering in the drumming of his fingers against the wall.

Althea stared at the image for a moment longer, expecting to see some sort of explanation of the action, but Ivanov continued to drum against the wall without apparent aim.

Finally unable to endure it, Althea snapped, “Ivanov, stop that!”

The drumming cut off abruptly, but Althea still saw his hand twitching against his thigh as though he would have liked to continue. Perhaps it was a nervous tic. Ivanov said, “I thought I told you to call me Ivan,” and his voice was light, amused, almost teasing, and that did not match with his expression at all.

Althea scowled and closed the video window. She tried to remember where she'd left off in her work before that damned tapping had drawn her out of it, but then, cautious and quiet, the tapping started again.

“Ivanov!”

“Sorry,” he said. “It's boring in here.”

Althea could not have cared less. She said nothing in the hope that he would do the same.

That particular tactic failed, as it had failed every time during their brief interactions thus far. “Maybe I could help you try to figure out what's wrong with the ship,” Ivanov suggested.

It was tempting, but Domitian had ordered her not to, and so Althea did not give it a second thought. “No.”

“Mattie must have installed the virus at a specific computer terminal,” Ivanov mused, as if he hadn't heard her. “If you look at that terminal, you should probably see traces of whatever he did.”

“I already looked at that terminal; I'm not an idiot,” Althea snapped. “Shut up. I'm trying to work.”

“I'm trying to help,” Ivanov countered.

“Well, I can't leave my place to guard you anyway,” said Althea, firmly. “So shut up.”

Ivanov laughed.

“What do you think I'm going to do if you leave me alone?” he asked. “The door is locked. I have no picks and couldn't pick it from the inside anyway. There's a camera on me at all times; someone would see any attempted escape before it got very far. Whether or not you're physically outside my door doesn't matter.”

“I have a gun,” said Althea, a statement that also should have ended the discussion. She did not mention how not all the cameras were working and it was only sheer luck that Ivanov's cell had one that was still successfully recording.

“Though I suppose you're right,” Ivanov said. “There's no point in going back to the terminal Mattie used if you've already looked at it. You were the one who realized immediately that we'd hacked into your computer when we first boarded; you know this ship so well, you wouldn't have missed anything this time around.”

Althea had not in fact noticed immediately that her computer had been hacked into earlier that day. She stopped typing and sat, tense with the idea that there was something she could have missed the way she'd missed things this morning.

“Hey,” said Ivanov. “Doctor Bastet.”

She barely registered the correct name and title; doubtless he and Gale had looked up her and the rest of the
Ananke
's crew before boarding the ship, after they'd hacked into the
Ananke
's computer. “What?” she snapped. She couldn't leave her position, and she knew that she hadn't missed anything down at the terminal in the base of the ship anyway, but the idea, once introduced, nagged.

“You really care for this ship, don't you?” said Ivanov, sounding thoughtful and a little gentle as if he were looking upon a mother with her new child. “Look, like I told you before, Mattie wouldn't have done anything that dangerous. All he wanted to do was escape. He wouldn't need to do anything more than, say, mess with the cameras so that you couldn't track him.” He laughed a little, more to himself than to Althea, who was still furiously going over in her head her actions at the base of the ship, trying to figure out if at any point she could have failed to check something. “We've worked together for ten years, and I can only remember one or two—maybe three—times when he deliberately messed up the navigation of a ship just because he didn't like the crew.”

“Ivanov, shut up!”

“You're not very friendly, are you?” Ivanov asked.

“I'm trying to work, and you're bothering me,” Althea snapped, and started to check the ship's navigation for any errors.

Perhaps she should go down and check the last terminal. It was possible, after all, that she'd missed something. She'd thought she'd checked all the places, but there was always the possibility that somehow she had missed something. But she couldn't go now; Domitian had ordered her not to leave her place, and the System's punishments for disobedience, well…

Ivanov sighed. He was just about to speak again—Althea heard him take in a breath—but she heard distinctly the sound of steps coming down the hall, and she hissed, “Shut
up,
” at him again. He must have heard the change in her tone, because this time he did fall silent.

When Domitian came into sight, Althea was bent over the computer terminal, to all appearances deeply engrossed in the machine, but she was filled with an uneasy sort of guilt. She hadn't been forbidden to talk to Ivanov, and indeed she hadn't been talking to Ivanov; he had been talking to her. But somehow she did not want Domitian to know.

When he was near, she looked up just long enough to catch his eye, to assure him that she was aware of his presence and was actually doing her job of guarding Ivanov, but she turned her eyes back to the machine as soon as she reasonably could, unwilling to endure that vague uneasy guilt while looking directly at Domitian.

From behind her, she heard the metallic click of the key in the lock and then the sound of the door sliding open. “On your feet,” said Domitian, low and commanding and dangerous, and Althea steadfastly did not turn around.

A pause and the sound of rustling, then the soft slap of bare feet on the metal floor. Althea sat with her back stiff, facing the machine, and listened to the rattle of metal as Domitian cuffed their prisoner.

“Go on,” Domitian said, and she heard Ivanov stumble; only then did she turn her head to peek back between the wiry strands of her curly brown hair.

Ivanov was only a foot or so away from her. His hands were cuffed behind him, stretching his shoulders back and making the fabric of his black turtleneck pull in little lines from his neck to the roundness of his shoulders. He was different when he was physically there and not just a voice behind a door, more real and less real at the same time. He glanced at her, and for a moment she was pinned by blue.

She looked away and let the curtain of her hair fall between her face and his.

Domitian looked big and dangerous with a gun in his hand, and with his slender wrists bound, Ivanov looked vulnerable, helpless. He was no such thing, she knew. And even if he had been, he was still a criminal, an enemy to the System.