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about this?”
    â€œNobody. Just us.”
    â€œTell me exactly what happened. Where did you leave them?”
    â€œWe took them out above the continental shelf. It’s well over five hundred meters deep. I saw them go into the water and the bezeri came up to meet them. They’ve got them down there.”
    â€œâ€™Course, with c’naatat, they could just walk back to shore.” It was no good: she had to alert the Eqbas now stationed on Bezer’ej, and she had no idea how they’d react. The wess’har matriarchs had once been on the brink of executing Aras for infecting her. “I’d better warn Esganikan. What the fuck were you thinking? ”
    Aras cut in. “ Isan, this was my idea and if Ade had not prevented me, I would be with the bezeri now. They wanted me and I was ready to join them.”
    It was a slap in the face. Shan leaned back a little andfought to separate the reality of yielding c’naatat to Rayat and Lindsay from her hurt feelings.
    You’re my jurej. Wess’har males are supposed to be loyal. You aren’t supposed to put the bezeri’s needs above mine.
    The selfish, petty thought caught her unawares. She folded her arms.
    â€œTerrific. It’s always good to know I can rely on you.” She knew he understood sarcasm, even if most wess’har—literal, eye-wateringly honest—didn’t grasp it. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
    â€œDa Shapakti could remove your c’naatat and you could return to Earth with Ade if I weren’t here.”
    â€œDo you ever listen to a word I say? I told you I would never abandon you. ”
    â€œYou did that when you spaced yourself.”
    â€œYeah, and I didn’t want to.” A voice in her head reminded her she was a hypocrite, because she hadn’t put Aras’s needs before her duty. Keeping c’naatat from Rayat overrode everything. “But you knew why I had to do it.”
    â€œAnd I felt I had to act for the bezeri. But both Ade and I are here now, and the bezeri are as satisfied as they ever can be. That’s all that matters. Intentions are irrelevant.”
    That was the wess’har way; action counted and motive didn’t. Apologies were worthless to them, because events were a reality that couldn’t be erased by mitigating circumstances or genuine regret. Dead’s dead. She said it herself most days, and long before she’d even heard of Cavanagh’s Star.
    â€œWell, actually, matey, that’s not all that matters.” She found her attention fixed on Aras’s charcoal eyes; they were all iris and almost no sclera, just like an animal’s, not a gold wess’har cross-hair gaze at all. Her face burned and the pressure in her ears felt close to explosion. Ade’s restless movement caught her peripheral vision. “What matters is that we don’t have this bloody parasite under our control any longer. A government agent has it. You know what he’ll do with it?”
    â€œHe’s not—”
    â€œSupersoldiers. Then they flog it off to the pharmacorps, because no government can resist money in the end. Or it gets out into the wider population by accident. Pandemic. You can spread it by sex, by body fluids, by wounds. You can do the maths, Aras. Wasn’t that why you quarantined Bezer’ej to start with? Because you saw what happened in the isenj colony there?”
    â€œThis is one man, trapped on Bezer’ej.”
    â€œNo, this is a spook, a very competent spook, and Lindsay Neville too, and even that idiot bitch can be trouble.”
    â€œHow can they leave? How can they pass it on? The bezeri never caught it from me, and I moved among them for nearly five hundred years.”
    â€œThere’s no such thing as can’t in this universe, Aras. Even the bloody dead come back to life.” Shan could feel her own voice becoming thin and compressed in her own skull. “And Rayat