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will find a way, trust me. I would if I were him.”
    You lost the will to live when you thought I was dead. But you were ready to run away and live with the bezeri.
    She tried to shake that thought out of her head. It was a selfish thought, a woman’s reaction without consideration of anything beyond her own hurt feelings. It wasn’t professional. She tried to slap it down.
    Ade moved. She saw him reach out cautiously, slowly. He laid his hand on her forearm and she concentrated on not jerking it away. His expression was the utter dejection of a beaten child.
    â€œThere’s another way of looking at it, Boss.”
    â€œReally?” She was fond of Ade to the brink of falling in love, but right then she wanted to punch the shit out of him. The impulse appalled her. He usually brought out the vestige of her protective urge, but she’d vented her anger on him before. “Forgive me if I haven’t spotted it.”
    â€œThe little shit’s stuck on the seabed with a bunch of aliens who hate him. Forever. So’s she. That probably even beats hanging them.”
    If Shan had been looking for vengeance for the near extinction of the bezeri, then Ade had a point: it was extremepunishment, as extreme as it got. Shan wondered what changes c’naatat would make to the two of them to keep them alive in the deep ocean and knew that whatever it was, it might be a lot more traumatic than the largely invisible tinkering that the parasite had carried out on her.
    And I know what it’s like to drown. And to drift in space. Oh yes, that’s fucking bad. Living with the squid might be too good for Rayat.
    â€œYou’d better be right,” she said. “Because I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life making sure they don’t pass it on. Or hunt the fuckers down and fragment them.”
    A well-placed detonation was the only way to disrupt c’naatat ’s lightning defenses of its host organism. It was the way the wess’har c’naatat troops—accidental hosts, thinking their malleable genome had picked up just a handy adaptation for fast healing—had ended their lives when not aging or dying became too much to bear.
    Ade managed to look her in the eye. “I’ve let you down, haven’t I?”
    â€œBloody right you have.” Shan stood up and walked over to the deeply hollowed stone set under the water spigot, the nearest that wess’har had to a sink. She couldn’t stop herself raging. “How could you do such a frigging stupid thing? After all that’s happened?”
    â€œI had to make a decision there and then. We never planned to let them live.”
    â€œJesus, am I the only one here who can think beyond the next five minutes? I pretty well died to stop anyone getting hold of this, but you two just hand it over, good as gold. I suppose Rayat made a really good case, did he? Talked you into it?”
    â€œNo, Lindsay did,” said Aras. “This satisfied the bezeri, and stopped either of us taking their place. Because somebody had to help the few still left. Or at least give them some semblance of justice.”
    Shan recalled the last time the bezeri had called for justice; a scientist had been executed over the death of one of their young. And Aras had carried it out, whatever she’d toldthe Thetis camp. Even then, Shan felt it was her responsibility. She’d been in command for far too long and it was an inextricable part of her. She hated standing on the sidelines.
    â€œEither?” she asked. “What do you mean by either of you?”
    Ade closed his eyes for a moment and it disturbed her. She found no satisfaction in making a brave man cower. “Yeah, well…it was a case of both of us trying to do the decent thing. We…persuaded each other out of it.” He paused and adopted that I-wish-I-hadn’t-said-that expression. She realized that she didn’t know him as well as she