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his mind.
    And he began to tell her about Cassandra Diaz.

5
    Dom aimed down the sights of her submachine gun as the three figures stepped into the chapel.
    “Lookie here,” the front man said as he emerged into the light. His face was criss-crossed with a perfect grid of deep scars. “Ben’s got himself a girlfriend. And look at the size of her.”
    The other two grinned. One was a woman, small and spry. Two scars ran across her right eye and turned it milky white. The other was a bruiser of a man clad in a heavy coat. His bald head shone, reflecting the overhead light.
    “Hands, all of you,” Dom shouted. “I won’t ask twice.”
    The front man raised his arms. His left ended in a stump at the wrist. “You heard the lady. Show her we mean no harm. Go on.”
    The other two smirked and raised their hands. The woman gave a fake tremble and stared at Dom with wild eyes.
    “Kill them,” Reverend Bollard hissed next to her. “Kill them now, child.”
    “Shut up,” Dom said. She raised her voice. “That’s close enough, ladies and gentlemen. Who are you?”
    “Will you listen to that?” The man with the criss-cross scars laughed. “Ladies and gentlemen. When was the last time you were called a lady, Daz?”
    The woman grinned. “Six and a half years ago. My fiance said it. I remember, because I cut his tongue out later that week. He didn’t say much after that.”
    “Ouch,” the front man said. “Daz has a few issues. But don’t mind her. This big fella is Greg. And I’m Bones. On account of this.” He waved his stump back and forth. “Spend enough time in solitary and it gets to a man. It’s the boredom. I was a gambler, home-grown Temperance lad, in fact. So when I was eight months into my solitary stretch, I had a thought. To keep myself occupied I’d shoot some craps. Only I didn’t have any dice. And that’s when I got the idea, you see. One of the guards smuggled me in a knife, and I started cutting. Right here.” He pointed to his stump. “There’s still a few scars from where I cut the wrong place. You can’t imagine how much it hurt. How much it bled. But I got the hand off in the end. And then I started skinning it, stripping all the flesh off, right back to the bone. It was hard, trying to do it with one arm. But I got better. And when I had the bones, I started carving them. Whittling them down. And pretty soon I had a whole collection of dice to play with. Handmade, so to speak.”
    He laughed, a crooked, uneven laugh. The back of Dom’s neck went cold.
    “You know the funniest thing?” he said when his laugh subsided. “The very next day they let me out of solitary. And they took my dice. One of the guards, he laughed his fucking arse off when he saw what I’d done. I watched him take my dice and toss them into the trash chute to be shot out into space. Laughing the whole time. Laughing, laughing. I very much enjoyed dislocating his shoulders so he’d fit in the trash chute all those months later.” He licked his lips and stared at Dom. “There, now we’re all introduced. Best friends now. So why don’t you tell us why you’re trying to get poor little Ben to tell you about Roy Williams?”
    “None of you are my concern,” Dom said. Her hands were steady on her gun. “If you’re fugitives from the Bolt, your records are lost. Maybe some stalker out there wants your head. Not me. I will shoot all three of you down if I have to and the Federation will thank me. But I have no desire to do so.”
    “Ain’t that magnanimous of her?” Bones took a step forward, arms still raised. “You wouldn’t think of killing us in God’s house, would you?”
    “I’m looking for Roy Williams. That’s all. Where is he?”
    Bones shrugged. “What makes you think we’d know where the old bastard is?”
    “You broke out of the Bolt together. You hijacked a shuttle and station-hopped to Temperance with him. You know where he is.”
    The preacher edged close to her. “Please kill