Cibola Burn

The walk from the RCE security shed back to his room at the community center wasn’t a long one, but it was very dark. Miller’s faint blue glow illuminated nothing, but it was oddly comforting anyway.

“Hey, old man,” Holden said in greeting.

“We need to talk.” Miller grinned at his own joke. He made jokes now. He was almost like a real person. Somehow that was more frightening than when he’d been insane.

“I know, but I’m kind of busy with keeping these people from killing each other. Or, you know, us.”

“How’s that working for you?”

“Terrible,” Holden admitted. “I’ve just lost the only real threat I had to make.”

“Yeah, Naomi being on their ship makes the Rocinante a non-factor. Letting her anywhere near that ship was a dumb mistake.”

“I never told you about that.”

“Should I pretend I’m not inside your head?” Miller asked with a Belter shrug. “I’ll do it if it makes you more comfortable.”

“Hey, Miller,” Holden said. “What am I thinking now?”

“Points for creativity, kid. That’d be difficult to pull off and less fun than you might expect.”

“So stay out.”

Miller stopped walking and grabbed Holden’s upper arm. Again he was surprised at how real it felt. Miller’s hand felt like iron gripping him. Holden tried to pull away and couldn’t. And all of it was just the ghost pushing buttons in his brain.

“Wasn’t kidding. We need to talk.”

“Spit it out,” Holden replied, finally yanking his arm away when Miller let go.

“There’s a spot a way north of here I need to go look at.”

“By which you mean you need me to go look at.”

“Yeah,” Miller said with a Belter nod of one fist. “That.”

Against his will, Holden felt his curiosity piqued. “What is it?”

“So, turns out our coming here caused a little ruckus with the locals,” Miller said. “May have noticed. Lot of leftover stuff waking up all over the planet.”

“Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that. Is that you? Can you control it?”

“Are you kidding? I’m a sock puppet. Protomolecule’s got its arm so far up my ass, I can taste its fingernails.” Miller laughed. “I can’t even control myself.”

“It’s just that some of it seems dangerous. That robot, for instance. And you were able to turn off the station in the slow zone.”

“Because it wanted me to. You can order the sun to come up if you time it right. I’m not driving this bus. Making it do what I want would be like talking someone out of a seizure.”

“Okay,” Holden said. “We have got to get off this planet.”

“Before that, though, there’s this thing. This not-thing. Look, I’ve got a pretty good map of the global network. Lots of leftover stuff coming up, checking in. Except one spot. Like a big ball of nothing.”

Holden shrugged. “Maybe it’s just a place where there are no nodes on the network.”

“Kid, this whole planet is a node on the network. There shouldn’t be anyplace that’s off-limits to me.”

“So what does it mean?”

“Maybe it’s just a spot that’s really really broken,” Miller said. “That’d be interesting but useless.”

“And the useful thing?”

“It’s a leftover bit of whatever killed this place.”

They stood in silence for a moment, the cool evening wind of Ilus ruffling Holden’s pants and not affecting the detective at all. Holden felt a chill start at the base of his spine and slowly climb his back. The hairs on his arms stood up.

“I don’t want to find that,” he finally said.

“And I do?” Miller replied with his best attempt at a friendly smile. “Free will left the conversation for me a while back. But that’s where the clues are. You should come with. It’s going to happen eventually anyway.”

“Why is that?”

“Because real monsters don’t go away when you close your eyes. Because you need to know what happened here just as bad as I do.”

Miller’s expression was still friendly, but there was a dread in it too. A fear that Holden recognized. And shared.

“Naomi first. I don’t go anywhere until we get her back.”

Miller nodded again and flew apart into a spray of blue fireflies.

Amos was waiting for him when he got back to the bar. The big man sitting alone at a table with a half-empty bottle of something that smelled like antiseptic and smoke.

“I’m guessing you didn’t kill him after I left,” Amos said as Holden sat down.

“I feel like I’m walking a tightrope so narrow I can’t even see it,” Holden replied. He shook his head when Amos offered him the bottle, so the mechanic took a long swig from it instead.

“This ends in blood,” Amos said after a moment. His voice sounded distant, dreamlike. “No way around that.”

“Well, since my job is pretty much exactly the opposite of that, I hope you’re wrong.”

“I’m not.”

Holden lacked a compelling argument, so instead he said, “What did Alex have to say?”

“We put together a list of demands for the captain of the Israel. Make sure Naomi gets well taken care of while she’s there.”

“What will we give up in exchange?”

“Alex isn’t blowing the Israel into its component atoms right this second.”

“I hope they agree we’re being generous.”

“He is, however,” Amos continued, “keeping a constant rail gun lock on the Israel’s reactor.”