“What’s on your mind?”
“Are you really Amos anymore?”
“Yup.”
“No, I mean. Amos… died. He got killed. And then the repair drones took the body, and… I need to know, are you really Amos Burton? The Amos I knew.”
“Sure am. Anything else?”
Holden nodded more to himself than to anyone else. Muskrat whined and tried to swim over toward him, paws flailing in the air. He reached out and pulled the dog over, bracing her against his knee and patting her back. “I just think it’s important.”
“Seems like you’re having a hard time taking yes for an answer, Cap. Here’s how I look at it. Yeah, I went through some weird shit. It changed me. I know some things I didn’t know before.”
“Things like what?” Holden asked, but Amos waved the question away.
“Thing is, you went through some weird shit too. You got changed. Know some things you didn’t know going in. Naomi and Alex? Same. Hell, Tiny’s barely related to who she was the first time I saw her. That’s just life.” Amos shrugged. “I guess the dog didn’t change much, except she got a little gray around the muzzle.”
Muskrat wagged.
“You want this to be a philosophy question, that’s fine,” Amos said. “But if you’re asking am I still me? I am.”
Holden nodded. “All right. I had to ask.”
“No problem,” Amos said.
Holden scratched Muskrat one last time. A little cloud of hair floated free, the strands clinging together in complex webs and drifting toward the air recycler. “I see what you mean. Alex is starting our braking burn in twenty-five, thirty minutes.”
“I’ll make this all safe by then,” Amos said.
Holden pulled himself to the door. As he was about to leave, Amos’ voice pulled him back.
“One thing, though?”
He braced in the doorway. Amos’ eerie black eyes were on him. “Sure.”
“Those things that Duarte pissed off? The ones that ate Medina?”
“I know the ones you mean,” Holden said.
“One of the things I know now is that they’re going to kill everybody.”
They were silent for a moment.
“Yeah,” Holden said. “I know that too.”
Acknowledgments
While the creation of any book is less a solitary act than it seems, the past few years have seen a huge increase in the people involved with The Expanse in all its incarnations, including this one. This book would not exist without the hard work and dedication of Danny and Heather Baror, Bradley Englert, Tim Holman, Anne Clarke, Ellen Wright, Alex Lencicki, and the whole brilliant crew at Orbit. Special thanks are also due Carrie Vaughn for her services as a beta reader, the gang from Sakeriver: Tom, Sake Mike, Non-Sake Mike, Jim-me, Porter, Scott, Raja, Jeff, Mark, Dan, Joe, and Erik Slaine, who got the ball rolling.
The support team for The Expanse has also grown to include the staff at Alcon Entertainment and the cast and crew of The Expanse. Our thanks and gratitude go especially to Alex Cabrera-Aragon, Glenton Richards, and Julianna Damewood.
A particular debt of gratitude is also owed to Jeff Bezos and his team at Amazon for their support of the project in all its forms.
And, as always, none of this would have happened without the support and company of Jayné, Kat, and Scarlet.
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BY JAMES S. A. COREY
THE EXPANSE
Leviathan Wakes
Caliban’s War
Abaddon’s Gate
Cibola Burn
Nemesis Games
Babylon’s Ashes
Persepolis Rising
Tiamat’s Wrath
THE EXPANSE SHORT FICTION
The Butcher of Anderson Station
Gods of Risk
The Churn
Drive
The Vital Abyss
Strange Dogs
Tiamat's Wrath Page 52
