“Grab her!” Travis snapped, sounding absolutely furious. “Get the bitch back to her room!”

“No goddamn it!” Crash screamed, yanking Travis’s gun from his belt and aiming it at the bound Rifter. “I’m just gonna shoot this perjuring piece of shit before his mental infection spreads, Travis—”

“Don’t you goddamn dare!” Travis shrieked, reaching for her just as Crash pulled the trigger, and the bullet shot into the air right above Travis’s head. The bullet bounced, skittering across the metal room, and the boom was louder than Crash intended. She blinked as her ears started to ring.

“You stupid bitch!” Travis screamed through the ringing, yanking the gun from her hands much more violently than needed and shoving her to the ground, hard. Crash grunted, not having expected the shove, and fell against the legs of several soldiers, who simply backed out of the way, parting to give her and the Commandant space. All eyes in the room were on her as an enraged Travis brought the gun back down, and, for a horrifying moment, Crash thought the Commandant was going to spin the weapon around and aim it at her.

Panting, still holding the gun, his hazel eyes glittering as they fixed on her Travis touched his cheek and it came back bloody. Scowling at her, he said, “You. Stupid. Bitch.”

“Hardly stupid,” Crash sneered, but she could feel the coldness rolling off her onetime boyfriend and it was making her bowels turn to liquid. She knew what happened to people who pissed off the Commandant, but up until now, that cold, killing fury had never been turned on her. Until her, it had been completely inconceivable that it could.

“You know what, Crash?” Travis snapped. “I think it’s over.”

“What’s over?” Crash asked, getting back up on her elbow. “The farce? This charade of a peaceful union between two peoples of completely different mental capacities, one thinking he was outwitting the other? One violent, psychotic creep who likes to murder innocent people for no real reason, a wolf in fucking sheep’s clothing spending all his time getting under my skin, pretending to be my friend? The psychopathic jackass who actually thought he was smarter than me, who still thinks he’s smarter than me, even right now, even standing in this same goddamn room with me?” She was burning inside, a heat of rage that was almost nuclear, but she kept her fury hidden behind a wall of indignance, just as Travis had insisted she do hundreds of times before. Lies…to hide the truth. Behind the wall of soldiers, she caught sight of the Rifter’s palm glowing green against the shackles on his ankles, so she went on, “Some sneaky, unloveable mental midget, a violence-loving savage who, probably due to a lack of father influence and therefore no definitive moral bearing aside from his own fucking arrogance and ambition thinks he can lie to me, lie right to my face, Travis, and I’d never figure it out? Is that what’s over? His uncontrolled fibbing?”

“No,” Travis said, way too calm, “Us.” His one hazel eye darkened. “You.”

“What do you mean, I’m over?” Crash demanded. “I told you he was lying. I could hear it.” She got up, grabbed a piece of the glass that had shattered from the ruined datapad and moved towards the Rifter like she was going to try stabbing him with it.

“Come here, goddamn it!” Travis grabbed her by the wrist and squeezed, painfully.

Crash started to shriek and kick and flail as wildly and uncontrolledly as she could as the Commandant’s grip went beyond what was necessary to make her release the glass…and kept squeezing until it felt like he was puncturing the skin of her arm. “Ow, ow!” she screamed. “Travis, what are you doing?! Ow! Why aren’t you letting me kill him?! He’s a perjurer, Travis! A fucking fraud. A falsifier of information! He should die by firing squad and acid bath for having the audacity to spew his heinous swindler abominations in polite company!” The glass fell from her fingers as she continued struggling and crying out in pain.

“You,” Travis said, his eyes filled with excited, malignant purpose, “are done making my life miserable, you arrogant, fish-obsessed cretin.”

“Octopi aren’t fish!” Crash blurted, not even having to fake it. She’d told him as much at least four hundred times. “They’re cephalopods. That means they’re highly evolved mollusks, Travis. The ‘foot’ or ‘pod’ as they call it, is just the tonguelike thing on a clam evolved into tentacles! Not. Fish! I’ve told you this! I’ve told you this a lot!” She threw glass at him from the floor. “Get off of me! Someone help! He’s hurting my hand! Quad! Quad, get your robots in here and help me! Travis is the one who killed Barney! He’s a murderer, Quad!”

Travis yanked her off her feet and dragged her closer to him, his eyes simmering with fury. “I was gonna wait a couple more years, let Quad get into the groove of things with my researchers, smooth out the transition, see if there were any last-minute things you could teach us, but fuckit—Quad’s not going anywhere, and I’m done with you. I spent twenty years putting up with your bullshit. You’re going swimming today, bitch, and every news crew in the Alliance is going to be told of how you valiantly lost your life fighting these savage, liver-eating monsters to the very end.” He made a nasty face, full of venom. “It’ll be motivating to hear their precious Scholar drowned at the hands of a savage.”

“Drowned?” Crash said, and she didn’t even have to fake her confusion and fear. “What do you mean, drow—”

Travis grabbed her by the hair with his other hand, then, as she cried out and beat at his chest and ribs with her free hand, dragged her over to the other side of the engine block and shoved her against it. “Someone get some fucking rope.”

Then, like well-trained lemmings, one of the men Crash had considered on her side yanked a coil of woven black rope off his belt—almost like this had been part of the plan—and walked it over to Travis. “Sir,” he said, offering it like he were offering a candy bar.

Travis, breathing hard and his eyes shining like rabid diamonds, now, yanked the rope from his soldier’s hand and started winding it around Crash’s wrists.

“What are you doing?” Crash demanded, and the fearful tension in her words was not fake. “Why are you tying me up? I’ll stop yelling. I told you I just need to sleep. Let me get away from this perjurer for a few hours and I’ll be good as new.”

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“Oh, I don’t think so,” Travis snapped. “We already got the general location—we can figure out where that damned base in Canada is without you,” Travis said. “And we know exactly where Quad is. I’ve had a tracker on that ship from the beginning. I was just letting you entertain your autistic fucking self for a couple hours so I could have some peace and quiet and maybe get a real fuck, but that wasn’t good enough. So now you get to join him.”

“Join who?” Crash demanded, starting to shove and kick at Travis. She caught him squarely in the nutsack with a knee. “Travis, let me go—”

She didn’t have a chance to finish because Travis elbowed her in the face, exploding the bone in her nose in a crackling of stars and pain. Crash didn’t have to fake the cry that followed…which immediately ended in a gurgle as she choked on her own blood.

“You broke my nose!” she gasped, tilting her head forward to let it run down her face and out of the back of her sinuses. “Travis you broke my—”

He hit her again, this time in the temple, and Crash felt her world go dark in a wash of stars. She groaned as everything shuddered and threatened to go black. She saw a faint shimmer, then lights as her world started crawling back into focus.

When she came back to, she realized Travis was tying her arms over her head, looping the ropes binding her wrists over a bolt in the massive engine behind her. She groaned and tried to pull her hands down to reach for her face, but the ropes kept them awkwardly out of the way.

“Travis,” she moaned, seeing two of him as he finished tying the rope over her head. “What are you doing?” Her heart was starting to pound, because this had not been in her calculations.

“Unclip the engine block,” Travis told his men, ignoring her. Immediately, several soldiers began unclipping the carabiners holding the massive engine to the floor of the cargo bay, then dragged the chains off the huge block of metal.

“Travis?” she asked, cringing away from the way he was touching him as a big chain slid across the metal by her head. “Why are you tying me to the engine, Travis?”

“Why?” Travis snorted. “Because I’m tired of your shit and I wanna see you drown.” At her mouth-open stare, he smiled and leaned forward and, taking a lock of her red hair between his fingers, said to it, “I’ve been capering to your every whim for two decades, you incredibly stupid bitch,” Travis snarled. “You know what? News flash, thundercunt. This whole time, all those times you freaked out and made a total little bitch of yourself fingering some poor guy just trying to save his family he had hidden under his house, I’ve just been lying to you.” He tossed the lock of hair aside, his face filled with self-satisfied malice. “I didn’t give a shit about you. I was using you to pump info out of Quad and anyone else I wanted. And all this time, you thought you were so smart, like God’s Gift to lie detectors, and you didn’t even notice. How’s that feel, you dumb cunt? You were nothing but a tool to me.”

Even though Crash had already figured as much, to hear it from Travis’s lips left her feeling stabbed, like the biggest knife in existence slammed into her chest and started tearing around, ripping at her chest, slicing at her soul.

He saw her open-mouthed shock and he grinned down at her cruelly. “Oh yeah. Just a tool, and not even a very good one. Half the time, you didn’t do what you were told.”

“Travis…” Crash began, sputtering as blood trickled down her nose, into her lips.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Travis said, “am I breaking that tiny wad of monkey jizz you call your brain? This whole time…and it’s just now you’re realizing you were the stupid one?”

He really thought I was stupid, Crash realized as she stared up into his malignant hazel eyes. For two decades, he thought I was just a stupid tool.

Suddenly, all the times they’d been interrupted pre-coitus, all the times aides had suddenly shown up right before the action was to start, all the times Quad had popped in saying, “You called, Commandant?” right before they were to get it on…

“You really thought I was vile,” she realized, stunned. Horrified. Shocked to her core. “You didn’t want to have anything to do with me.”

“My mother always told me never to stick my dick in crazy,” Travis sneered.

He had never fucked her…not because the Fates hated her and he was just overwhelmingly busy and generally swamped and unlucky…but because he thought she was repulsive.

…and she was still a virgin, waiting for him. Waiting for him for twenty years.

“You were so wrapped up in your fucking octopus talks you never even noticed we never had sex,” Travis laughed. “You dumb fucking cunt.”

“I noticed,” Crash whispered. She just…hadn’t thought about it for very long because she was busy thinking about other things. He thought I was disgusting. Suddenly all the sideways looks, the throat-clearings, the sudden trips to the bathroom made sense. The magnitude of her epiphany was shattering what was left of her self-control and, despite herself, she started to cry.

Travis—and the other men in the room—magnified her horror when they laughed, gathered around her like a freak at a freak show, drinking in her pain like a fine whiskey. “Anyone wanna fuck her before we throw her over the edge?” Travis asked,. Like he was asking if anyone wanted a beer. His cruel hazel eyes boring right into hers, he said, “She always told me she didn’t want to die a virgin.”

Crash was so horrified she couldn’t even speak.

“Fuck no, man,” one of the men gathered around her laughed. “Don’t want whatever she’s got.”

“Mental disease,” another one snickered.

“I might get my rocks off once or twice if you don’t mind, sir,” another man—the big guy she’d squirted with the squirt bottle in the interrogation room, Crash realized, in horror—said.

“Yeah, fuck, whatever,” Travis snorted, waving at her like she was a malfunctioning vending machine. “I don’t give a shit. Fucking brain-dead parrot will probably be back to counting out Roman root words in different Ancient American dialects before you’re done.” He turned his back to her, chuckling with his buddies, about to walk away.

“You’re average,” Crash blurted.

Travis stopped walking, his back remaining facing her for a moment. He turned slowly, a little frown on his face as he looked at her over his shoulder.

“Psychopaths always think they’re smarter than everyone else,” Crash went on. “But they’re actually less intelligent than those around them. Those Alliance University researchers did a study before you killed them. Psychopaths think they’re smarter… But it’s just because they’re so broken that they can’t form normal human connections, so nobody realizes that they’re incapable of reciprocating even the most basic elements of humanity, and they never realize they’re just lying the whole time.”

Travis’s face cleared. “She’s just talking about the lying thing again,” he sneered, turning to go again.

“No, I’m saying you’re average,” Crash retorted. “I’m saying you tricked people not because you’re smarter, but because you’re broken. Defunct. Incapable. Lacking. Most people literally don’t realize you’re just too emotionally stupid to return their love, so you think you’re a rocket scientist when they’re really just humoring you the whole time and making up for your missing parts.”

Travis’s brow twitched and he turned further towards her.

“And so, in that tiny, pea brain of yours, you saw yourself ‘tricking’ people your whole life, and in your own little echo chamber of stupidity, you equated that with being ‘smarter’ than them. When, in reality, it just means you’re an average-height guy with an average IQ, a crippling abandonment complex, and a knack for thinking his five inch dick is eight and a half because everyone around him is too scared of his psychopathic, broken brain to point out the days he forgets to stuff his tighty-whiteys. Like today.” She made a show of lowering her eyes and cocking her head. “So, I guess in some respects, you’re actually below average, aren’t you, Travis?”