People nodded from windows and outdoor nets as he passed, some smiling with faint sympathy. There were only a couple of hundred people in the Belt; the tragedy must have hit almost everybody. From dozens of cabins came the sounds of soft weeping, of cries of pain.

Rees lived alone, keeping mostly to his own company; but he knew almost everybody in the Belt. Now he lingered by cabins where people to whom he was a little closer must be suffering, perhaps dying; but he hurried on, feeling isolation thicken around him like smoke.

The Quartermaster's bar was one of the Belt's largest buildings at twenty yards across; it was laced with climbing ropes, and bar stock covered most of one wall. This shift the place was crowded: the stink of alcohol and weed, the bellow of voices, the pull of a mass of hot bodies — it all hit Rees as if he'd run into a wall. Jame, the barman, plied his trade briskly, laughing raucously through a graying tangle of beard. Rees lingered on the fringe of the milling crowd, anxious not to return to his desolate cabin; but the drink and laughter seemed to flow around him, excluding him, and he turned to leave.

"Rees! Wait…"

It was Sheen. She had pushed away from the center of a group of men; one of them — a huge, intimidating miner called Roch — called after her drunkenly. Sheen's cheeks were moist from the heat of the bar and she had cropped away her scorched hair; otherwise she was bright and clean in a fresh, skimpy tunic. When she spoke her voice was still scoured rough by the smoke. "I saw you come in. Here. You look like you need this." She held out a drink in a tarnished globe.

Suddenly awkward, Rees said, "I was going to leave—"

"I know you were." She moved closer to him, unsmiling, and pushed the drink into his chest. "Take it anyway." Again he felt the pull of her body as a warmth in his stomach — why should her gravity field have such a distinct flavor from that of others? — and he was distractingly aware of her bare arms.