Record of a Spaceborn Few

Tessa

‘Mom, can I go see the stars?’

Tessa looked up from her small workbench and down to her even smaller daughter. ‘I can’t take you now, baby,’ she said. She nodded toward the cleanerbot she was trying to coax back to life. ‘I want to finish this before your Uncle Ashby calls.’

Aya stood in place and bounced on her heels. She’d never in her life been still, not while sleeping, not while sick, not while she’d grown in Tessa’s belly. ‘I don’t need you to go,’ Aya said. ‘I can go myself.’

The declaration was made boldly, laden with enough self-assurance that Tessa set down her screwdriver. The words I don’t need you made a part of her shrivel in on itself, but then, wasn’t that the point of being a parent? To help them need you less and less? She turned to Aya, and considered. She thought of how deep the elevator shaft to the family cupola was, how easy it would be for a bouncing almost-five-year-old to slip off the bench and fall a full deck down. She tried to remember how old she herself had been the first time she’d gone down alone, but found she couldn’t. Aya was clumsy, as all people learning their bodies were, but she was careful, too, when she put her mind to it. She knew to buckle her safety harness on the ferry, to find an adult if she heard air hissing or metal groaning, to check for a green pressure light on any door before opening it. Aya was a kid, but a spacer kid, and spacer kids had to learn to trust themselves, and trust their ships.

‘How would you sit on the bench?’ Tessa asked.

‘In the middle,’ Aya said.

‘Not on the edge?’

‘Not on the edge.’

‘And when do you get off of it?’

‘When it gets to the bottom.’

‘When it stops,’ Tessa said. It wasn’t hard to picture her daughter jumping off while still in motion. ‘You have to wait for the bench to stop all the way before getting off of it.’

‘Okay.’

‘What do you say if you fall?’

‘I say, “falling!”’

Tessa nodded. ‘You shout it real loud, right? And what does that do?’

‘It makes . . . it makes the . . . it makes it turn off.’

‘It makes what turn off?’

Aya bounced and thought. ‘Gravity.’

‘Good girl.’ Tessa tousled her kid’s thick hair with approval. ‘Well, all right, then. Go have fun.’

Her daughter took off. It was only a few steps from Tessa’s table at the side of the living room to the hole in the centre of the floor, but running was the only speed Aya knew. For a split second, Tessa wondered if she’d just created a future trip to the med clinic. Her fears gave way to fondness as she watched Aya carefully, carefully unlatch the little gate in the kid-height railing around the elevator shaft. Aya sat on the floor and scooted forward to the bench – a flat, legless plank big enough for two adults sitting hip-to-hip. The plank was connected to a motorised pulley, which, in turn, was attached to the ceiling with heavy bolts.

Aya sat in quiet assessment – a rare occurrence. She leaned forward a bit, and though Tessa couldn’t see her face, she could picture the little crumpled frown she knew had appeared. Aya didn’t look sure about this. A steep, dark ride was one thing when held firmly on your mother’s lap. It was another entirely when the only person taking the ride was you, and nobody would catch you, nobody would yell for help on your behalf. You had to be able to catch yourself. You had to be able to raise your voice.

Aya picked up the control box wired to the pulley, and pressed the down button. The bench descended.

I don’t need you, Aya had said. The words didn’t sting anymore. They made Tessa smile. She turned back to the cleanerbot and resumed her repairs. She’d get the bot working, she’d let her daughter watch ships or count stars or whatever it was she wanted to do, she’d talk to her brother from half a galaxy away, she’d eat dinner, she’d call her partner from half a system away, she’d sing their daughter to sleep, and she’d fall sleep herself whenever her brain stopped thinking about work. A simple day. A normal day. A good day.

She’d just about put the bot back together when Aya started to scream.

Isabel

Isabel didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to see it, didn’t want whatever nightmare lay out there to etch itself permanently into memory. But that was exactly why she had to go. Nobody would want to look at it now, but they would one day, and it was important that nobody forgot. Somebody had to look. Somebody had to make a record.

‘Do you have the cams?’ she asked, hurrying toward the exit.

Deshi, one of the junior archivists, fell alongside her, matching her stride. ‘Yeah,’ he said, shouldering a satchel. ‘I took both packs, so we’ll have plenty to— holy shit.’

They’d stepped out of the Archives and into a panic, a heaving chaos of bodies and noise. The plaza was as full as it was on any festival day, but this was no celebration. This was terror in real time.

Deshi’s mouth hung open. Isabel reached out and squeezed his young hand with her wrinkled fingers. She had to lead the way, even as her knees went to jelly and her chest went tight. ‘Get the cams out,’ she said. ‘Start recording.’

Her colleague gestured at his scrib and opened his satchel, and the camera spheres flew out, glowing blue as they absorbed sight and sound. Isabel reached up and tapped the frame of the hud that rested over her eyes. She tapped again, two short, one long. The hud registered the command, and a little blinking light at the corner of her left eye let her know her device was recording as well.

She cleared her throat. ‘This is senior archivist Isabel Itoh, head of the Asteria Archives,’ she said, hoping the hud could pick up her voice over the din. ‘I am with junior archivist Deshi Arocha, and the date is GC standard 129/303. We have just received word of— of—’ Her attention was dragged away by a man crumbling soundlessly to his knees. She shook her head and brought herself centre. ‘—of a catastrophic accident aboard the Oxomoco. Some kind of breach and decompression. It is believed a shuttle crash was involved, but we do not have many details yet. We are now headed to the public cupola, to document what we can.’ She was not a reporter. She did not have to embellish a moment with extraneous words. She simply had to preserve the one unfolding.

She and Deshi made their way through the crowd, surrounded by their cloud of cams. The congregation was dense, but people saw the spheres, and they saw the archivists’ robes, and they made way. Isabel said nothing further. There was more than enough for the cams to capture.

‘My sister,’ a woman sobbed to a helpless-looking patroller. ‘Please, I think she was visiting a friend—’

‘Shh, it’s okay, we’re okay,’ a man said to the child he held tight against his chest. ‘We’re gonna be home soon, just hold on to me.’ The child did nothing but bury xyr face as far as it would go into xyr father’s shirt.

‘Star by star, we go together,’ sang a group of all ages, standing in a circle, holding hands. Their voices were shaky, but the old melody rose clear. ‘In ev’ry ship, a family strong . . .’

Isabel could not make out much else. Most were crying, or keening, or chewing their lips in silence.

They reached the edge of the cupola, and as the scene outside came into view, Isabel suddenly understood that the clamour they’d passed through was appropriate, fitting, the only reaction that made any sense in the face of this. She walked down the crowded steps, down as close as she could to the viewing glass, close as she could to the thing she didn’t want to see.

The rest of the Exodus Fleet was out there, thirty homestead ships besides her own, orbiting together in a loose, measured cluster. All was as it should be . . . except one, tangled in a violent shroud of debris. She could see where the pieces belonged – a jagged breach, a hollow where walls and homes had been. She could see sheet metal, crossbeams, odd specks scattered between. She could tell, even from this distance, that many of those specks were not made of metal or plex. They were too curved, too irregular, and they changed shape as they tumbled. They were Human. They were bodies.

Deshi let out a wordless moan, joining the chorus around them.

‘Keep recording,’ Isabel said. She forced the words from her clenched throat. They felt as though they were bleeding. ‘It’s all we can do for them now.’

Eyas

‘Do they know how many yet?’ someone asked. Nobody had said much of anything since they’d left the Asteria, and the abrupt end of quiet startled Eyas out of wherever she’d been.

‘Forty-three thousand, six hundred,’ Costel said. He cleared his throat. ‘That’s our best estimate at this point, based on counting the evacuees who scanned in. We’ll get a more accurate number once we— once we collect the rest.’

Eyas had never seen her supervisor this rattled, but his halting words and uneasy hands mirrored her own, mirrored them all. Nothing about this was normal. Nothing about this was okay. If someone had told her the standard before – when she’d finally shed her apprentice stripes – where accepting this profession would lead her, would she have agreed to it? Would she have continued forward, knowing how this day would unfold?

Probably. Yes. But some warning would’ve been nice.

She sat now with the other caretakers from her segment, twenty of them in total, scattered around the floor of a volunteered cargo ship, headed to the Oxomoco. More cargo ships and caretakers were on their way as well, a fleet within the Fleet. This ship normally carried foodstuffs, she could tell. The smells of spice and oil hung heavy around them, ghosts of good meals long gone. Not the smells she was accustomed to at work. Scented soap, she was used to. Metal. Blood, sometimes. Methylbutyl esters. Cloth. Dirt. Rot, ritual, renewal.

She shifted in her heavy exosuit. This, too, was wrong, as far a cry as there was from her usual light funerary garments. But it wasn’t the suit that was making her uncomfortable, nor the spices tickling her nose. Forty-three thousand, six hundred. ‘How,’ she said, working some moisture into her mouth, ‘how are we supposed to lay in that many?’ The thought had been clawing at her ever since she’d looked out the window thirteen hours prior.

Costel said nothing for too long a time. ‘The guild doesn’t . . . we don’t know yet.’ A ruckus broke out, twenty questions overlapping. He put up his palms. ‘The problem is obvious. We can’t accommodate that many at once.’

‘There’s room,’ one of Eyas’ colleagues said. ‘We’re set up for twice our current death rate. If every Centre in the Fleet takes some, there’s no problem.’

‘We can’t do that, not all at once,’ said another. ‘You’d fuck up the carbon–nitrogen ratio. You’d throw the whole system out of whack.’

‘So, don’t do it all at once. A little at a time, and we . . . we . . .’

‘See,’ their supervisor said. ‘There’s the issue.’ He looked around the group, waiting for someone to step in with the answer.

‘Storage,’ Eyas said, shutting her eyes. She’d done some quick math while the others spoke, much as she hated to reduce something this important to numbers. One hundred and eighty Centres in the Fleet, each capable of composting a thousand corpses over a standard – but not at the same time. A Human body took just under four tendays to break down fully – bones and all – and there wasn’t space to lay in more than a hundred or so at once. Even if you could set aside the carbon–nitrogen ratio, you couldn’t change time. You’d have to store tens of thousands of bodies in the interim, which the morgues could not handle. More importantly, you’d have to tell tens of thousands of families that they’d have to wait to grieve, wait to hold a funeral, wait their turn to properly say goodbye. How would you choose who went first? Roll dice? Pick a number? No, the trauma was great enough without adding anything smacking of preferential treatment to the mix. But then . . . what would they do? And how would those same families respond when told that the people ripped away from them would not be joining their ancestors’ cycle – would not transform into nourishment for the gardens, would not fill the airways and stomachs of those who remained – like they’d always been promised?

She put her face in her hands. Once more, silence returned to the group, and this time, no one broke it.

After a while, the ship slowed and stopped. Eyas stood, the pain inside stepping back to make room for the task at hand. She listened to Costel give instructions. She put on her helmet. She walked to the airlock. One door closed behind her; another opened ahead.

What lay outside was an obscenity, an ugliness she would wrestle another time. She blocked out the ruined districts and broken windows, focusing only on the bodies floating between. Bodies she could handle. Bodies she understood.

The caretakers scattered into the vacuum, thrusters firing on their backs. They flew alone, each of them, the same way that they worked. Eyas darted forward. The sun was muted behind her tinted visor, and the stars had lost their lustre. She hit her stabilisers, coming to a halt in front of the first she would collect. A man with salt-and-pepper hair and round cheeks. A farmer, by the clothes he wore. His leg dangled oddly – possibly the result of some impact during the explosive decompression – and a necklace, still tied around his neck, swayed near his peaceful face. He was peaceful, even with his eyes half-open and a final gasp at his lips. She pulled him toward her, wrapping her arms around his torso from behind. His hair pressed against her visor, and she could see the flecks of ice woven through it, the crunchy spires the cold had sculpted. Oh, stars, they’re going to thaw, she thought. She hadn’t considered that. Spacing deaths were rare, and she’d never overseen a funeral for one. She knew what normal procedure was: vacuum-exposed bodies got put in pressure capsules, where they could return to normal environmental conditions without things getting unseemly. But there weren’t enough pressure capsules for the Oxomoco, not in the whole Fleet. No, they’d be piling frozen bodies in the relative warmth of a cargo hold. A crude half-measure improvised in haste, just like everything else they were doing that day.

Eyas took a tight breath of canned air. How were they supposed to deal with this? How would they give these people dignity? How would they ever, ever make this right?

She closed her eyes and took another breath, a good one this time. ‘From the stars, came the ground,’ she said to the body. ‘From the ground, we stood. To the ground, we return.’ They were words for a funeral, not retrieval, and speaking to corpses was not an action she’d ever practised (and likely never would again). She didn’t see the point of filling ears that couldn’t hear. But this – this was the way they would heal. She didn’t know where this body or the others would go. She didn’t know how her guild would proceed. But she knew they were Exodan. They were Exodan, and no matter what threatened to tear them apart, tradition held them together. She flew back toward the ship, ferrying her temporary charge, reciting the words the First Generation had written. ‘Here, at the Centre of our lives, we carry our beloved dead. We honour their breath, which fills our lungs. We honour their blood, which fills our hearts. We honour their bodies, which fuel our own . . .’

Kip

Not in a million years would Kip have wanted to be held up – that was for kids, not eleven-year-olds – but he couldn’t help but feel kind of envious of the little droolers sitting comfy around their parents’ heads. He was too big to be held, but too short to see over the forest of grown-ups that filled the shuttledock. He stretched up on tiptoe, swaying this way and that, trying to see something other than shoulders and shirt sleeves. But no, whenever he found a gap to look through, all there was beyond was more of the same. Tons of people packed in tight, with kids up top, making the view all the more impossible. He dropped his heels down and huffed.

His dad noticed, and bent down to speak directly in Kip’s ear. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

It wasn’t easy for them to push their way back out of the middle, but they managed – his dad leading the way, Kip following the grey-striped print of his father’s shirt. It was a nice shirt, the kind of shirt you wore to naming days or weddings, or if someone important came to the hex for dinner. Kip was wearing a nice shirt, too – yellow with white dots. He’d struggled with the buttons, and his mom had had to help him get it closed. He could feel the fabric tugging tight over his chest every time he took a breath, just like he could feel his toes pressing against the ends of his shoes. His mom had shaken her head, and said she’d go over and see if his cousin Wymer had any bigger hand-me-downs lying around. Kip wished he could get brand new clothes, like the ones the import merchants hung outside their stalls, all crisp and straight and without stitches where somebody else’s elbows had poked through. But he could see stitches on his dad’s shirt, too, and on most of the shirts they pushed past. They were still nice shirts, though, as nice as people could manage. Everybody wanted to look good for the Aeluons.

No matter whether the shirts were new or stitched, there was one thing everybody had on: a white band tied around their upper right arm. That was what people wore in the tendays after funerals, so other people knew to cut you some slack and give you some kindness. Everybody had them on now – everybody on the Asteria, everybody in the whole Fleet. Kip didn’t know anybody who’d died on the Oxomoco, but that wasn’t the point, Mom had said while tying cloth around his arm. We all lost family, she’d said, whether we knew them or not.

Kip looked back once they’d cleared the crowd. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked with a frown. He hadn’t been able to see anything where they were, but the empty dock was far away now, and the ship would be arriving any minute. They weren’t going to miss it, were they? They couldn’t.

‘Trust me,’ Dad said. He waved his son along, and Kip could see where they were headed: one of the cargo cranes perched nearby. Some other people had already got the same idea, and were sitting in the empty gaps of the crane’s metal neck. His dad put his hand on Kip’s shoulder. ‘Now, you should never, ever do what we’re about to do any other time. But this is a special occasion, yeah? Do you think you can climb up there with me?’

Kip nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said, his heart pounding. Dad didn’t break the rules often. Ever, really. No way would Mom have gone for this. Kip was secretly glad she hadn’t come.

They climbed up the crane’s service ladder, then clambered along the fat metal supports. The crane was way taller than it had looked from the floor, and Kip was a little scared – not like scared scared, he wasn’t a baby – but the climb wasn’t hard. It was kind of like the obstacle course at the playground, only way bigger. Besides, he was with his dad. If Dad said it was okay, it was okay.

The other people already on the crane smiled at them. ‘Pull up a seat,’ one lady shouted.

Dad laughed. ‘Don’t mind if we do.’ He swung himself into an empty spot. ‘Come on, Kip.’

Kip pulled himself alongside, letting his arms hang over one support beam and his feet swing free below another. The metal below his thighs was cold, and definitely not designed for sitting. He could already tell his butt was going to go numb.

But the view . . . the view was awesome. Being far away didn’t matter so much when you were up top. Everything looked small – the people in the crowd, the patrollers at the edges, the in-charge group waiting right at the dock. ‘Is that the Admiral?’ Kip said, pointing at a grey-haired woman in a distinctive green council uniform.

‘That’s her,’ Dad said.

‘Have you ever met her?’

‘No.’

‘I did, last standard,’ said the friendly, shouting lady. She sipped something hot from a canteen. ‘She was on my sanitation team.’

‘No kidding,’ Dad said. ‘What’d you think?’

The lady made a yeah, not bad kind of face. ‘I’d vote for her again.’

Kip felt a knot start to unravel itself, a mass that had been tangled in him ever since the crash. Here was his dad, climbing up a crane with him and chatting easily with strangers. There was the crowd, assembled in the smartest clothes they had, nobody crying or screaming anymore. There was the Admiral, looking cool and official and powerful. Soon, the Aeluons would be there, too, and they’d help. They’d make things right again.

The dock lights turned yellow, indicating an incoming vessel. Even up high, Kip could hear the crowd hush. All at once, there it was. It flew into the dock silently – a smooth, gleaming Aeluon skiff with rounded corners and pearly hull. It almost didn’t look like a ship. Ships were angular. Mechanical. Something you bolted and welded together, piece by piece, chunk by chunk. This ship, on the other hand, looked like it had been made from something melted, something poured into a mould and polished for days. The entire crowd held their breath together.

‘Stars, that’s something,’ Dad said quietly.

‘Get ’em all the time over at cargo,’ the lady said. ‘Never get tired of it.’

Kip didn’t say anything. He was too busy looking at the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He almost asked his dad what this kind of ship was called, but his dad obviously hadn’t seen one before, and Kip didn’t know the lady, so he didn’t want to ask her. He’d look up Aeluon ships on the Linkings when he got home. He knew all the types of Human ships, and he also liked to know stuff about alien bodies, but he hadn’t ever thought to learn about their ships. It was easy, in the Fleet, to think that Human ships were all there was.

A hatch yawned open. How, Kip couldn’t say, because there weren’t any edges on the outer hull to suggest doors or seams. The crowd broke into a cheer as three Aeluons stepped out. Kip had really wanted to see them up close, but even at a distance, they made his heart race. Bare silver heads he knew were covered in tiny scales. Patches on their cheeks that swirled with colour. Weird grey and white and black clothes that, he guessed, had never been anybody’s hand-me-downs.

‘Why are they wearing masks?’ Kip asked. ‘Can’t they breathe oxygen?’

‘They can, and do,’ Dad said. ‘But sapients who don’t live around Humans tend to find us, ah . . . pungent.’

‘What’s pungent mean?’

‘We stink, kid.’ The lady laughed into her canteen.

‘Oh,’ Kip said. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. And the longer he sat there, the less he was sure how he felt about anything. His insides began to tangle themselves again as he watched the Admiral greet their otherworldly neighbours. Her uniform no longer looked cool, the crowd no longer looked smartly dressed, and the dock no longer looked normal, not with a big flying gemstone resting in the middle of it. The Aeluons were here to clean up a mess the Fleet couldn’t, a mess that wouldn’t have happened without busted ships and worn-out tech. They shook hands Human-style with the stinky, stitched-up council, and beneath Kip’s excitement, beneath his wonder, a sadness spread.

He watched the Aeluons, and he felt ashamed.

Sawyer

The trick to living on Mushtullo was knowing which sunrise to wait for. Ressoden came up first, but only spacer merchants and little kids made the mistake of going out that early. Ressoden was dinky, capable of providing usable light but not enough warmth to burn off the cold. The pre-dawn fog carried the kind of insidious wetness that wormed its way to your bones, and you couldn’t be blamed for deciding to wait for the third sun – big, fat Pelus – to banish the clouds entirely. But that, too, was a rookie mistake. You had about a half an hour after Pelus’ appearance until the surrounding swamps to evaporate, and the roasting midday air became thick enough to chew. The second sunrise – Makarev – was where it was at. Makarev held court for an hour and sixteen minutes, just long enough for you to get up and catch a tram to wherever it was you needed to go. Not too damp, not too muggy, not too hot, not too cold. You didn’t need to layer, and you wouldn’t show up to work with a sweaty shirt that wouldn’t dry out. Ideal.

Sawyer pressed his palm against the inner wall of his capsule bunk, and he could tell that Makarev was just about there. His capsule was supposedly temperature controlled – and okay, sure, he hadn’t frozen to death or anything – but the insulation was as cheap as his rent. He lay under his blankets, waiting for the wall to hit that level of warmth that meant . . . now. He sat up on his mattress and hit one of the buttons on the wall. The sink shelf slid out, a thick rectangle with a basin and a pop-up mirror and the almost-empty box of dentbot packs he needed to restock. He rinsed his face, drank some water, cleaned his mouth, combed his hair into place. He pushed a different wall button. The sink retracted, and a larger shelf extended, holding a quick-cooker and a storage box full of just-add-water meals. He knew he had a long day at work ahead, so he opted for two packs of Magic Morning Power Porridge, which were still heating up when he checked his scrib and discovered he had no job to get to.

He didn’t bother to finish reading the soulless form letter his (former) employer had sent. He knew what it said. Unforeseen funding shortage, blah blah, sincerely regret the abrupt notice, blah blah, wish you the very best of luck in future, blah blah blah. Sawyer fell back onto his pillow and shut his eyes. He was nineteen, he’d been working since twelve, and he’d had ten jobs by now. The math there was not in his favour.

‘Great,’ he sighed, and for a while, he considered staying in bed all day, blowing the extra creds needed to cool his capsule while Pelus was out. But now his creds were even more precious than before, and if he’d been laid off, that meant everybody else at the factory had, too. They’d all be descending on the commerce square, ingratiating themselves to business owners until one of them offered a job. That was how things worked with Harmagians, anyway. No résumés or interviews or anything. Just walk up and hope they like you. With other species, finding a job was a less tiring to-do, but Harmagian jobs were where the creds were at. There were jobs in his neighbourhood, probably, but Humanowned work didn’t get you very far. Much smarter to head out to the square and try his luck. He could do it. He’d done it before.

With a weary will, he sat back up, ate his porridge, and put on clean clothes (these, too, were stored in the wall). He scooted off the end of his mattress and out the capsule hatch, planting his feet on the ladder outside in a practised way. He gripped his doorframe as he started to lower himself down, and immediately withdrew his hand with disgust. ‘Oh, come on,’ he sighed, grimacing at the grey gunk smeared across his fingers. Creep mould. The grey, greasy stuff loved the night-time fog, and it grew so fast you could clean it up before bed and find a fresh new mat in the morning, just like the one inching over Sawyer’s tiny home now. He wiped his palm on an old shirt and resumed his exit, taking care to not get any of the gunk on his clothes. He had new bosses to impress, and this already wasn’t his day.

It would be, though, he decided, hoisting his mood as he climbed down. He’d go out there, and he’d find a job. He’d find something even better than the job he’d had yesterday.

He headed out into Mushtullo’s second morning, weaving his way through the neighbourhood. The narrow paved streets were as packed as the tall buildings that lined them, and the general flow of foot traffic was headed for the tram stations, like always. He saw a few other better-dressed-than-usual people in the crowd, and he quickened his step. Had to get to the square before the good stuff got snapped up.

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted something out of the ordinary: a small crowd – old people, mostly – gathered by that little weather-worn statue of an Exodan homesteader over by the grocery. They were decorating the statue, laying wreaths of flowers and ribbons over it, lighting candles around its base, scrubbing creep mould off of it. Sawyer dimly remembered talk at work a few days before, something about a homesteader exploding, or decompressing, or something. Some horrible shit. He figured that was the reason for the crowd, and would’ve kept going on his way were it not for one face he recognised: Shani Brenner, one of the supervisors from the factory. She wasn’t headed for the trams, she was helping some old – no, ancient – lady light a candle. Did she not know about the layoffs? Had she not checked her scrib?

Sawyer hesitated. He didn’t want to waste time, but Shani was all right. She’d shared her lunch with Sawyer once, when he’d been short on creds. This day hadn’t had a lot going for it yet. Maybe, Sawyer thought, helping somebody out would get the universe back on his side.

He changed course and hurried toward the statue. ‘Hey, Shani!’ he called with a wave.

Shani looked up, first with confusion, then with recognition. She patted the old woman (who was sitting on the ground, now), then met Sawyer halfway. ‘Shitty morning, huh?’ she said, rubbing the back of her neck.

‘You heard,’ Sawyer said.

‘Yeah. Got a letter, same as I bet you did. No idea it was coming. Stingy bastards. I gave Tolged a thanks-for-being-my-boss gift three days ago and everything.’

Sawyer jerked a thumb toward the street. ‘Aren’t you going to the square?’

Shani shook her head. ‘Not today.’ She nodded to the statue. ‘That’s my grandma over there. You hear about the Oxomoco?’

‘That homesteader that . . . ?’

‘Yeah. She was born there. Came here when she was seven, but still. Roots, y’know?’ Shani eyed Sawyer. ‘You Exodan?’

‘I mean . . .’ Wasn’t everybody, at one point or another? ‘Like way, way back. I— I don’t know what ship, or anything. I’ve never been.’

Shani shrugged. ‘Still counts. Wanna come sit with us?’

Sawyer blinked. ‘Thanks, but I—’

‘There’ll be jobs tomorrow,’ Shani said. ‘I’m not worrying about it, and neither should you. We’ll both land on our feet, yeah? Things work out.’

Over Shani’s shoulder, Sawyer could see other people joining Grandma Brenner on the ground. Some were weeping. Some held hands, or passed a flask around. Some were speaking in unison, almost like a chant, but he could only catch a few words. His Ensk was scattershot at best.

Shani smiled at Sawyer. ‘Up to you,’ she said as she walked away. She, too, sat on the ground, and held her grandmother close.

Sawyer did not join them, but neither did he turn back. There was no reason for him to stay, and yet . . . and yet. He imagined the jam-packed frenzy that awaited him at the commerce square, the lines of eager people desperate to impress. It was the antithesis of the scene in front of him, this quiet mourning, this shared respect. The idea of joining them felt awkward. He didn’t want to intrude. He wasn’t one of them, didn’t belong there. But as he watched them share tears and songs and company, he wished that he did. He didn’t have anything he was a part of like that. Even in grief, it looked like a nice thing to have. Maybe especially in grief.

He thought, as he rode the tram to the square, of the recited words he’d managed to make out. They circled his mind, over and over as he watched crowded neighbourhoods blur through mouldy windows.

From the ground.