Record of a Spaceborn Few

Feed source: Reskit Institute of Interstellar Migration (Public News Feed)

Item name: The Modern Exodus – Entry #6

Author: Ghuh’loloan Mok Chutp

Encryption: 0

Translation path: [Hanto:Kliptorigan]

Transcription: 0

Node identifier: 2310-483-38, Isabel Itoh

[System message: The feed you have selected has been translated from written Hanto. As you may be aware, written Hanto includes gestural notations that do not have analogous symbols in any other GC language. Therefore, your scrib’s on-board translation software has not translated the following material directly. The content here is a modified translation, intended to be accessible to the average Kliptorigan reader.]

It is without question that there are many ways in which Exodans have benefited from GC influence. Imubots, artigrav, algae fuel, tunnel access – and of course, mek, which Exodans drink in quantities on par with the rest of the galaxy. But cultural exchange is never without its disruptions, and while the elder Exodan generation frowns over the younger’s preference for Klip and penchant for Harmagian charthump (why that genre of music in particular, I can’t say), I submit that there is one introduced factor more divisive than any other: the Galactic Commons Commerce Credit.

To understand the conundrum created by the humble cred, you must first understand how Exodans manage labour and resources – and indeed, how they have done so for centuries. To begin, the basics: if you are physically present within the Exodus Fleet, you receive lodgings, food, air, and water. You have access to all public services, and you are granted the same sapient rights as any. No exceptions, no questions asked. There are limits to how much an individual can receive, of course – finite stores within a closed system can only be stretched so far. But Exodan life support capacity has been greatly expanded by the upgrades they’ve implemented over the standards (again, thanks to GC tech), and they take careful count of each person who enters the majestic homesteader shuttledocks. Were Fleet systems or supplies to become taxed, all but citizens would be systematically deported. This has yet to become an issue. In fact, if anything, the decrease in Exodan population since their admission into the GC has made the Fleet more capable of welcoming others.

You may be wondering, dear guest, as I did, how labour is compensated if your base needs are met. This is the part that’s hard for many – non-Exodan Humans included – to understand: it’s not. Nor do some professions receive more resources than others, or finer housing, or any such tangible benefits. You become a doctor because you want to help people. You become a pilot because you want to fly. You become a farmer because you want to work with growing things, or because you want to feed others. To an Exodan, the question of choosing a profession is not one of what do I need? but rather what am I good at? What good can I do?

Of course, some professions are more glamorous than others – a pilot, it’s safe to argue, has more dynamic days than a formwork clerk – but this ultimately comes down to personal preference. Not everyone wants a busy, exciting profession that requires long hours and specialised training. Many are content to do something simple that fulfils the desire to be useful but also allows them plenty of opportunity to spend time with their families and hobbies. This is why professions that do require rigorous schooling – or pose inherent risk, either physically or emotionally – are so highly respected within Exodan society. I witness this often in the company of my dear host, Isabel, who receives gifts and deference wherever she goes (you may be wondering how gifts work in a society with no native currency; I will come to that). I have seen this behaviour as well with caretakers, miners, and council members. This is not to say that other professions are unvalued – far from it. There is no such thing as a meaningless job in the Fleet. Everything has a purpose, a recognisable benefit. If you have food on your plate, you thank a farmer. If you have clothing, you thank a textile manufacturer. If you have murals to brighten your day, you thank an artist. Even the most menial of tasks benefits someone, benefits all.

Perhaps it is their very lack of planetary scale that makes this kind of inclusive thinking possible. Societal machinations and environmental stability are not abstract concepts for the Exodans. They are an immediate, visceral reality. This is why it is rare for able adults to eschew a profession entirely (though this does happen, to considerable scorn), and why youths are under intense scrutiny from their elders as to which line of work they will apprentice in. A job is partly a matter of personal fulfilment, yes, but also – and perhaps chiefly – social fulfilment. When an Exodan asks ‘what do you do?’, the real question is: ‘What do you do for us?’

This is not a wholly communal society, however. The concept of personal belongings (and living space) still exists, and is quite important. A canister of dried beans, for example, is a public resource, until said canister is allotted to a family. The family trades nothing for this item, as access to it is their right as citizens. But once the canister crosses from storeroom to home, it now belongs to the family in question, and another family taking it would be a punishable act of theft (not to mention unnecessary, as the thieves would have their own beans to start with). Let’s now imagine that a member of this family decides to become a baker. Xe takes xyr family beans, makes them into dough, and creates delicious confections (or so I am told; as with so many Human foods, bean cakes are one of the many staples I cannot consume). Unless this individual is extremely generous, xe will not distribute these goods for free, as this is food now absent from the family pantry. Xe will instead engage in that most Exodan of traditions: bartering. Were I an Exodan with want of cake, I could offer vegetables from my home garden, or a selection of spare bolts, or any such offering that both the baker and I deemed a fair and acceptable trade.

If the baker is successful enough in bartering xyr wares, xe will have a surplus of bartered items that can then be traded with the public food stores in exchange for surplus allotments of beans, at which point the herbs and bolts and whatnot re-enter the realm of public resource and become available to the general populace. Or, the baker can simply hang onto xyr bartered items in lieu of having a full cupboard at home, if the family decides they prefer bolts to beans. So even though all resources are rigidly controlled and meted out on a public level, there is profound freedom in what each family decides to do with their share.

Perhaps it has already become obvious how this delicate balance was disrupted the moment Exodan forebears crossed paths with an Aeluon research probe. Exodans are not impoverished (a misconception I encounter constantly back home). They are healthy and housed, and experience no extraordinary stress. But it is true that if you were to pick up an Exodan home and place it in the middle of, say, Sohep Frie or the residential edges of Reskit, that home would appear jarringly meagre. It is not that Exodans are lacking; it’s that the privileged of us have so much more. A canister of dried beans is well and good, but it’s not as nutrient-packed as jeskoo, not as tasty to a Human palate as snapfruit, not as exciting as something new. Yes, an Exodan might say, the shuttle engines built in Fleet factories are perfectly adequate, but have you seen what the Aandrisks are flying these days? Have you seen the latest sim hubs, the latest implants, the latest redreed hybrids? Have you seen what wonders our alien friends have?

I should note, in case you’re getting the wrong idea, that Exodans have been steadily innovating and inventing throughout their history. The Fleet is one enormous tinkerer’s workshop, and the equity with which goods are accessible means that anybody with a new idea – mechanical, scientific, artistic, what have you – has the resources to bring it to life. The only limit to what an Exodan can create is what xe has on hand. The fact that Humanity has been liberally implementing GC tech (and building off of it in ingenious, locally specialised ways) does not mean that the Fleet has been technologically stagnant since leaving Earth, nor does it mean their system of labour management is insufficient in driving creative minds to improve upon the old. Dear guest, I cannot impress strongly enough how important it is that we understand the current Exodan state of affairs. It is not that the Exodans were standing still. It is that the rest of us were so far ahead.

Which brings us to those who keep the treasures the average Exodan cannot resist: GC merchants. Non-Human species in residential areas are so rare as to be effectively hypothetical, but the merchant-facing shuttledocks are relatively diverse. Multilingualism is a job requirement for today’s import inspectors, as is interspecies sensitivity training. But while the Exodans working the docks have made efforts to adapt to alien custom, the merchants they so eagerly welcome have neglected to adapt in one crucial respect: payment. This is hardly surprising, nor is it unfair. A GC trader has no use for beans or bolts. Xe wants creds, plain and simple. If the Exodans want their imports (and they badly do), they must pay up.

On a galactic scale, a unified currency makes sense. The alternative would be madness. But in a society as small as the Exodus Fleet, the mixture of creds and barter has yet to gel. The Exodus Fleet produces virtually no trade goods of outside interest, which means creds can only come from elsewhere. For generations, more and more Exodans have left to do work in other systems, in search of wealth, adventure, or simply a broader variety of occupational options. These individuals are Exodan through and through, however, and they do what any community-minded citizen would: they send creds home. Who wouldn’t do this? Who wouldn’t want their families to eat better, to be more comfortable, to have more conveniences and delights? How could this act of sharing be born of anything but kindness?

Imagine now that our baker has been given some creds. Now xe no longer needs to wait for beans to become available, or to carefully save up the right number of bolts. Xe can instead put in an import order for suddet root – not the same as beans, but usable in the same way, and more valuable for its exoticism. The creds then leave the Fleet, nothing re-enters the public stores – beans, bolts, or otherwise – and other bakers who once comfortably traded bean cakes in nearby neighbourhoods now find their customers making longer walks elsewhere for the sake of alien novelty. A seamless harmony that was maintained for centuries has been thrown off-key, and it remains unclear how the song will end.

This is not a new problem. The Fleet has been struggling with creds since the days of first contact. At first, participation in the galactic economy was perceived as a harmful acquiescence to foreign values – not alien, interestingly, but Martian. Contact with the GC in turn enabled Fleet contact with the Sol system for the first time since the Exodans left, and the reunion was not a cordial one. Much has been written on this topic elsewhere, so in the interest of brevity, I will mention only that in the early days of the post-contact Fleet, anything coded as Martian – money, war, extreme individualism – was understood to be dangerously incompatible with Exodan morality. This sentiment still lingers (unwaveringly so in military affairs), but in matters of economy, there has been a slow, steady shift. There are Exodan merchants who, to this day, steadfastly refuse to accept creds out of cultural pride, and there is a social righteousness I’ve observed in individuals who, in turn, choose to only interact with such establishments. But these principled people live next door to others who do have the newest implants and the trendiest food. While our resolute barterers may not be tempted by flash and fashion, while they may be content to live with amenities that are suitable and adequate and just enough . . . their children are still making up their minds.

Sawyer

Sent message

Encryption: 0

Translation: 0

From: Sawyer (path: 7466-314-23)

To: Eyas (path: 6635-448-80)

Hi Eyas,

I hope you don’t mind me sending you a note. I found your scrib path in the ship’s directory (you’re the only one with your name!). Anyway, I wanted to thank you again for your advice the other day. I’d just signed up for sanitation work when I met somebody outside the job office looking to hire workers for a salvage project. It’s just a gig right now, but it might be more. Plus, this crew’s been the only group of people other than yourself to offer to show me the ropes. They seem like fun folks. So I’m on board with them now, but don’t worry! My name’s still in the sanitation lottery. I took what you said seriously, and I’ll help out when I’m needed. Thanks for steering me in the right direction.

Sawyer

He should’ve been sleeping. Sleep was the smart thing, the responsible thing. He was worried about not screwing things up that day, and he knew that if he was smart, he’d still be in bed, because being well-rested would help him actually accomplish that. But instead, he was up during the artificial dawn, standing in his bedroom in the otherwise unoccupied home, turning this way and that in front of the mirror, cycling through the five shirts he owned and liking none of them. They didn’t look like what Exodans wore. They were too bright, too crisp. They lacked that degree of sincere, inoffensive wear that Exodan clothing always had, that reminder that new cloth only came around every so often. His clothes, cheap though they’d been, simple though he’d thought them, were made too well. He hadn’t known that when he’d packed his bags back on Mushtullo, but he knew it now, just like he knew that his accent put people off, and that even though he shared the same DNA as everybody else here, they saw him as something other.

I should’ve bought new clothes, he thought irritably as he pulled off his shirt with a sigh. He’d meant to, but he’d been so busy brushing up on Tinker that he’d run out of time. He backed up to the edge of his bed and sat down, holding the garment in his hands. Red and brown threads, woven together in a breezy fashion, perfect for the sticky days back home. He’d bought this shirt at Strut, one of his favourite shops down in Little Florence. He’d been with friends at the time – Cari and Shiro and Lael, blowing their creds and getting drunk in celebration of yet another payday at the shitty stasie factory.

Of all the things he’d anticipated in leaving Mushtullo, homesickness hadn’t been one of them. He didn’t feel it with a pang, but with an ache – a dull, keening ache, the kind of thing you could ignore at first but that grew less tolerable every day. There was a lot about his homeworld he didn’t miss. The crowds. The grime. The triple dose of daylight that made shirts like the one he held a necessity. But he missed the people. He missed Lael, with her incessant puns. He missed Cari, always good for the latest gossip. He even missed Shiro, the cranky bastard, garbage taste in music and all.

He’d left for good reasons, he told himself. He’d left for the right reasons. What was there for him on Mushtullo, beyond working jobs he didn’t care about so he could buy drinks he’d piss away and shirts he wouldn’t like later? What was there beyond a drab studio in a drab residence block, in a neighbourhood where people shoved guns in your back and took your creds? What meaning was there in that? What good?

Even so, he missed his friends. Stars, he missed having friends.

He wondered, cautiously, if he’d made a mistake. If he was still making one. Maybe Eyas had been right. Maybe the folks at the job office had been trying to tell him that he didn’t have the right stuff to become part of the Fleet. He knew where the transport dock was. He only had five shirts. It wouldn’t take him long to pack.

Sawyer shook his head. What was wrong with him? He was starting a job today! A job! With people! With Oates, who’d liked him! Muriel seemed to like him, too, and Len seemed all right, and . . . okay, Dory was scary, but maybe she’d come around. Maybe he was what they were looking for. Maybe they’d welcome him in.

Sawyer realised that was what was scaring him. He was afraid of getting his hopes up, of putting too much stock into this new thing. He’d learned, in the past few tendays, that deciding ahead of time how a thing was going to go was setting yourself up for a faceplant.

So, fine, he didn’t know how it would go . . . but he knew what he wanted from them. A posse. A crew. A real crew, like he’d seen in vids and sims. People who looked after each other. People who were messy sometimes, but could pull together when stuff got tough. People who would laugh at his jokes, and give him a nickname, maybe, who would knock on his door late at night because they knew where they could go with their problems. People who always had a spot at the table for him. People to whom he mattered.

It was too big of an expectation to put on one job offer, he knew that. But he looked at himself in the mirror, and he felt some confidence creep back in. If it was a matter of either getting his hopes up or glooming himself to the edge of going home – well then, hopes up it was. He took a breath and put on his shirt. His clothes were fine. They would do. The crew of the Silver Lining would like him. He’d do a good job. He’d use the last of his creds and buy everybody a drink after. He’d be cool and funny, and they’d want him to come back again.

Sawyer stood and examined himself. Red looks good on you, he could hear Cari saying, the payday kick making her loud. You should definitely buy that.

He nodded. He smiled. He was gonna do great.

Tessa

‘Aren’t you supposed to be at work?’ Pop grumbled, slumped and spread-legged in the clinic waiting room. They were the only ones there, thank goodness. The last thing this ridiculous to-do needed was an audience.

‘Nope, I’m here,’ Tessa said, idly scrolling through a news feed on her scrib. Stars, was there ever a day when the news was good?

‘Don’t you have a shift?’

‘I swapped with Sahil for the afternoon.’

Out of the corner of her eye, Tessa saw his arms cross and mouth scowl. ‘I would’ve gone,’ Pop said.

‘You haven’t gotten a checkup in six tendays. You’re supposed to go every three.’

‘I’m fine.’

Tessa’s eyes shifted to the wall across from them. ‘Can you read that sign?’

‘What sign?’

She nodded at the assertive yellow notice on the wall, informing people about the new imubot models that had become available. ‘That sign.’

‘Oh, so you’re my doctor now?’

‘Pop.’

‘Sorry, but only a medical professional can ask me those kinds of questions.’ He looked her up and down. ‘And I don’t see your credentials.’

A twinge appeared in Tessa’s left temple. He was acting infantile, but she was also fairly certain he couldn’t read the sign, and that meant she had to stick this out.

The office door opened, thank goodness, and Dr Koraltan stood waiting with a broad smile. ‘M Santoso, at last!’ he said in a tone that suggested he knew exactly what the score was. ‘I was beginning to think you didn’t like us.’

Pop stood; Tessa did the same. ‘You’re not coming with me,’ Pop mumbled.

‘Oh, yes, I am.’ She put her scrib in its holster and gestured toward the door. ‘After you.’

Dr Koraltan’s smile grew larger. ‘Nice to see you as well, Tessa. How’s your back?’

‘Behaving,’ she said, following her defeated father onward to the examination room. ‘Amazing how not twisting my spine while lifting my toddler has helped.’

The doctor laughed as he waved the exam room door closed. ‘Up on the table, please, M. Tessa, make yourself comfortable.’ He gestured at his scrib. ‘All right, M, it looks like it’s been . . . wow, almost nine tendays since you were last here.’

Tessa’s head snapped to her father. ‘Nine, huh.’

Pop scowled at the floor. He looked for all the world like Aya when she’d gotten into something she shouldn’t. It might’ve been funny if it weren’t so damned embarrassing.

Dr Koraltan cleared his throat. ‘I really do recommend coming by every thirty days, M. I know it’s not fun, but—’

‘I’m not having another surgery,’ Pop blurted out. ‘I’m fine.’

The doctor exchanged a glance with Tessa. ‘Do you think you need one?’ he asked.

Pop was quiet a beat too long. ‘How should I know?’ he said.

The twinge in Tessa’s temple made its way to her eye socket.

‘Well, let’s see if I can settle the matter,’ the doctor said. He wheeled over a bot scanner; Pop placed his wrist in habitually. For all his protesting, he was entirely compliant as the doctor performed the exam. Tessa had seen this play out many times, but there was always something disquieting, something sad about watching Pop submit to the pokes and prods. In childhood, he’d been awesome, invincible, the guy who could pick you up and spin you around and make your fears melt away. Superhuman, him and Mom both. It had been an eternity or two since Tessa had thought of Pop like that, but he was, after all, still her dad. And while her mother’s too-soon death had been a brutal confirmation of mortality, it had also been fairly quick. Watching someone succumb to an unexpected disease over the course of a few tendays wasn’t the same as standing witness to decades of decline. Pop wasn’t ill or anything. He’d be a pain in everyone’s ass for a good while yet. But she looked at him now, wrinkles and spots and hunched shoulders, here because of problems that kept coming around. She thought of her back, which was better, but still woke her up in the night sometimes. There were lines in her face that weren’t getting shallower. Grey highlights were taking over her black curls. She looked at Pop, entropy incarnate, and wondered if his present would be her future. She wondered which of her kids would sit in the extra chair in the exam room and lament the days when she’d been awesome.

Dr Koraltan studied the live feed from the imubots reporting within Pop’s eye, and he sat back with a neutral look. Tessa held her breath. Their doctor was an affable sort, and the only time he didn’t show his cards was when the news was going to suck. ‘I’m sorry to say it, M,’ he said. ‘But the growth around your cornea’s come back.’

Pop didn’t look overly surprised, but his mouth twisted. He said nothing.

‘This is the trouble with Kopko’s syndrome,’ the doctor said. ‘We can remove the errant tissue, we can have your bots clean out the remnants, but this is about your genes. You didn’t get the prenatals that your kids did, and performing gene therapy on someone your age is often too much of a system shock. It’s not worth the risk.’

‘We got new lights at home,’ Pop said. ‘The good ones.’

The doctor looked sympathetic. ‘Modern globulbs do decrease the risk of Kopko’s coming back. But it’s a decrease, not a guarantee. You – and I see this in so many patients your age – you spent decades rolling the dice with the old sun lamps down at the farms. Once that switch gets flicked, it’s so hard to turn off. We can try, but . . .’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry, M. Kopko’s is a bastard.’

‘So, he needs another surgery,’ Tessa said.

‘I’m afraid not,’ Dr Koraltan said. ‘And I’m sure you’re happy to hear that, M, but . . .’ He pressed his lips together.

Uh oh, Tessa thought. This really wasn’t good.

‘Every time we go in there to clean things out, we do damage. Tissue scars. Things wear out. Can’t be helped. We’ve gotten to the point where your eye can’t take much more.’

Tessa frowned. ‘What are our options, then?’

The doctor made an empty-handed gesture. ‘We either do nothing, and he loses sight in that eye, or we do another surgery, and there’s a good chance that he loses sight in that eye. Honestly, I don’t think the modest chance of benefit is worth the trouble of surgery.’ He nodded at Pop. ‘But that’s up to you.’

‘What about an optical implant?’ Tessa said.

The doctor looked at her with interest. ‘Is that on the table?’

Pop stared. ‘We can’t afford that.’

Tessa braced herself, knowing what she was about to say wouldn’t go over well. ‘Ashby sent me some creds, specifically so we could order you an implant.’

Pop glared as he realised he’d been ganged up on. ‘If he’s sent you creds, you should spend them on the kids.’

‘The kids aren’t our only family, Pop.’

‘M Santoso,’ Dr Koraltan said seriously. ‘I understand that this isn’t what you want to hear. I also can’t force you to receive treatment. But replacing your eye with an optical implant would solve the problem. No more surgeries after installation. If repairs need doing, we can undock the main attachment without any pain. I know the implants back in your day were unreliable, but modern biotech is incredibly comfortable and easy to maintain. Your vision would be good as ever. Better than ever.’

‘And I’d look like one of those modder freaks,’ Pop said. ‘No thanks.’

The doctor was careful with his words. ‘Getting used to the look of a new implant can take some adjustment, yes,’ he said. ‘Especially if it’s on your face. But you would adjust.’

Pop looked at the floor. He was quiet for a moment. ‘I don’t want to lose my eye.’

A sliver of sympathy pushed past Tessa’s frustration – not enough to erase it entirely, but she did care. She wouldn’t want to lose an eye, either.

Dr Koraltan’s voice was gentle, but direct. ‘M Santoso, if something doesn’t change, you’re going to lose your eye one way or the other. It’ll still be in your head, but it won’t work. I’m sorry. We did everything we could do with what we have here.’ He gestured at his scrib. Pop’s scrib dinged in response. ‘I’ve sent you some reference docs on implants. They’re good, M. If you have the means, I really do recommend it.’ He stood and gestured toward the door. ‘Go home, take some time to think about it. Let me know what you decide.’

Pop exited the room without a word.

Tessa sighed, and stood. Stars and fire, he was such a child. ‘Thank you,’ she said on her way through the door. He gave her an understanding nod.

Her father was old, but he was still fast, and already out into the courtyard by the time she got out of the clinic. ‘Hey,’ she called. She quickened her pace until she fell into step beside him. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m goin’ to Jojo’s,’ he said. His face was grim, but he strode forward purposefully. ‘It’s second day, and that means fish rolls. If I get there before eleventh, they’ll still be warm.’

‘Pop.’

‘Plus, Micah owes me trade. We bet lunch over flash last tenday, and he hasn’t made good yet.’

‘Pop.’ She took his arm.

Pop shrugged her off and kept walking. ‘You’ve got two kids at home,’ he said. ‘I’m not one of ’em.’

Tessa stopped, a swell of anger ballooning in her chest. She’d switched her shift for this. She’d upended her whole day for this, and . . . and . . . what a stupid, stubborn jackass. Fine. Fine, he could go to Jojo’s, and play his stupid games, and let his eye kill itself. It was his fucking life. She was only the one who had to live with him.

She turned away and stormed off toward the transport deck, where she could catch a pod to Bay Eight. Someone had to be an adult that day.

Isabel

‘So it’s true, then,’ Ghuh’loloan said with delighted disgust. ‘You expel organs during live birth.’

Isabel laughed as they made their way down the ramp to the viewing area. ‘We expel one organ, yes. But it’s a disposable one. We don’t have it the rest of the time, and we only need it during pregnancy.’

The Harmagian’s tentacles rippled. ‘You’ll forgive me, dear host, but to me, the idea is . . .’

‘Horrifying?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not alone in that. Explaining the business to kids always results in a raised eyebrow or two.’

‘A raised . . . ah, yes, yes. Is it not painful?’

‘. . . giving birth, not raising eyebrows, correct?’

Ghuh’loloan laughed. ‘Correct.’

‘It is. But not the . . . the discarding of an organ. That part’s not so bad, or so I hear. Everything else is, though.’ She spread her arms as they came to the end of the ramp. ‘Here we are,’ she said. They’d come to a broad platform, fitted with benches and picnic tables, guarded with a waist-high railing around the edge. Below the platform lay a fibre farm, overflowing with thickets of bamboo standing in orderly rows under a ceiling painted with blue sky. The tall plants had plenty of room to stretch up and up and up until finally bowing under their own leafy weight. Farmers made themselves busy in the walkways between, some harvesting, some testing the soil, some planting new seedlings. A caretaker was at work as well, pulling her heavy wagon behind her.

Isabel kept waiting for something that did not elate her colleague, but that moment had yet to arrive. ‘Oh, marvellous!’ Ghuh’loloan cried. ‘Stars, look at them! What curious trees!’

‘Grass, in fact,’ Isabel said.

‘No!’

‘Yes. That’s what makes it a much better crop for us. It reaches full height quickly.’

Ghuh’loloan’s dactyli undulated in a gesture Isabel had come to learn meant appreciation. ‘A grass forest,’ she said. ‘Ahh, I can smell the new oxygen. Wonderful.’

Isabel sat on a nearby bench and considered the Harmagian’s phrasing. ‘Does your species have a sense of smell?’ She could’ve sworn she’d heard they didn’t.

Ghuh’loloan parked alongside her, so they were both facing the farm. ‘Well caught, dear host,’ she said. ‘We do not, not in the same manner as you. You know that we do not breathe, yes?’

Isabel turned that statement over. She’d never thought about it before, but . . . but yes, other than their mouths, Harmagians didn’t have visible breathing holes. ‘Then . . . how . . .’ She searched for the right words. ‘You’re speaking.’

Had she not been in alien company for several tendays, what happened next might’ve sent Isabel running – and even so, she had to steel herself through it. To say that Ghuh’loloan opened her mouth wide was an understatement. There was no word Isabel knew that could properly describe what she saw. Not a gape, not a yawn, but an unfolding, an expanding, a hideous extension of empty space. Ghuh’loloan pointed one of her tentacles toward her gullet, and with a smothered shiver, Isabel understood. Ghuh’loloan wanted her to look inside her throat. And so Isabel did, with all the grace she could muster, leaning forward – not into her mouth, of course, there were limits – and spotting an unfamiliar structure at the back. A large, fleshy sack, unconnected to what was presumably Ghuh’loloan’s oesophagus (or equivalent thereof), every bit as yellow as her exterior.

Thankfully, Ghuh’loloan closed her mouth, and Isabel leaned back. ‘Now watch carefully,’ Ghuh’loloan said, pointing at her mouth again. She formed each word that came next with exaggerated precision, as a teacher might speak to a child. ‘Watch – what – is – happening – in – my – throat.’

Isabel could see it, though she wasn’t sure that she wanted to. The oesophagus did not move, but the sack did, expanding to give the words life, contracting to push them out. ‘So you don’t . . . you don’t use that to breathe.’

‘No,’ Ghuh’loloan said, speaking normally now. ‘It is my kurrakibat, a wholly self-contained organ. An airbag, in essence. It pulls in air and it makes sounds. That is all.’

Isabel tried to imagine how she was going to relay this part of her day to Tamsin when she got home, and came up empty. ‘Then how do you breathe?’

‘Through my skin. All over, front to back. And in the same manner, I can detect chemicals in the air around me, and this produces . . . it is difficult to explain. In Hanto, the word is kur’hon.’ She considered. ‘“Air-touch” is a rudimentary translation, but it does not envelop the full meaning.’

‘I understand.’

Ghuh’loloan curled her front tentacles. ‘It is a full-body sensation, and much like smell – or, that is, what I understand of smell – it can be pleasurable or distasteful. It is easier, then, for us to use words like smell or scent in Klip, as the end effect is the same.’

‘I see.’ A question arose in Isabel’s mind, a childish thing she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer to. ‘I have . . . I have heard that other species often . . .’ She sucked air through her teeth with an embarrassed smile. ‘I have heard that other species sometimes find the way Humans smell to be . . . unpleasant.’

Ghuh’loloan’s entire body gave way to a mighty laugh. ‘Oh, dear host, do not ask me this!’

Isabel laughed as well. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Do not be,’ Ghuh’loloan said, her skin rippling with mirth. ‘And please do not take offence.’

‘I won’t.’

‘If it is any consolation, I stopped noticing it within a few hours of arriving.’

Isabel groaned. Poor Ghuh’loloan. ‘You got used to us, eh?’

‘Well . . .’ Ghuh’loloan gave a quieter laugh. ‘Stars, this is a horrible thing for a guest to say. But in the interest of cultural exchange: the Human kur’hon in these ships is so overpowering that not only have I become numb to it, but I cannot “smell” much of anything else.’

‘Oh, dear.’ Isabel put her palm to her cheek. ‘On behalf of my species, I apologise.’ She paused. ‘But you could smell – you could—’ She wrapped her lips around the unfamiliar word. ‘Ker-hone.’

‘You are very close. Kur. Our word for both air and vapour. Kurrrrr’hon.’ The Harmagian gave the R a mighty, over-exaggerated trill.

Isabel couldn’t duplicate the sound, but she gave it a valiant attempt. ‘Ker’hon.’ That would have to do. ‘You could . . . you detected the oxygen here.’

‘Yes, it is very strong here, and it’s wonderful. I could stay here all day.’

Isabel had no argument there. The fibre farms were peaceful, and sitting on a bench and discussing differences of biology sounded like a marvellous way to spend an afternoon – provided Ghuh’loloan did not invite her to inspect her innards again. Isabel’s disquiet from the experience was still ebbing away, and she found herself with an impish desire to return the favour. ‘So you were asking about Human birth.’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘Do you know,’ Isabel said with a grin, ‘that during late pregnancy, sometimes you can see the baby’s features pressing through the mother’s skin?’

The Harmagian’s eyestalks gave a slight pull downwards. ‘. . . not the face.’

‘Sometimes the face.’

Ghuh’loloan made a sound of good-humoured revulsion. ‘My dear Isabel, I really do recommend that your species try spawning like normal people do. It is far, far less disturbing.’

Sawyer

The vox snapped on with a loud scratch, waking Sawyer with all the courteousness of being dropped into a pond. ‘One hour to go time,’ Oates announced. ‘Up and at ’em, folks.’

Sawyer processed the message, processed his surroundings, and processed the fact that he felt wholly like shit. ‘Ugh, stars,’ he moaned, rubbing his face with his palms. He was hungover, and how. Len had presented two bottles of Whitedune after dinner the night before, and every memory Sawyer had retained after that point was hazy at best. A bellyful of corrosive kick should’ve been enough to make him sleep through the night, but it turned out that Oates, who had the room next to his, snored with a vigour and volume that could pull even the drunkest punk into a queasy, half-awake limbo for cumulative hours.

And yet, in between the heavy pulses in his temples, he remembered other things. He remembered the table cracking up at his lousy imitation of a Martian accent. He remembered Len jamming on his lap drum and cheering loudly when Sawyer proved he could sing along to ‘Go Away Away’ – the Exodan pop song of the standard – in its entirety. He remembered Dory roaring with laughter and thumping him across the back after he choked on one shot too many and felt it exit his throat by way of his nose. He remembered Muriel saluting him with a raised glass.

They like me, he thought as he threw up in the washbasin. He spat, smiled, and half-laughed at himself. What a great look for his first day. He’d laugh in full about this, at some point, that first job on the Silver Lining when Len got everybody shitfaced the night before. Yeah, that was the kind of story you’d tell fondly a few days down the road.

He washed himself up and found his last clean shirt. It had been four days since they’d left dock and headed into the open. He could make out the Fleet in the distance, just barely – a bright cluster of lights that didn’t match the stars. But he couldn’t see the Oxomoco yet. He didn’t know much about navigation, granted, but he was kind of confused by the direction they were heading. He thought he’d heard that the wreck had been put into orbit in such a way that it and the Fleet were always on opposite sides of the sun, so nobody would have to look at it. If he could still see the Fleet, then . . . then maybe he’d got that wrong. He’d misunderstood. Wouldn’t be the first time.

He headed to the kitchen. No one else was there, but some saintly person had put out a big hot pot of mashed sweet beans, a bowl of fruit, and – best of all – an open box of SoberUps. He availed himself of everything, plus a giant mug of water.

‘Hey hey, grounder,’ Nyx said, entering the room. The pilot delivered the dig with a friendly grin, then spotted the items on the counter. ‘Oh, thank fuck,’ she said, reaching into the box of SoberUps. She had a packet open and its contents crunched between her teeth in seconds flat. Nyx grimaced. ‘I hate the taste of these.’

‘Me too,’ Sawyer said.

She flipped the packet over and squinted at the label. ‘Snapfruit flavoured, my ass. More like . . . snapfruit’s ghost. Like a really sad ghost.’

Sawyer navigated a chuckle around his mouthful of mash. The magic combo of carbs and medicine was already doing its trick, and his temples throbbed less forcefully now.

Nyx helped herself to breakfast. ‘You ready for the hop?’

Sawyer wasn’t sure what she meant. A tunnel hop? That couldn’t be right. He was pretty sure they weren’t anywhere near the Risheth tunnel, and they couldn’t have got there in four days anyway. Besides, they weren’t leaving the system for this job, so – hmm. Whatever. He chose ignorance over sounding stupid, and replied: ‘Yeah, totally.’

‘Good good,’ she said, fetching herself a spoon and heading for the door. ‘You can ride it out anywhere you like. Bed’s best for it, though, if you’re not flying. Doesn’t take long, but most folks like to lie down.’

‘Okay, cool,’ Sawyer said, having even less of an idea of what was going on now. ‘Is there . . .’ He had no idea what they were talking about, much less what to ask. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

‘Nah,’ Nyx said, grabbing a spoon. ‘Muriel or Oates’ll call you when it’s your time to shine. Go put your feet up.’ She winked. ‘Let the snapfruit ghosts do their job.’

Sawyer chuckled and nodded, feeling utterly lost as she left the room. Well, it was his first day. Feeling lost came with the territory, right?

He headed back to his room and lay down, as instructed. His body sank into the bed with gratitude. SoberUps were great and all, but he still felt like he was balancing his brain on stilts. A bit of rest, and he’d be good to go.

He passed the time quietly, skimming through feeds on his scrib and letting the helpful drugs smooth out his edges. He’d almost forgotten about all his questions until another one appeared: What’s that sound?

It was a sound he knew, but he couldn’t place it. A mechanical sound. An engine sound. Something that had been activated. Something . . . different. He started to sit up, but the vox stopped him. ‘Hop time, everybody,’ Oates said. ‘Sit down or lie back.’

Sawyer lowered himself back down. His heart quickened. His head puzzled. And then – oh fuck.

Space disappeared. Time disappeared. For how long or how far, nobody could say, because neither of those things meant anything anymore. Everything doubled, tripled, folded in on itself. Sawyer tried to look out the window, but his vision swam and his head begged to hold still, hold still, everything’s wrong.

Then, just as abruptly, everything was fine.

Sawyer sat bolt upright and held onto the edge of the mattress. Nausea – a whole fun new version of nausea – pushed at him in waves. He knew that feeling. Not well, but he knew it. He’d felt it once on a trip to Hagarem, when his sedatives hadn’t quite kicked in before the deepod got going. That’s what had happened. That’s what the sound had been.

They’d punched through the sublayer. The Silver Lining had a pinhole drive.

Sawyer knew, as any kid who’d taken a shuttle licence lesson did, that pinhole drives were dead-ass dangerous, that making tiny collapsing holes in the space between space was risky business, that doing so outside of designated transport lanes was illegal in the GC. He frowned. Well, it was illegal in Central space, anyway. Was it in the Fleet? He didn’t know.

There was nothing to worry about, he told himself. These folks were professionals. They had a clean ship, a registry number, kids and families back home. Besides, he didn’t know jack about scavenging. He didn’t know—

Something tugged at the edge of his vision. He looked up. He froze. Slowly, he got to his feet and approached the window. ‘Stars,’ he whispered. In the blackness hung what was left of the Oxomoco. A shell. A corpse. A ruin clasped in a sphere of flotsam. He’d seen pictures. He’d known where Muriel and her crew were taking him that day. None of that had prepared him for it. Nothing had made him ready for the tangible presence of this once-mighty homesteader, torn to shreds by something so seemingly simple as one moment of air meeting vacuum. Sawyer stood at the window, awed and shaken.

What was he doing here?

The sound of the vox switching on made him jump. ‘All right everybody,’ Oates said. ‘You know what to do. Sawyer, meet us at the airlock. Time to suit up.’

Sawyer didn’t waste a moment. He headed down the walkway, getting his head on straighter with every step. This was new, and he was just nervous. Time to shove that aside. He had a boss to impress. A crew to join, maybe. There’d be plenty of opportunity for questions later. For now, he had a job to do, and dammit, he was going to do it right.

Kip

Kip knew, theoretically, that things weren’t always going to be like this. He knew that he wasn’t going to be sixteen forever, that exams would be a memory one day, that if other people lived away from their parents, he could, too. He would.

But right then, it sure as shit felt like life was never, ever gonna change.

Bored wasn’t even the word for it anymore. There was something biting inside him, something shouting and endless sitting right at the bottom of his rib cage, pressing heavy with every breath. He wanted . . . he didn’t know what, even, but he was always reaching, always waiting, and not knowing how to fix it was making him crazy. He thought about the vids he watched, where everyone was cool and clever and knew how to dress. He thought about the sims he played, where jumping meant flying and punches exploded. He thought about the spacers he’d see in the shuttledock sometimes, coming home with armfuls of expensive shit for friends and fam, handing their belt guns over to patrol before crossing that invisible line between out there and in here. Squish all of that together, and that’s what he wanted. He wanted aliens to nod hello to him when he walked through spaceports. He wanted to look in the mirror in the morning and think something other than well, I guess that’s as good as it gets. He wanted. He wanted.

Yet he knew, as he made his way to his usual bench after trading for his usual lunch, that he was full of it. He was still seething at his parents after the whole patch thing – which, of course, had gotten around school, too, and was doing such fucking wonders for his social life – but deep down, there was some snivelling, traitorous part of him that . . . ugh . . . that had been glad, kind of. Glad that his parents had showed up at the Nova Room. Glad that he’d been given an out. And that was his whole problem, really, more than parents or job trials or the slow crawl between birthdays. The problem was that what he wanted, more than anything, was to fuck someone or fight something, and he knew – from experience, now – that if given the opportunity, he’d be too scared to do either.

Cool. Real cool.

A group of his schoolmates walked by, on their way to Grub Grub for hoppers of their own. He didn’t look at any of them, but he could hear whispers, giggles, a pack passing him by.

Stars, he sucked. Everything sucked.

He saw Ras approach out of the corner of his eye. He had a spring in his step, a look that said I’ve got an idea. Kip took a long sip of his choko and sighed. He was still kind of pissed at Ras, but at the same time, there was nobody else coming over to sit with him.

‘Tek tem, man.’ Ras took his place on the bench and reached for Kip’s drink. ‘You look like shit.’

Kip let the bottle go without a fight. ‘Yeah, well, I spent my night boxing up all the food compost in the whole fucking hex, so . . .’ He let a shrug serve as the end of the sentence.

Ras winced. ‘They are really on your ass about this, huh?’

‘Are yours not?’

Ras shook his head as he drank. ‘They keep giving me shit, but I’m not in trouble-trouble.’ He handed the bottle back over. ‘Tika lu, man. I feel kinda responsible.’

Kip looked at his friend and felt some irritation slip away. Ras cared, and that . . . that felt pretty good. ‘Nah,’ Kip said. ‘It’s cool. Semsem.’

The smile returned to Ras’ face. ‘To make sure that it is, I wanna make it up to you. You think they’ll let you come out soon?’

Kip considered. It had been a tenday since it had all gone down, and Mom was being more reasonable. ‘Maybe. I got a job trial—’

‘Where at?’

‘Tailor shop. Y’know, stitching socks, whatever.’

Ras rocked his head, trying to look positive but undoubtedly unimpressed. ‘Cool.’

Kip gave a short laugh. ‘It’s not.’ He took another sip.

‘Well, here,’ Ras said, handing over his satchel. ‘You’ll feel even better about this, then.’

Kip looked at the bag, then looked at Ras.

‘Open it, dumbass.’ Ras turned his head toward another group from school. ‘Hey, Mago!’ he called cheerfully. ‘Porsho sem!’ Nice ink.

‘Go fuck yourself,’ came the inevitable reply. Mago had gotten a cheap bot tattoo on vacation and it looked straight up dumb. Like, the lines didn’t even move at the same time.

Kip unclasped Ras’ satchel as the sparring continued. Just school stuff, it looked like. Scrib, stylus, some pixel pens, a bag of candy, a lunch tin, an info chip, a— wait. He rifled back to the bag of candy. He wasn’t sure that it was candy.

‘Dude,’ Kip said, starting to lift the bag out of the satchel. ‘Is this—’

Ras pushed Kip’s hand down into the satchel without looking. ‘Stay stylish, man,’ he called after Mago’s back. Ras snapped to Kip. ‘What the hell,’ he whispered, more amused than mad. ‘Don’t let people see.’

That clinched it. This was not candy. Kip dropped his voice to match Ras’, his heartbeat kicking up several notches. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘Toby’s sister, remember? I told you.’

Kip looked at the clear pack, full of non-threatening bundles, each wrapped in a colourful bit of throw-cloth. He’d never smoked smash before, but he knew what it looked like. He’d played sims. Smash wasn’t illegal or anything – not in the Fleet, anyway – but you could only get it and use it in special cafes with bouncers at the door and patrol always hanging around outside. It was also yet another one of those things locked away behind the When You Turn Twenty seal, and he didn’t know any adults who were into it. His mom definitely wasn’t. She said it was ‘a waste of time, trade, and self-respect.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Ras gave him a reassuring look. ‘It only lasts a few hours, and it’s not like we’ll be sitting around your kitchen. We’ll go park ourselves in a garden somewhere after lights out, and it’ll be a real good time. And besides, Una makes solid stuff.’

‘Have you tried it?’

‘Well . . . no, but everybody says. You should’ve heard her explaining it to me as she packed it up. It’s some serious science. Look, if you don’t want to, it’s cool—’

‘Nah,’ Kip said. He closed the satchel definitively. ‘Let’s do it.’

Ras blinked, then laughed. ‘All right, man!’ He clapped Kip on the shoulder. ‘I thought you were gonna take more convincing than that.’

Kip swallowed the last of his choko, heart still quick but head as steady as could be. He shrugged again, as if he did this every day. ‘Something to do, right?’

Tessa

Somewhere in her head, she knew that she’d left the cargo bay, that she’d found someone to cover for her, that she’d taken a transport pod, that she’d walked (and run, in spurts) through the crowded plaza and into the entry doors of the primary school. She’d felt nearly none of it. Nothing but a furious blur existed between getting a vox call at work and her bursting into the admin office, where Aya sat sobbing on the couch, untouched tea and cookies on the table in front of her, a pair of concerned adults on either side.

‘Tessa, I am so sorry,’ one of them said, standing to make way for her. M Ulven, Aya’s teacher. ‘I don’t know how they got away from the group, it happened so fast—’

In the same distant part of her head that held the memory of getting from there to here, Tessa knew that the teacher wasn’t to blame, that field trips were frantic and kids were unpredictable, that her daughter would be okay. But all of that was shadowed behind a raw animal fury, something that wanted to roar at everyone who’d let this happen.

She took her place beside Aya and pulled her close. Aya trembled, her face burning red and her nose pouring down her lip. There was a throw-cloth clutched in her hand, unused. Some part of her head was distant, too.

Tessa glared at the people who were supposed to keep her kid safe. ‘Give us a moment,’ she said from behind her teeth.

M Ulven started to say something, but the head teacher laid her hand on his arm. He nodded guiltily – good – and they exited the office. Aya clutched Tessa’s shirt as the door slid shut, sobbing all the harder.

‘It’s all right, honey,’ Tessa said, hugging, rocking. The girl in her arms was so big, and yet still so small. ‘Here, blow your nose.’ A sizable portion of Tessa’s shirt was already soaked with snot. No matter. Ky had done the same to another corner that morning. Her definition of clean hadn’t been the same since the moment a night-shift doctor had placed a blood-smeared newborn in her arms.

Tessa took the throw-cloth from Aya’s hand and pressed it to the kid’s face. ‘Blow.’

Aya did as told, and continued to sob. ‘I was so scared.’

‘I would’ve been, too.’ Tessa rubbed her daughter’s back with the palm of her hand for a few minutes, waiting for Aya to quiet a bit. The sobs slowed, hiccuping out weakly every few seconds. ‘M Ulven told me what happened, but I want to hear it from you. Tell me how it went.’

Aya sniffed. ‘Am I in trouble?’

‘No.’ Under different circumstances, she would have been, but that was a bridge too far right then.

Aya swallowed hard and began to speak. ‘Everybody age nine went on a field trip to water reclamation today.’

‘Mmm-hmm,’ Tessa said, handing her the wet cloth. That part she hadn’t needed a recap of, but okay.

‘And Jaime, he – he said – it wasn’t my idea, Mom—’

‘You guys snuck off on your own,’ Tessa said. A pack of four or five of them, was what she’d gotten over the vox.

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah,’ Tessa echoed. She was sure that her daughter had leapt at the chance to abandon a dull field trip for a de facto obstacle course. That was a talk for another day. ‘And then what?’

Aya’s lower lip quivered. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

‘Use the cloth, please.’

Aya gave her nose a perfunctory rub. ‘I don’t know why they – why they – I hate Opal. I hate her!’ Her words were ragged now. Angry.

Tessa raised her eyebrows. ‘Opal was involved in this?’ She didn’t even try to keep the edge out of her voice.

Aya nodded hard. ‘Palmer, too. I hate him also.’

Aya’s most frequent playmates – or they had been, before this. Their parents were going to get hell incarnate on their doorsteps before the day was out, but for the time being, Tessa put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders and squeezed. ‘Tell me what they did,’ she said.

‘Opal told everybody that I’m scared of – that I’m scared of outside. Etty told me that was stupid, and Palmer said I was a baby, and – and they kept being mean, and I told them to stop it but they didn’t, and then—’ The sobs started again.

Tessa put both her arms around Aya now, and let her cry. She knew what had come next. The little bastards had shoved her in a cargo drone port, closed the door, and made her think they were going to pop the hatch. They didn’t have the auth codes for it, but Aya didn’t know that. Her screaming was what brought one of the nearby mech techs running.

‘I hate them,’ Aya said again. ‘I’m not going to school anymore.’

That . . . okay, that wasn’t on the table, but Tessa didn’t think it was the time to argue. ‘They did a horrible thing to you, honey,’ she said. ‘I am so, so sorry.’

‘Why did they do that?’ It was a genuine question, brittle with betrayal.

‘I don’t know. Sometimes . . . sometimes kids think it’s funny to be mean to each other.’ Tessa reached back to the times she’d been teased, to the times she’d teased in response or for no reason at all. ‘I don’t know why.’

‘It wasn’t funny.’

‘No, it most definitely was not funny.’

‘And I hate living on a ship.’

Tessa blinked. This turn wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it surprised her nonetheless. ‘I know you’re scared of outside, but our home is so good. Yeah? It’s safe here. You’re safe with me, and your grandpa, and our hexmates, and our friends—’

‘I hate it.’

‘You know those kids couldn’t have opened the hatch, right? There are codes that—’

‘I don’t want to live on a ship anymore. I want to live on a planet.’

Tessa sighed. ‘Planets have dangerous things, too.’

Aya wiped her nose with her sleeve. She pulled close to her mother, away from the walls, away from the emptiness outside. ‘Not like here.’

Tessa searched for the right response, the right comfort, some of that motherly instinct bullshit you were supposed to just have. She found nothing.

Aya sniffled mightily and said: ‘Can I say a swear word?’

Tessa remembered a couple tendays prior, when she’d knocked a mug of mek onto her workbench while repairing a cleanerbot. A cascade of profanities had exited her mouth before she’d noticed the kids had entered the room. Don’t say stuff like that, Tessa had told them at the time. I only said it because I was mad. She’d spent several days after trying to make Ky stop gleefully chanting ‘son of a bitch’ – and had won that particular skirmish – but hadn’t realised Aya sponged up a lesson from the exchange, too. ‘Yes,’ Tessa said. ‘This is a time when a swear word is entirely appropriate.’

Aya took a breath. ‘I fucking hate them,’ she said. ‘I’m gonna kick all their asses.’

Tessa smothered the laugh pressing against her lips. She gave a serious nod. ‘That was two swear words.’

‘Well, I’m really mad.’

‘And you know fighting solves nothing, right?’

‘Ugh, Mom.’ Aya rolled her bloodshot eyes. ‘I didn’t mean like that. I just meant . . . I meant . . .’

‘I know.’ Tessa put her arm around her daughter and kissed the top of her head. ‘I want to kick all their asses, too.’

Eyas

Sunny had become a habit, and Eyas didn’t know what to make of that. It wasn’t romance, she knew that much. Romance had never been her thing. She watched him as he traced the path back from the bed to where his pants had ended up. He picked up the rumpled pair and dug around in a pocket. ‘Do you mind if I . . . ?’ he asked, holding a retrieved redreed pipe and an accompanying tin.

Eyas shook her head. ‘Not at all.’ He’d never done this before, and she found it endearing. This wasn’t part of a seductive script. There was nothing in this for her. The man wanted a smoke. On the clock though he was, something had shifted enough for him to feel comfortable not spending every second entertaining her. They were just . . . hanging out now. She liked that.

He returned to bed, leaving the pants where they’d been. ‘Do you want some?’

‘Not really my thing.’ She reached for his bottle of Laru kick, an ever-present part of these evenings. ‘This, however, is.’

Sunny nodded as he filled his pipe. ‘Help yourself.’

He puffed; she poured. They sat side by side, leaning against propped pillows, close enough to feel the warm brush of the other’s bare skin but nowhere in the realm of a cuddle. Eyas felt perfectly at ease. No pretence, no bullshit. No ‘M.’ She felt like herself, nothing more or less. Judging by the content neutrality on Sunny’s face, he felt the same.

It was really nice.

‘Is this what you always wanted to be?’ Eyas asked, cupping her glass in the palm of her hand. Sintalin benefited from a bit of warmth, she’d learned.

Sunny exhaled. The smoke twisted up toward the air filter above. ‘You mean, a host?’ His face shifted into a far-away smile. ‘Not my first choice. I was going to be a Monster Maker.’

‘A what now?’

‘A Monster Maker! Didn’t you play that sim?’

‘Oh, stars.’ Eyas shut her eyes and laughed. ‘I’d forgotten about that. Where you go around the galaxy scanning different animals to . . . collect their DNA, or something.’

‘Yeah! And then you smash them together to make hybrids!’

‘This was for some superficially educational purpose, right?’

‘Yeah, yeah, you did it to solve problems. Say, like – say you’ve got to cross a flooded area. You’ve got DNA scans for something with long legs, and scans for something that can move through water. You punch ’em both into your Monsteriser—’

‘Your—’

‘Your Monsteriser. Eyas, please, this is serious technology we’re discussing.’

‘Of course, I’m sorry.’ She swallowed her smile. ‘Please explain how a Monsteriser works.’

‘Well . . . I can’t, but that’s beside the point. The point is, it makes a monster. It is the most crucial tool a Monster Maker has.’ He bowed his head. ‘It was a very, very hard day when my dad broke the news that none of it was real.’

Eyas patted his shoulder. ‘My condolences.’

Sunny scrunched his face into a parody of grief. ‘Thank you.’

‘So once you got over the shock,’ she said, ‘you decided the only thing left for you was a life of getting people off.’

Smoke shot out of Sunny’s nose as he laughed. ‘There were a few more steps between that and this. I bounced around for a while. I thought about being a doctor, but I’m a lazy student. I spent some time in one of the festival troupes—’

‘You play music?’

‘No, I sing. It was fun, but . . . I dunno. Wasn’t what I wanted to do forever, y’know? Then one of my friends, she started her host training, and she was telling me about it – not just the physical side of it, but all the ethos and whatnot. I was like, hey, that sounds pretty cool. And it was, and here I am.’

Eyas sipped her drink. ‘You found something that incorporates everything else you tried. You perform, you make people feel better.’ She took another sip and smiled. ‘And maybe sometimes you help people with their monsters.’

Sunny’s pipe paused on the way to his mouth. ‘Huh,’ he said, seeming pleased. ‘Huh.’ He took a drag and angled himself toward Eyas. ‘So what about you? I mean, seems fair to ask, but I know you don’t like talking about work, so it’s cool if—’

‘No, I don’t mind,’ she said. I don’t mind talking about it with you, she meant. It was different with Sunny. Backwards. Usually, people had to get past what she did in order to get to know her. Sunny had come at it the other way around. Explaining her work wasn’t a chore with him. She wasn’t teaching; she was sharing. ‘I always wanted to be a caretaker. Seriously. I went to my aunt’s laying-in when I was six. She died very suddenly. Exosuit accident.’

‘Stars. I’m sorry.’

Eyas nodded in acknowledgement. ‘The caretaker who conducted the ceremony, he was so kind and so . . . impressive. I was upset and confused, and the adults around me were a mess, but he was this . . . this calm in the centre of it. I remember watching him, watching the ritual, absorbing everything he explained to me – me, directly – about the science of it. It was beautiful. Magic, almost. That was it for me. That was what I wanted to do.’ She took a pensive sip.

Sunny watched her even though she wasn’t looking at him. ‘And?’ he asked.

‘And, nothing. It’s what I always wanted to do.’

‘Is it exactly what you’d thought it would be?’

She glanced at him. ‘Perceptive,’ she said, surprised but unbothered.

‘Literally part of that training I mentioned.’

Eyas leaned her head back into the pillows, taking her time. ‘The caretaker I encountered that day, he was a . . . a symbol to me. This symbol of fearlessness, of . . . harmony. He took a terrifying thing I barely understood and he showed me it was okay. It was normal. And that feeling was reinforced by the way adults treated him. They didn’t pull away. They weren’t repulsed. They embraced him – in both senses of the word. He was life and death walking as one, and they wrapped their arms around him and gave him gifts, and by extension, showed me I did not have to be afraid of our reality.’ She paused again. She’d never talked about this with someone outside of her profession, and certainly not to this degree. ‘I am that, now. I am that symbol to others. It’s exactly what I wanted, what I worked for. But there’s this other side to it I didn’t expect. I’m a symbol, yes, but a symbol wearing my face and my name. Myself, but also not. Mostly not. People know, when I walk through my district, who I am, what I do. Doesn’t matter if I’ve got my wagon or am wearing my robes. They know. And so I always have to be Eyas the symbol, the good symbol, because I never know who’s looking at me, who needs to see that thing I saw in a caretaker when I was six. It doesn’t matter if I’m having a bad day, or if I’m tired, or if I’m feeling selfish. They look to me for comfort. I have to be that. And that is me, in a sense. That is a genuine part of me. But that’s just it – it’s a part. It’s not—’

‘It’s not the whole,’ Sunny said.

Eyas nodded. ‘And that aspect of my work, I wasn’t ready for. I never thought about who my aunt’s caretaker was when he went home.’

Sunny held the bowl of his pipe in his palm. The smoke ascended as if he were conjuring it. ‘Sounds lonely.’

Eyas weighed that word. Lonely. Was she? She pursed her lips. ‘Not exactly. It’s not like I work alone, or live alone. It’s more that I feel . . . I feel . . . incomplete. Or stuck, maybe. Like I can only ever be this one thing. Like this is the only side of myself I’ll be able to express. Like there’s something more I could be doing.’ She shrugged and sipped. ‘But then, I’ve never wanted to do anything else, so I have no idea what it is I want to change.’ She paused, her mouth twisting.

‘What?’

‘That’s not entirely true.’

‘What’s not?’

Oh stars, was she really going to tell him this? Why not, she thought. She was already naked as naked could be. Eyas looked away with an embarrassed smile. ‘There was a brief period in my teens when I went off on a Gaiist kick, but other than that—’

‘Wait, wait, wait.’ Sunny laughed. ‘You can’t fly past that. You. You went on a Gaiist kick.’

Eyas laughed right along with him. ‘I did. Drove my family crazy.’

Sunny was gleeful. ‘Were you going to go to Earth, or . . .’

‘No, it’s so much worse than that.’ She made an exaggerated grimace. ‘See, I got this info chip at a spaceport—’

He cracked up. ‘Oh, stars, you were going to be a missionary. Oh, fuck. That’s so much dumber than Monster Makers.’

Eyas flicked his thigh. ‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘I was fifteen.’

‘And that’s why it’s forgivable,’ he said. He took a deep breath. ‘Hoo. Congrats on growing out of it.’

She raised her glass in salute.

‘So what steered you away from that truly amazing life goal?’

‘I don’t know. Not one specific thing.’ She pursed her lips. ‘The problem with Gaiist philosophy is . . . well, my work.’

He spread out his hands, inviting her to continue.

Eyas considered. ‘You’re fine with me digging into what I do? It won’t ruin the mood?’

‘Yeah, it’s cool.’ He rearranged himself on the mattress, facing her fully now. ‘It’s interesting. Just . . . part of life, right?’

Eyas studied him. ‘Yeah.’ She smiled. ‘Okay. So. Gaiist philosophy. “Our souls are tied to our planet of origin.” That’s their central tenet, yeah? Our souls are tied to Earth, and they essentially get sick if we go elsewhere. Since there’s no hard-and-fast definition of soul anywhere, we’ll go with what I interpret that to be: the quality of being alive. The thing that separates us from rocks or machines. By my definition, every organic thing has a soul – it’s not just for sapients.’ She gestured around the room. ‘According to Gaiists, the Fleet should be a place chock-full of diseased, malnourished souls. This is as far from organic as it gets. We live inside machines. We’ve replicated the systems on Earth. There is no wind to move our air, there is no water cycle, there is no natural source for photosynthesis. This is a lab experiment. A biologist could make no real conclusions about our natural behaviour. They’d have to add the caveat “born in captivity” to everything they recorded.’

‘That’s . . . oof. Okay.’

‘See, I told you I was going to ruin the mood.’

‘You haven’t, but I would like some of that,’ he said, nodding at the bottle. ‘Seriously, I want to hear this.’

‘Okay.’ Eyas poured him a glass. ‘I promise things look up from here.’

He nodded. ‘I trust you.’

Eyas inwardly noted that, and kept going. ‘So, despite everything about our environment, there is a natural cycle that remains, and it’s one that we can’t escape, that we couldn’t leave behind. It’s completely beyond our technological grasp to alter or replicate.’

‘You mean death.’

‘I mean life and death. Can’t have one without the other. If my work has taught me anything, it’s that death is not an end. It’s a pattern. A catalyst for change. Death is recycling. Proteins and nutrients, ’round and ’round. And you can’t stop that. Take a living person off Earth, put them in a sealed metal canister out in a vacuum, take them so far away from their planet of origin that they might not understand what a forest or an ocean is when you tell them about one – and they are still linked to that cycle. When we decompose under the right conditions, we turn into soil – something awfully like it, anyway. You see? We’re not detached from Earth. We turn into earth. And it’s an entirely organic process. We can’t substitute anything artificial. I can’t make a corpse compost without adding batches of bamboo chips to get the carbon–nitrogen ratio right. If I don’t remove the corpse’s bots, they’ll disrupt the bacteria the entire process relies on. Likewise, I have to take out any implants or mods the person had installed, or they’ll contaminate the finished product.’

‘But isn’t the core artificial, too? I’m not being contrary, I’m just trying to understand.’

‘It is,’ Eyas said. ‘But think about it: it’s an artificial system set up to accommodate something that would happen without it. We would still die and rot if the core wasn’t there. We’d rot differently, yes, but you could say that about someone who died in a desert versus someone who died in a swamp. In both cases, rot is inevitable. So all we’ve done is provide conditions that encourage the kind of rot we want, and facilities that ensure we’re not tripping over corpses all day. Sorry for the visual.’

‘That’s okay.’

Eyas nodded. ‘Despite growing up in an environment that is utterly artificial, we default to the rawest, purest state at the end. So you can’t tell me that our souls are sick and broken when they’re inextricably linked to a force that powerful. Whatever soul we got from Earth – whatever that even means – we took it with us when we came out here. And that’s why I do what I do. Yes, I’d love to see a forest, a real forest. I’d love to stick my hands down into the humus and touch saplings growing out of stumps. I’d love to see a system of decomposition and growth that just happened without any need for Human tending. But the system we built here does need tending, and that means it needs caretakers who understand the magnitude of that.’

‘It needs you.’

Eyas paused, considering the line between hubris and honesty. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It needs me. And I do believe that. I do love what I do. So I don’t know what this . . . this discontent is. I don’t know why I’m conflicted about it lately.’

Sunny swished his drink around. ‘Can I ask you a weird question? And I’m not trying to be disrespectful or negative, honestly. I just want to pick your brain.’

‘Go ahead.’

Her companion shifted his jaw in thought. ‘Is it the most efficient thing? Composting, I mean. In terms of resources, is it still the best thing for us to be doing?’

Eyas had been preparing herself for a question about funeral preparation, or states of decay, or what bodily functions a corpse can still perform. Those questions, she was used to. This, she was not. ‘What alternatives are there? You want to just space them?’

‘Of course not. You could fly people into the sun, though, right? Like we did after the Oxomoco. Wouldn’t that be easier? Less work?’

Eyas continued to feel thrown. She remembered the announcement that the Oxomoco victims would be flown en masse into their sun, and the second grieving that decision had prompted – the disbelief, the backlash, the endless requests for personal exceptions, the crowded lines at counselling clinics and emigrant resource centres and neighbourhood bars, the exhaustion, the resignation, the popular justification that the bodies would fuel the sun, and the sun fuelled their ships, so a similar end would be achieved. And now here they were, just a few standards later, talking about that recourse as matter-of-fact as could be. ‘You’re forgetting resources,’ she said, speaking words she’d never thought an Exodan would need to be reminded of.

‘That was true for old folks,’ Sunny said. ‘That’s why we did composting while we were still drifting around the open. It’s different now.’

‘We . . . we still have to manage metal and fuel. They’re less rare than before contact, yes, but the . . . the need to be frugal hasn’t changed. You can’t fly bodies anywhere without metal and fuel.’

‘But does the math work out that way? Is it actually less of a drain on resources anymore to keep the Centres working than it would be to kit out a busted old skiff sometimes?’

Eyas stared at him. That wasn’t math she’d ever done, ever considered doing. She had a dozen polished responses to the question of why the tradition she oversaw existed. But Sunny wasn’t asking why, he was asking why now, and that . . . that she didn’t know how to answer. She emptied her glass down her throat and tried to think.

Sunny cringed apologetically. ‘So, what I was trying to do was push you into some kind of epiphany and help you untangle this thing . . . but it looks like I maybe messed you up further.’

She sputtered. ‘How was this supposed to help?’

‘You were supposed to say that the math doesn’t matter. Because you love it, and because it’s our way, and that’s reason enough. And then, see, you’d feel like your job was enough, and you wouldn’t feel conflicted anymore.’

‘You asked me a practical question!’ She hit him with a pillow. ‘Not an emotional question! Those two never have the same answers!’

‘Well, fuck, sorry!’ he laughed, fending off her attack, holding his pipe well out of harm’s way. ‘You called me perceptive, and I got cocky.’

Eyas shook her head with a smile. ‘That’s the last time I pay you a compliment.’

‘Probably for the best.’ Sunny gave a low whistle. ‘Stars, I am sooooo glad I picked an easy job. I am not used to getting this existential.’

She chuckled. ‘I wouldn’t call your job easy.’

He gestured to his reclining, naked frame. ‘I am in the middle of a shift, right now.’ He took a long drag of his pipe. ‘I am on the clock.’ He sipped the last of his drink and swallowed with an indulgent exhale. ‘Oh, what a difficult profession.’ He set the pipe and glass aside and rolled over onto her, far more goofball than alluring, and planted his face smack between her breasts. ‘Look at me, serving the greater good,’ he said, nuzzling appreciatively. He sat back as Eyas laughed. ‘I guess I kinda am, huh?’ he said, his voice more serious. He gestured at her. ‘You’re the literal greater good here.’

Eyas raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you get this sappy with all your clients?’

Sunny grinned broadly. ‘I wouldn’t have gotten very far in this job if I didn’t.’ His eyes softened – not worryingly so, but enough to make her stop teasing. ‘I meant it, though.’

Eyas held his eyes for a moment. She squeezed his hand, and poured them both another drink.

Sawyer

‘Boss, we got a problem.’

Everybody in the airlock paused their suiting up. ‘Do tell,’ Muriel said, continuing to wake the four empty autocarts that would be joining them.

Nyx cleared her throat over the vox. ‘We’ve got company. The Neptune.’

Muriel paused. ‘How long?’

‘Three hours, maybe four.’

Sawyer stood awkwardly, helmet in hands, not sure what that meant or why the mood in the airlock had changed. ‘Ah, shit,’ Oates said. He frowned at everyone present. ‘Who got drunk and told someone where we were going today, hmm?’ His eyes lingered on Sawyer.

Sawyer swallowed. He was pretty sure he hadn’t said anything to anybody other than that he had a salvage job. He hadn’t known he wasn’t supposed to talk about it, but who would he even have talked to?

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Muriel said. She fastened her suit latches in sequence, one, two, three. Methodical. Matter-of-fact. ‘Is what it is.’ She looked around at her crew. ‘This just became a rush job. Grab and carry first. Tear-downs if you can.’

Sawyer cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t— what’s going on?’

Muriel clicked her helmet into place, and the vox below the seam switched on. ‘We’ve got competition. Another salvage crew. Think of it like a race.’

A competition. Sawyer hadn’t planned on that. ‘Do you guys – do the salvage crews not keep a schedule?’

Dory laughed and shook her head, walking toward the hatch.

‘Salvage is a more . . . independent line of work,’ Oates said. ‘First come, first serve.’

The airlock remained tense, so Sawyer decided to save the rest of his questions for later. Still, his list was growing. If retrieving salvage was competitive, there must be some kind of special compensation given by the Fleet to salvage crews, but that didn’t mesh with . . . well, with how everything else worked. Maybe it was dangerous, or messy? You could say the same about asteroid mining, though, or zero-g mech work, or sanitation. Sanitation. Maybe he should have stuck with that, started there. He didn’t understand enough about anything else yet. Maybe . . . maybe the race Muriel mentioned was purely a matter of pride. A race to see who could bring the best stuff back home. Yeah, that made sense. He put on his helmet and got ready to follow.

That is, he thought he was ready. He’d been outside before, tethered and on a guided walk, but that was different; he wasn’t floating now. He could feel the sudden lightness of everything in and around him, but his cling boots held his feet firmly to the ruined shuttledock they walked out onto. He’d never worn cling boots before, and he found them . . . not uncomfortable, exactly, but more challenging than the others made them look. A little like walking through wet sand. It’d take practice, he assured himself. After all, this crew had probably been wearing them since they were kids. One step at a time.

Sawyer looked up from his feet and met the Oxomoco. He shuddered. He swallowed. Around them were the same features he’d seen in the Silver Lining’s dock four days prior – walkways, railings, directional signs – but this was a fever dream, a rent and twisted mirror image. The vacuum occupying the space around them glittered with dust and dreck. It would’ve been almost pretty, were it not for the violently wrenched metal everywhere else. Sawyer turned to look around, and even in the regulated warmth of his exosuit, the sight made him go cold.

There was no wall on the other side of the dock. Just a gaping hole into empty space, the edges surrounding it bent outward. He knew the decompression had been quick, but stars, he hoped it had felt that way, too.

‘All right, three hours,’ Muriel said. ‘We should split up. Oates, head to the hexes. Dory and Len, let’s go to cargo. It’s bound to be even more picked over than the last time we were here, but we gotta give it a shot. Sawyer, you’re with Oates. More code that’ll need tweaking where he’s headed. Nyx, you’ll keep us posted?’

‘You know it,’ Nyx’s voice said inside their helmets.

Muriel nodded at the group. ‘Let’s move.’

They split as directed, autocarts trailing after. Sawyer followed Oates, and tried his best to look nonchalant.

He failed at that, apparently. ‘Don’t worry,’ Oates said, pushing his big bag of tools along. ‘Fucks everybody up the first time.’

Sawyer felt embarrassed at that, but relieved, too. ‘I’ve seen pictures, but—’

‘Yeah, pictures don’t cut it. I always need a good, stiff drink to get me to sleep after we make a run here. Speaking of – you holding up okay?’

The slightest echo of a headache was all that remained of Len’s Whitedune. ‘Yeah,’ Sawyer said. ‘I’m good.’

Oates gave him a solid pat on the back, his thick glove landing dully against an even thicker oxygen canister. ‘See, you’ll be great. We got about an hour’s walk there, and if we’ve gotta be back in three, we need to keep a good pace if we’re gonna have any time to actually work. If you gotta piss, well – you’ve worn a suit before, right?’

Sawyer hadn’t ever used that particular exosuit feature, but he nodded.

Oates grinned. ‘It’s a fancy job, what can I say.’

The walk was tiring, thanks to the boots, but Oates made for good chatter. After an hour and change, as had been predicted, they arrived in a residential corridor. ‘Okay, a lot of these will be empty already,’ Oates said. ‘I’ll know a good one when I see it, though.’

Oates’ quarry was found a few minutes later, though Sawyer couldn’t see what had drawn him to this particular spot. The centre of the hex was empty. No toys or tools littered the floor. No dishes lined the table. No plants remained in the hollowed planters. Everything that wasn’t bolted down had been sucked away through a gash in the floor that split the hex in two. Sawyer could see the remaining edges of the sewage deck below and the stars beyond.

‘Hmm,’ Oates said, as if he were picking apart a pixel puzzle. He eyed the front doors. ‘That one. We’ll start there.’ He pointed to a door that was open about a hand’s width, on the other side of the gash.

Sawyer hesitated. ‘How do we . . .’

‘Ah,’ Oates said. ‘Here, I’ll show you.’ He reached down and hit the cling boot controls on his ankles. With a low buzz, Oates was unanchored. ‘Okay? And then—’ His suit thrusters activated, and he flew forward at a cautious speed, drifting over the tear in the floor, then reactivated his boots once he reached the other side. ‘See? Nothin’ to it.’

Sawyer repeated each step. Detach, thrusters, forward, anchor. There wasn’t anything to it, now that he’d done it, but he felt pleased anyway.

The autocarts flew themselves across the gap as well, and the small party stood at the cracked-open door. Oates reached into his tool bag and retrieved a power pack and a pair of cables. He popped open a service panel by the doorframe, connected the pack, and gestured at the door. Nothing happened. He ran his hand inside the open space between door and frame. ‘Nothing blocking it,’ he said. He rattled the door itself. ‘And it’s not off-track. It’s just locked itself in a weird spot.’ He nodded at Sawyer. ‘This is where you come in.’

On cue, Sawyer hooked up his scrib to the control panel and dove into the code. It was a different setup than the lockbox code, naturally, but the territory was more familiar now. He tweaked and teased, coaxing the commands to do what he wanted. Sure enough, five minutes in, the door slid open.

‘Hey, hey!’ Oates said. He rubbed his hands together as he entered the home. ‘We’re in business. Nice work.’

A smile briefly formed on Sawyer’s lips, then disappeared. Eerie as it was to see a hex without any stuff in it, a home still full to the brim with belongings was worse. Free of gravity, every piece of furniture and everything that had been on them was afloat, drifting in a bizarre jumble. Oates pushed things out of his path as he walked through, like a parody of a man wading through water. The objects tumbled into each other, set in motion by the intrusion.

A sock floated past Sawyer’s face. He saw a fork, a kettle. A frozen, dilapidated piece of fruit. A horrible thought struck him. ‘Are there any . . . um . . . there aren’t still . . .’

Oates looked at him. ‘What?’

Sawyer wet his lips. ‘Bodies.’

‘Oh, stars, no.’ He made a face. ‘Couldn’t pay me enough to come here if there were. No, after it happened, the Aeluons, they’ve got these . . . I dunno what they’re called. Some kind of bots that detect whatever organic form you tell ’em to look for. They use ’em to retrieve their dead after battles in zero-g. You know what I’m talking about?’

‘No.’

‘Well, anyway, the Aeluons gave us a bunch for clean-up. They can bore through walls and whatnot, so if you’re in a closed-off space like this and you don’t see a big hole in the wall, it means there was nobody in here, and nobody’s been in since.’

There was nobody in here. A small comfort, but Sawyer took it.

‘Okay,’ Oates said. ‘Cloth and metal, those are always good to grab. Anything that can be made into textiles or melted down.’ He grabbed a floating storage crate, put it beneath one boot, and began to pry the lid up. ‘Tech takes priority over everything. Broken is fine, intact is better, functional is best. We can’t grab everything, so use good judgment. Find things people can make use of.’

Sawyer looked around. Everything in there had had a use, once. Everything in there had been brought in for a purpose. He shook his head. Job. He had to do his job. Okay, he thought. He reached out and grabbed the floating kettle. ‘Like this?’

‘Yeah. Someone can smelt it, if nothing else. Remember, we’re on the clock. Grab and go.’

Sawyer grabbed. Utensils, tech bits, blankets. He brought handful after handful to one of the autocarts, steadily filling its enclosed compartments. The grimness of the place was starting to ebb into the background. Instead there was just the work, the task at hand. There were creds to be made, and crew to win over, and – he paused. He’d opened a decorative box – no, not a box. An old cookie tin someone had painted. The contents inside drifted up to greet him. Sawyer’s chest went tight. There wasn’t much in the box, nothing that Oates would want, nothing that was of any use. There were kitschy figurines, a pair of Aandrisk feathers, an info chip, a handful of yellow stones washed smooth by an alien sea. He took the info chip, which had a name printed on it. Myra, it read. He turned his attention to the wall of painted handprints, which he’d been steadfastly ignoring since the moment they walked in. Okoro, it read. The hands reached nearly to the ceiling. He wondered which of them was Myra’s. He wondered where she’d been during the accident, if she hadn’t been here. He wondered if she’d made it.

‘Hey,’ Sawyer said. ‘What about things like this?’ He gestured to the floating mementos.

Oates was busy carving hunks of stuffing out of the sofa with his knife. ‘Like what?’ He looked over. ‘Just junk. Leave it.’

‘It’s got a name on it. If she’s still around, she’d be in the directory, yeah? Doesn’t weigh much, and I bet she’d be happy to get her stuff back.’

Oates paused. He lowered his knife. ‘We’re here for salvage,’ he said. ‘Not lost and found.’

‘But—’

Oates’ voice changed. Sawyer couldn’t put his finger on what it was, but he didn’t like it. ‘On the clock, remember?’ Oates said. ‘You pick up every piece of junk you find, and we’ll be here forever.’

Sawyer frowned. An uneasiness filled him, the same feeling he’d gotten after the tunnel hop, the same he’d gotten in the airlock when competition arose. Competition. He looked at Oates, speedily tearing away hunks of fibre as if someone might take it away at any moment.

‘Oates,’ Sawyer said slowly. His tongue felt thick. He knew what he wanted to ask, and he knew how stupid it was. He knew he’d sound like an idiot, that it was probably nothing to worry about, that this might take him down a few points in the eyes of the man who’d picked him out of a crowd. But the needling grew stronger, and his stomach felt sour, and . . . and he had to. ‘Are we allowed to be here?’

Oates sighed, his helmet angling toward the floor. ‘Can we have this talk once we get back to the ship?’

‘Um—’ Sawyer shook his head, a bright panic growing in his chest. ‘No, I want to talk about this now. Are we allowed to be here?’

Oates gave him a look of pure exasperation, then returned his attention to the sofa. ‘You’re a grounder, so you’ll understand this analogy. Imagine you’re with a bunch of people wandering out in the desert. I mean a real desert, nothin’ anybody can use. There are jungles nearby, but you can’t go there. The jungle will eat you up. You’ll get lost in there. You’ll disappear. Now, sometimes, the people in the jungles will throw you a bag of food, but it ain’t much. Not like you’d get if you actually lived in there. But you’re desert people, and you’re not goin’ anywhere. One day, you stumble across a big, dead animal. Like a . . . I dunno, I was never good at animals. What’s a big one?’

‘I—’

‘A horse. That’s big, right? You stumble across a dead horse. Biggest horse you’ve ever seen, and it’s freshly dead. You could cut it up and eat it right now. It’s there for the taking. But the leaders of your group, they say, no, no, we need to talk about this. We can’t do this now. We need to talk about how to do this fairly. We have to make sure everybody’s getting the exact same amount of horse. We’re going to cut just a little bit of horse off, but oh, wait, no, now we need to reorganise all our satchels so we have room for the horse bits. And while we’re doing that, we should really talk about which of us could use some horse more. So everybody sits in the sand, doing fuck all but talk about the horse instead of actually using it. Meanwhile, everybody’s hungry, and they’re getting hungrier. Your family is getting hungrier, and that horse isn’t getting any better as the days go on. So some of your group, they decide to just cut up the damn horse already, because the people in charge are going to talk forever anyway, and you can feed a few mouths in the meantime.’ He shoved an armful of sofa stuffing into the nearly-full autocart. ‘What’s the harm in that?’

Sawyer stared at him. ‘That’s . . . this isn’t a horse. The Oxomoco isn’t rotting. And nobody’s starving. Nobody’s gonna die without . . . without . . .’ He gestured emptily at the cart.

Oates opened a closet and began working his way through the floating clothing. ‘I didn’t say it was a perfect analogy. But we’re getting people the things they need. We’re not hurting anybody. We’re helping. If the council’s gonna sit on its ass, somebody else is gonna step in.’

‘But you’re . . . you’re . . .’ Sawyer tried to work some moisture back into his mouth. ‘You’re stealing.’

Oates laughed. ‘You’ve filled half this cart yourself, kid.’

Sawyer’s head swam. He pulled his fingers into his gloved palms. ‘I – if I’d known—’

Oates’ expression grew serious. ‘You heard the boss. If you’re not happy, you walk away after this. After this. We are your ride home. We put food in your mouth and air in your lungs.’ He took a step forward, knife still in hand. ‘Right now, you owe us.’ He smiled as if nothing were wrong. ‘Now, we’ve eaten up a good chunk of time with this. To make up for it, I want you to take the other cart and check out the other homes while I finish up here.’ He clapped Sawyer’s shoulder. ‘Are we good?’

Sawyer would’ve given anything in that moment to be a stronger person. A smarter person. He wanted to tell Oates to fuck off, he wanted to run out of the room, he wanted to get back to the ship and into an escape pod and beat them back to the Fleet, where he could tell patrol what had happened, and they’d understand, they’d know he hadn’t known, they’d be reasonable and fair and . . . and . . . would they? Or would they scoff at him for being stupid? Would they lock him up? Would they kick him out?

The moral high ground didn’t look any safer. What would happen if Sawyer simply did nothing, if he refused to help any further with this? Would they leave him? Would they . . . He looked at Oates’ knife. Stars, they wouldn’t, would they?

Would they?

Sawyer couldn’t see any path of refusal that ended well. He didn’t have any clue what he’d do when they got back to the Fleet, but Oates was right. They were his ride home. He had four more days with these people. There wasn’t much else he could do.

He looked at the floor, and nodded.

‘Good,’ Oates said. He handed Sawyer his satchel of tools. ‘Go quick, and holler if you need a hand.’

Sawyer gestured for the cart to follow. He left the home. He walked to the next home over. There was nothing else he could do. Nowhere else he could go.

The front door was firmly sealed, and as unresponsive as the first had been. There was no big hole made by Aeluon bots. No one had opened this place up since the accident.

Sawyer stood motionless for a moment. He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to be there. Sanitation, he thought. That’s where he should be. Maybe he’d tell that to patrol when he got back. Maybe if he mentioned that he was in the sanitation lottery, they’d go easy on him, they’d see that he was serious about being there, that he hadn’t come all this way to cause trouble. Or would he go to patrol? Maybe it was better to do like Muriel had said – shake hands, walk away, no problem, never speak of it again.

‘Shit,’ he said. He leaned his forehead against the inside of his helmet and shut his eyes. He had to do this. He had to get back home. Back to the Fleet, anyway. He wasn’t sure he had a home. At the moment, he wasn’t sure he deserved one.

Sawyer reached into Oates’ satchel and found another power pack. He gestured. Nothing happened. He connected his scrib, like he had before. He went through the code, like he had before. This one was the same as the other had been, and he blazed through it in a blink. It was keyed differently, that was all. Keyed for someone else. Another family. Another wall full of hands.

Focus, he thought. C’mon, don’t fuck this up even more.

He punched in the last command.

Sawyer would never be sure of what came next. The sealed door slid open, and with it came force, and fear, and pressure, and Sawyer was in the air – no, that wasn’t right, there wasn’t air in space, there was – there was air, all the air that had been behind the door, and it was carrying him, and the contents of the home, all the things Oates wanted, all the things that family had needed, rushing, rushing, flying, thudding, falling. Then there was a bulkhead, and a split second of pain, pain everywhere, an inescapable shatter. But that was all. He didn’t have time to process what dying felt like.