Archive of Our Own ^beta

Zee was getting too big for the crawlspace. When she’d first discovered it, at four cycles old, it had been the perfect size to hide her, a few game blobs, and a snack. As her technical abilities had improved, she’d carefully knocked out one of the back panels, expanding the space enough to fit her three favorite DRDs alongside her. Zee had never been able to stand in the crawlspace, but in the past few monens, it had gotten so that she could hardly sit in it; anytime she spent more than half an arn there, her neck and shoulders ached for the rest of the day. Sometimes, being fourteen sucked.

Today, she was lying on her back, head pressed against one wall, toes touching the other, knees nearly scraping the low ceiling. This was uncomfortable in its own way—bolts and seams studded the floor and poked into her hips and spine—but on the whole preferable to the alternative. Her trio of DRDs were harmonizing her favorite Eidolon chant. Larry was on bass, Curly was soprano, and Moe was alto. It had taken Zee the better part of a monen to teach them, but it was worth it to have music while she thought.

The bioluminescent bulbs she’d installed along the floor and ceiling illuminated the sheets of alloy that arced above her. Zee was trying to decide whether they were load-bearing. She could always ask Pilot, of course, but it was usually best to do your research before you went to him asking for permission to rip up Moya. He could be picky about that kind of thing.

Plastic surgery, that was what Dad called it when Zee tore out panels to expand the crawlspace, or built a step-ladder along one of the walls to reach a high-up nook that was very good for storing spare flashlights. Zee hadn’t understood him the first time he said it—she hardly ever used plastic in her little home improvements—so Dad had pulled her onto his lap and told her an Earth story. Her favorite kind.

“Knock knock,” said Deke, tapping his knuckles on the edge of the crawlspace’s mouse-hole entrance. (Mouse-hole. That had come with another Earth story, and about a thousand microts’ worth of a really weird cartoon to illustrate it.)

Zee startled and jumped, banging her head against the ceiling. “Ouch!”

“Sorry, sorry,” said Deke. He crouched down and wiggled into the crawlspace, not bothering to ask for permission. Zee sat up, ducking her head and pulling in her knees to give him room. “This place is getting kinda tight.”

“I’d noticed,” said Zee. Annoyingly, Deke actually fit in here a lot better than Zee did. He was a cycle older than Zee, but he’d inherited their mother’s slim frame and had yet to hit a growth spurt. Zee was built more like Dad—tall and broad.

“Mom said dinner’s on the table anytime you wanna stop sulking.”

“I’m not sulking,” Zee said, although by now she’d calmed down enough that even she knew that she was.

“Whatever,” said Deke. “You don’t have to change or anything either, she said.”

Zee crossed her arms over her chest, blocking off the dench or so of blossoming cleavage revealed by her shirt. It was a new shirt, one she’d picked up with Chiana in the Hynerian capitol, and Mother had been fine with it when Zee had shown it to her in their quarters at Rygel’s palace. But now they were back on Moya, and Zee had shown up to dinner a couple arns ago wearing it for the first time. Dad had dropped a bowl, and Mother had insisted that she go change. Zee had… well, fine, she’d reacted badly, and before she knew it, she and Mother were screaming at each other and she was running off for the crawlspace. “Why the change of heart?”

Deke shrugged. “Dad talked her out of it, I think.”

“You think?”

When Deke said he thought something, he usually meant he’d lurked in a corner until the grown-ups forgot he was there, and then he’d overheard something he wasn’t supposed to. Zee was bad at being forgotten, so she usually just came right out and asked whatever she wanted to know. This was generally a reasonably successful tactic, because Dad loved telling stories and showing off. Every once in a while, though, he clammed up, or tried to change the subject, and that was when Deke came in really handy. His silent spying had netted them a tiny treasure trove of information, about Scorpius—whose name and description they’d been warned away from, but whose importance their parents refused to explain—about Mother’s past in the Peacekeepers—they’d been told that she used to be one, and very little else—and, most fascinatingly, about wormholes.

Wormholes had been a shared obsession of Deke and Zee’s since the day, some seven cycles ago, when Dad had warned Pilot that one was approaching, and Moya might want to turn in about half an arn. Zee had tugged on his shirt and told him it was more like an arn and a half.

“You can sense them?” Dad has asked, in a voice that Zee had understood, even at that age, to be afraid.

“Yeah,” she’d said. “Me and Deke.” They’d been feeling wormholes for years—sometimes just a vague tickle at the edge of the mind, sometimes a strange tug when they were near. Sheltered as they were on Moya, it hadn’t occurred to them that it might be unusual.

Dad had set them straight on that immediately. “You can never tell anyone,” he had said, staring them each in the eye and speaking with the kind of gravity he usually reserved for warnings not to touch the airlock controls. “Never, under any circumstances, talk about this to anyone who isn’t on this ship right now.”

That had left Deke and Zee free to talk about wormholes with Dad, Mother, Pilot, and Chiana. But in practice, they spoke about them only with each other. The grown-ups all took on a sort of pained look when Deke and Zee brought the subject up—even Chiana, who would usually freely talk about all of the things that everyone else avoided mentioning, things like their parents’ past lovers, and the not-so-nice stories about Deke and Zee’s namesakes. All of the secrecy had turned wormholes into the kind of delicious taboo that sex was for other children.

(Once a cycle, the whole family spent a monen or two on Arnessk for what Dad called summer vacation—a chance, he said, for Deke and Zee to hang out with kids their own age. Zee had been shocked speechless, at five cycles old, to discover that her new friends at the Eidolon school didn’t know where babies came from.)

From odd comments and eavesdropping, Deke and Zee had cobbled together a meager assortment of facts, which they discussed endlessly over the long arns in transit. Their sense for wormholes was inherited from Dad, of course, but as far as they could tell, he hadn’t been born with it. Just how he had obtained it was a mystery, and a subject of much debate between Deke and Zee; Deke was of the opinion that the simplest and best answer was that Dad had simply studied wormholes for a very long time, while Zee argued that studying couldn’t be inherited, and neither of them had ever read up on wormholes. They knew that there was some link between wormholes and Scorpius, the towering boogeyman of their childhoods, whom they had been warned to run from at all costs, should they come across him. And they knew, from a conversation that Deke had overheard very late one night, when he was very sick and their parents had assumed he was asleep, that Dad had once had even more wormhole knowledge, that some of it had been lost somehow, and that he was glad of it.

So yeah, Deke’s penchant for hanging around in shadowy corners came in handy, now and then. Tonight, however, it appeared to have yielded only partial results.

“Yeah, I think,” Deke said, shrugging again. “I’d left, and I was coming back to get my jacket, and Dad was saying something like, ‘I know what you’re doing, and it needs to stop,’ and then Mom said—” Deke switched seamlessly from English to Sebacean. “—‘I was just worried, that’s all,’ and then Dad said—” Back to English. “—‘Worried sounds a whole lot like angry,’ and then Mom spotted me and gave me the message to give to you.”

“This is so stupid,” Zee said, slapping her palm against the crawlspace’s outer wall. “Mother wears shirts like this all the time. It’s not like it shows anything, really.”

“Maybe she’s just in a bad mood,” Deke said. “I mean, you were being kind of demanding before the whole thing started.”

“I was not!”

“Sure you were,” Deke said. He spread his arms in an unfortunately accurate imitation of Zee’s posture and affected an imperious voice. “‘Where is my dinner?’ You sounded like Rygel.”

Zee kicked him in the shin—not very hard, since she only had about two denches to build up momentum. “I didn’t say that! I was just asking, you know, if we could get the dinner show on the road.”

“Whatever you say, Your Eminence.”

Against her will, Zee laughed. “Move your eema. I’m gonna go get my dinner.”

Deke stuck out his tongue at her, so Zee started crawling over him to get to the exit. That got him moving. “Pipe down, Stooges!” Zee called after her as she unbent herself into Moya’s broad corridor. Behind her, the DRDs halted in their song.

Deke split off on Tier 7 to do some combat practice in the gym, because Deke was a weirdo who enjoyed that kind of dren. Zee continued alone until she reached the galley, where she found her father, sitting alone, in the dark, staring at her uneaten dinner.

“Food’s cold,” he said as she sat down.

“I like Hynerian food better cold,” Zee said, proving the truth of her words by digging in enthusiastically.

“I don’t understand how anyone can eat kroldar at any temperature,” Dad said.

“That’s because you have a very unsophisticated palate,” Zee said, beaming up at him. Dad laughed gently and reached out to ruffle her hair—which, being pulled back in a firm ponytail, didn’t so much ruffle as wiggle.

“Where’s Mother?” Zee asked after another bite.

“In the gym,” Dad said.

“Deke just went there. They’re probably working on their Vulcan nerve pinch by now.”

Dad grinned huge, the way he always did when Zee made Earth references. “Whatever it takes for us all to live long and prosper.”

Zee flashed him the Vulcan salute. Still chuckling, Dad watched her eat a few more bites.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve never asked you. Why does Deke call your mom ‘Mom,’ and you call her ‘Mother’?”

Zee grimaced around her kroldar. “I don’t call her Mother,” she said, enunciating the English word clearly. “I call her Erezum. There’s no short version of the word in Sebacean, so your translator microbes turn it into ‘mother.’”

Dad frowned. “Say it again.”

“Erezum,” Zee said, savoring the warbling, breathy syllables. Her father scrunched his eyebrows, focusing to hear the word underneath the translation.

“So why do you call her, uh, Urzum?” Dad said, butchering the word the way he did all Sebacean. Injected late in life, he’d never totally gotten the hang of listening past the translator microbes, the way Deke and Zee could.

Zee shrugged. “I think I just liked the sound of it, at first. And then we were talking about it one day, and she said, since there’s no short version in Sebacean, ‘mom’ doesn’t translate. It just stays ‘mom.’ And she said that even though she understands what it means, and she loves it that Deke calls her that, she said that it’s just a word, you know? It has a meaning, but she doesn’t feel it. Erezum, she feels.”

They sat for a moment, while Dad chewed on her words, and Zee chewed on her kroldar. When she’d built up a little courage, Zee spoke again. “Why doesn’t she like me?”

“Your mom loves you. And she likes you,” Dad said, correctly anticipating Zee’s objection. “But sometimes, loving someone and liking them doesn’t mean getting along. Especially in families. Some of the fights I used to have with your grandpa make tonight’s little skirmish look like holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya.’”

“I don’t want to fight.”

“Neither does your mom.” Zee raised her eyebrows at him in silent skepticism. He laughed. “I think it’s hard for her, now that you’re getting older. Your brother still looks little, so that makes it easier, but you… you’re growing up, and none of us can ignore it. That’s not easy for any parent.”

“You seem to handle it without going fahrbot.”

Dad laughed again at that, but it was a different laugh, the kind grown-ups used when you’d said something funny without realizing it. “Someday, Zee, you’re gonna figure out that I’m way more fahrbot than your mom.”

#

A few days later, Moya reached the orbit of the commerce planet they were headed toward. Deke and Zee greeted this event with fanfare befitting one of Rygel’s royal proclamations. Going planetside was always exciting after a few weekens in space, but this particular planet was special: It was the first wild planet that Deke and Zee had ever been allowed to set foot on.

Zee’s parents made their living as couriers, carriers, and all-around errand-runners for the Eidolons. They purchased supplies, retrieved information, and occasionally ferried guests from all around the galaxy, and brought them back to the Eidolons’ new home on Arnessk. This work brought them to planets large and small, to moons, asteroids, and space stations, and back again. Most of the planets they visited resided in settled space—either the Luxans’ territories, the Hynerians’, or the Peacekeepers’. Deke and Zee had been accompanying their parents down to those sedate planets for cycles. Occasionally, though, an errand took the family deep into the Uncharted Territories, to a planet where “law” was a fairy tale, and “order” was the happy ending. In the past, Deke and Zee had always been left aboard Moya on such trips. Recently, however, after much pleading and debate, their parents had decided that Deke and Zee had proved themselves mature, wary, and capable enough to tag along. Deke and Zee were, naturally, elated. Zee spent the last arn of their approach in her quarters, primping in preparation. Well, actually, she spent the last arn and a little more.

“Zee, hurry up, the auction starts in two arns!” Mother stopped outside Zee’s quarters, staring in consternation at Zee, who had half her hair tangled on top of her head, and half of it tangled in a brush. “What are you doing?”

“It’s an Interion Twist,” Zee said, beckoning Mother in with her free hand. “Or it’s supposed to be. Chiana showed it to me, but I can’t get it to look the way she did.”

“This place is as backwater as commerce planets come,” Mother said. “They barely have clothing, let alone fashion. No one will know or care if your hair is in an Interion Twist.”

“I only want to look nice,” Zee said, sticking out her lower lip just a fraction of a dench, in a manner that often inspired Mother’s sympathies.

Sure enough, Mother sighed and moved in behind her, taking Zee’s hair into her hands. “Tell me what to do,” she said.

Over the course of her childhood, Zee had developed an entirely unexpected interest in clothing and fashion. Neither her mother nor her father had encouraged this in her, and neither of them seemed quite sure how to handle a child who wasn’t willing to wear the same outfit for weekens at a time. They gladly turned Zee’s stylistic education over to Chiana, who led her on gleeful shopping sprees through the Hynerian capitol, picking out fashionable jewelry and instructing her in hair and makeup techniques. But Chiana rarely accompanied them aboard Moya these days, so Mother and Dad had learned, over the cycles, to carefully follow Zee’s instructions on braiding hair, applying eyeshadow, and lacing up complicated dresses. The finished product never looked quite as good as when Chiana did it, but it always held up.

Mother put the finishing touches on Zee’s hair and spun her around, letting her see the back of her head in the angled mirror Zee had set up for this very purpose. Zee, seeing an adequate if not stellar Interion Twist, gave a nod of approval, and Mother’s face lit up in a smile. She kissed Zee on the forehead.

“You look lovely,” Mother said. “Now let’s go.”

In the transport pod, Mother handed Deke and Zee each a holster with a pulse pistol.

“You know the rules,” she said, her voice taking on a militaristic tone. “These are to be used as a last resort only. Do not go looking for a fight. Do not stick around a fight if you happen to find one. Do not wander off on your own. Do not question orders from me and your Dad. If you get lost, stay where you are and call us on comms. If anything happens to us, run to the transport pod and take it back up to Moya immediately. Do you understand?”

Deke and Zee nodded, intimidated.

“Say it out loud.”

“I understand,” Zee said, with Deke a beat behind her.

Dad put a hand on Mother’s shoulder. “They’ll do fine, Aeryn,” he said. “We raised them smart. I’m sure they won’t disappoint us.”

After that, of course, Zee would’ve died rather than break one of the rules—though come to think of it, “Don’t die” was surely the most important rule of all.

The transport pod touched down. “All right, kids,” Mother said, palming the doors open. “Welcome to Farolax.”

For the first half an arn, Farolax was great. It was the perfect kind of dirty and dangerous, reminding Zee of some of her parents’ more exciting stories from the years before she was born. Children ran unminded through the shambling streets; glowing signs beckoned from atop shady establishments; unsavory characters peddled suspicious merchandise from shadowy alleys. An old woman on the side of the street grabbed her wrist and tried to push a cheap bracelet onto it, and Zee yanked her hand away, her heart beating wildly and wonderfully as Mother shepherded her briskly onward.

The auction house was interesting for a little while—the bidders included several races Zee had never seen before, which was impressive—but after two thousand microts of watching her parents vie for crusty old religious artifacts, she started getting antsy. The Eidolons were very invested in a 20,000-cycle-old bell and a painting of mysterious origin, but Zee didn’t see the appeal. Zee loved Eidolon food, Eidolon music, and Eidolon people, but she had little use for Eidolon religion.

Just when Zee was about to tear her hair out with boredom, Mother slung an arm over her shoulder. “Let’s you, me, and Deke get out of here,” she whispered in Zee’s ear. “Your dad can finish up.”

Mother set off for the door, glancing behind her to make sure Deke and Zee were following. Relieved, Zee grabbed Deke’s hand and pulled him along behind her.

“Let’s see,” Mother said, as they ambled away from the auction house. “There’s a weaponry shop over there.” Deke’s eyes lit up with excitement, while Zee made a face. “Or a tech depot on the corner, there.” Zee nodded fervently, while Deke groaned. Mother laughed. “Okay, then. Food it is!”

They wound up in a little general store off the main drag, full of fossilized food cubes and tubs of some kind of small, spidery creature that was apparently a local delicacy. At the proprietor’s insistence, Deke and Zee each took a free sample of the latter. Deke discretely spat his out, but Zee didn’t think they were bad. Kind of salty and crunchy, with a strange, metallic aftertaste.

While Mother haggled with the proprietor over some dried prillan berries—always in demand on Moya, since they stewed down into a flavorful sauce that was one of the rare foods the whole family liked—Deke and Zee wandered the aisles, poking at dusty trinkets and cheap knock-off game blobs. Zee was bent over, peering at a copy of something called Xorax Quest!, when she heard a deep, female voice behind her.

“Velna?”

Zee jumped and spun around; she hadn’t thought there was anyone in the store besides Mother, up at the counter, and Deke, just down the aisle. It appeared, though, that there was someone else: a plump, pale-skinned woman, mostly Sebacean in appearance, her hair space-black with a dramatic streak of white like a shooting star swept through her bangs. She was a few denches taller than Zee, and wore a dress that slung low across her breasts, a style that had been popular in the Peacekeeper territories about five cycles ago. Something about the woman tugged at the edge of Zee’s mind, as though she’d seen a holo of her once, long ago, and then forgotten all about it until this moment.

The woman grabbed Zee by the shoulders and pulled her close, peering into her eyes. “Velna. It is you. I’d recognize those eyes anywhere.” She spoke Sebacean, in an accent Zee had only ever heard from station-born Peacekeepers.

Zee pulled away, uncomfortable. “My name’s not Velna.”

The woman laughed without humor. “Of course, they renamed you. What is it now, Xhalax?” She smirked and shook her head. “No, no. I’ll bet they named you Zhaan.”

“How did you…” Zee said. She stumbled backward in surprise, only to run into Mother. She and Deke had both run down the aisle to see what the commotion was.

“Get behind me, Zee,” Mother snapped. Zee complied immediately; Mother’s eyes were hard and dangerous, and her hand hovered above her pulse pistol. “Un-frelling-believable.”

“Officer Sun,” said the woman coldly.

Mother ignored her. “John,” she said into her comm, “We need you here now.”

But Dad was already bursting into the store; he must have been on his way from the auction house. He barreled into the aisle and skidded to a stop beside Mother, his pulse pistol already pointed at the woman. Deke and Zee both gasped. They had never, in all their lives, seen Dad pull a weapon. He always had a pistol on him, and Zee knew he used it occasionally, on some of the wilder commerce planets, but she’d certainly never been with him when he did.

“Get out,” Dad said, his voice tight, like he had to clench his teeth to keep from shouting. “Walk out that door right now, crawl back into whatever hole you came from, and don’t leave until we’re off this planet.”

The woman raised her hands, palms out. “I’m unarmed,” she said. “You can’t keep me from seeing my…”

“Watch me.”

“My daughter,” the woman finished, a smile sliding across her face.

“Aeryn,” Dad said, not taking his eyes off the woman, “take the kids back to the transport pod.”

Mother’s gaze darted from Dad’s pistol to the woman it was trained on, sizing the situation up for… for something. Zee had no idea what was going on. Nothing made sense. Apparently it did to Mother, though, because she took Deke and Zee’s wrists, one in each hand, and pulled them out into the street. Zee craned her neck for one last look at Dad, his pistol still steady, aimed between the strange woman’s eyes.

“What’s going on?” Zee asked as they hurried down the street.

“Not now,” said Mother. “We’ll talk in the transport pod.”

They made it back to the pod in a quarter of the time it had taken them to get to the auction house, moving at just short of a run, only stopping so that Mother could peer around corners before they turned. Zee had never seen her this tense; she had a feeling that the only reason Mother’s pistol was holstered was that pulling it out might cause a commotion.

There was an auction house guard outside the transport pod when they arrived, watching over several crates full of religious artifacts that Dad had purchased.

“You can go now,” Mother said. The guard looked like he might argue, but Mother’s hand was still perilously close to her pulse pistol, and he quickly decided to do as she said. “Zee,” Mother said, “get inside and stay inside. Deke, move the crates inside and then stay there too.”

“I can help,” Zee said, but Mother cut her off.

“Inside, now.”

Confused and a little hurt, Zee slunk inside the pod. She huddled herself into a ball on the floor in the back corner and watched Deke lug crates while Mother stood half a motra outside the entrance, her eyes on the horizon and her posture military-straight. Zee tried to calm her thoughts and control her breathing, the way the Eidolon priests had tried to teach her, but she was no good at meditation even on the tranquil cliffs of Arnessk—under the present circumstances, there was no hope at all. Mother was scared, and Dad was angry; it was like gravity had reversed itself.

When Deke had dragged the last crate in, he collapsed next to Zee on the floor. “Are you okay?” he asked, eyeing the way Zee had her knees hugged to her chest.

Zee opened her mouth to say… what? No? I don’t know? I’m afraid nothing will be okay again? But she was saved the trouble of answering when Dad arrived, grabbing Mother at a run and pulling her with him into the transport pod. Mother slammed the doors closed behind them and pushed the lever for take-off.

Dad stood for a moment in the center of the pod, breathing heavily. He looked like a coiled spring, barely restrained. A microt later, he sprung, slamming the heel of his hand into the wall so hard that the whole pod shook. Deke and Zee jumped in shock.

“John!” Mother said, warningly.

“The first freaking time,” Dad said. “The first time we set foot on an uncharted planet. I thought we were done with this kinda luck.”

“What did you do with her?” Mother asked.

“Asked her a couple questions, got the usual nonsense. Second verse, same as the first, yada yada. So I paid the merchant to hold her in the shop until we got out of orbit.” Dad sighed heavily and slumped to the floor. Mother sat next to him, her palm on his arm.

“Excuse me,” Zee said, regaining her nerve, “but what the frell is going on?”

Mother and Dad looked at her like they’d forgotten she was there.

“Zee,” said Dad in a cracked voice. “It’s not… don’t worry about it, okay? It’s got nothing to do with you.”

“Yes it does!” Zee said. “That woman was talking to me. She knew my name. Or… or guessed it.”

“Guessed, probably,” said Dad. He glanced at Mother. “Unless she’s been talking to Peacekeepers again.”

“Let’s hope not,” said Mother.

Zee could see them slipping into their own world again, the world where they talked about secret history behind closed doors. Not this time; this time, Zee would make them give her answers. “She called me her daughter!”

Dad wouldn’t look at her. He stared at the wall above Zee’s head, until Mother touched him gently on the shoulder.

“John,” she said. “It’s time.”

Dad closed his eyes and shook his head. “No.”

“The jug is up, John. She’s not going to stop asking.”

“The jig. The jig is up.” Dad exhaled for a long moment, then opened his eyes. “The jig is up. Zee, that woman is…” He cleared his throat and started again. “The woman’s name is Mele-On Grayza. And she is, technically speaking, your mother.”

Somehow, despite the fact that the woman—Mele-On Grayza—had called Zee her daughter, Zee hadn’t been expecting this. She’d been sure that there was some kind of reasonable explanation, like maybe Grayza was a compulsive liar, or maybe Zee had a mystical doppelganger. Something.

“I don’t understand,” Zee said, looking at Mother. “You’re my mother.”

“Yes,” Mother said fiercely. “I am.”

“Grayza is your biological mother,” Dad said.

Zee tried to wrap her head around this. “Did you… did you adopt me?” She’d met families like that, before—there was the Nebari boy on Hyneria whose Luxan parents had found him on an abandoned ship, and the Interion girl on Arnessk who’d been taken in by traveling scholars. But even as she said it, Zee knew it couldn’t be right. She looked so much like Dad. And there was the wormhole knowledge.

Sure enough, Dad was shaking his head. “No, I’m your biological father.” There seemed to be more—there had to be more, because none of this made any sense—but Dad was having trouble saying it.

“I don’t understand,” Zee repeated. If Grayza was her biological mother, how had that happened? Why had that happened? And why hadn’t they told her? Zee glanced at Deke, looking for support, and at the sight of his wide, shocked eyes, something clicked. “Wait. I’m younger than Deke. And you were already married before you had him, right? That’s what you always told us?”

It was a funny story when Dad told it, though there had always been something missing. There was some kind of fight going on that kept preventing the wedding, but Dad had never been clear who the fight was with, or what it was about.

“That’s right,” Mother said.

“Is that it, then?” Zee asked. “You had sex with this Grayza woman after you married Mother, and she had me? Is that why you never told me?”

“No!” Mother said, her knuckles tightening like a clamp on Dad’s shoulder. “That’s not what happened.”

“You’re not…” Dad laughed, not like he’d just heard a joke, but the way he laughed when Moya’s amnexus conduits sprung a leak just as they stumbled into an asteroid belt, and they discovered that the sealant they’d bought on the last commerce planet was faulty—a laugh in the face of a situation so overwhelming, it didn’t seem real. “You’re not younger than Deke.”

“Yes, I am,” Zee said, because this, somehow, was more ridiculous than the idea that Mother wasn’t really her mother.

“You’re not. We’re not exactly sure of your birthday, but we’re pretty sure you were born within a few days of each other. We couldn’t pass you guys off as twins—a lot of people already knew Aeryn was only having one kid—so we kept you on Moya for the first cycle, until we could say you were younger than you were.”

Zee gaped at him. “Why?”

Dad ground the heels of his hands into his eyes, and left them pressed there until Mother gently shook him out of it. “I can tell her, if you like,” she said.

“Nah. It should be me.” Dad pulled away from Mother, scooching forward until he and Zee were eye to eye and knee to knee. He took Zee’s hand and gripped it in both of his, firm but incredibly gentle. “Nothing I’m about to say changes how your mom and I feel about you. You understand?”

Fear flickered to life in Zee’s stomach as she nodded. What could possibly be bad enough to make her parents act like this?

“Say you understand.”

“I understand,” Zee said, her voice as small as it had ever been.

Dad closed his eyes, inhaled, and opened them again. “Grayza was a Peacekeeper. A high-ranking one. And I had some information that she wanted. About a cycle before you were born, she caught up with me and spent about a day interrogating me. She had—has, I guess—an implanted gland that releases a pheromone-based drug. No matter what you try to do, you end up doing what she wants you to. Your basic mind-control mix. Grayza used it to make me tell her what she wanted to know. She also used it to force me to have sex with her.”

At this, Dad paused. He seemed to be waiting for some kind of response, but Zee didn’t know what to say. “Force to have sex” were almost exactly the words Chiana had used six cycles ago to define frembeti, a word Zee hadn’t understood in a report about the Nebari resistance. Chiana had even mentioned drugs as a possible means of committing the crime. The Sebacean word for it, gleaned from holo-dramas that the Eidolon priests always said Zee was too young to watch, was ’pi-aeoh. Zee didn’t know the English word. In any language, though, it was spoken with anger—sometimes horror. She’d usually heard it used to describe the fate of victims of invading armies, but surely it applied in this context, too. And equally surely, it could not. It must not.

“Are you saying she… she ’tpi-aeoh you?” Zee said.

Dad winced, and Zee thought that whatever reaction he’d been hoping for, this had not been it. “Yeah,” he said softly. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“And that’s… that’s where I…”

Dad nodded. He peered into Zee’s eyes, like he did when Zee was sick and he was trying to gauge how bad she was feeling. But Zee wasn’t feeling much at all, at the moment. It was as though someone had replaced her brain with ice, and it was waiting for the rest of the story before it thawed.

“We’re not sure why Grayza decided to have you,” Dad said, when it was clear that Zee wasn’t about to lose it. “It would’ve been against Peacekeeper regulations. Maybe she wanted a bargaining chip to use against me. Maybe she suspected you’d grow up to have some wormhole knowledge. Anyway, it went wrong somehow. The Peacekeepers turned against her. She said it was political, that some bigwigs didn’t like the way she handled the Scarran conflict. Maybe she was even telling the truth. What we know is, when she saw the winds turning against her, she took you and showed up on our doorstep. You were about a monen old. It was the first I knew about you.”

A tiny, incongruous smile softened Dad’s lips. “You were such a tiny baby, you know? I never would have predicted you’d grow up into Attack of the Fifty Foot Teenager.”

No, Zee didn’t know. She’d never heard any stories about herself as a baby. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder why.

“Anyway.” Dad cleared his throat and let the smile drop off his face. “Grayza wanted to hitch a ride to an independent Sebacean colony. We brought you both on board, did a DNA test to confirm my paternity—we’ve still got that stashed away, you can see the results if you want—it came back positive, obviously. There was no way I was letting Grayza raise you, so we dumped her on a backwater planet and took off with you. And we’ve never looked back.”

Dad sat back on his heels. He was still hanging onto Zee’s hand, and that was where Zee kept her eyes, locked on the place where her wrist disappeared inside her father’s grip. She couldn’t bear to look anywhere else. The thought of meeting Dad’s eyes repulsed her like fire.

“Zee?” Dad said. “Talk to us, kiddo.”

But Zee couldn’t speak. Her frozen mind was starting to thaw, sending trickles of feeling down her spine. She didn’t want to be here when the flood came.

The floor of the transport pod gave a sudden shudder as it docked in Moya’s bay. Zee was up and out into the corridor before the doors had fully opened. She ran flat-out for her crawlspace, chased by her parents’ echoing calls.

For a little while, all Zee did was sleep. The crawlspace was warm and familiar and soothing, even cramped as it was, so Zee unstrapped the holster on her hip, pushed the pulse pistol far into the back with the broken game blobs and metal debris that had collected over the years, and curled up on her side. It wasn’t the most comfortable place to sleep, but right now, it was better than her quarters.

Zee woke up, groggy, an arn later. The nap had done some good; she no longer felt like she was about to fly apart into a million bits. But she definitely wasn’t ready to leave the crawlspace.

She pushed her comm. “Pilot?”

“Yes, Zhaan?”

“I’m gonna take out a few of the ceiling panels in the crawlspace. Raise the roof a little.”

A brief pause. “Of course, Zhaan.”

No questions, no concerns, no instructions—clearly, Pilot had been informed of what had happened on the transport pod. For that matter, Zee realized as she aimed Curly and Moe’s lasers at two overhead bolts, Mother and Dad had been living on Moya since well before Deke was born; Pilot must have known about Grayza all along. Pilot, and Chiana, and Rygel, and even the old woman Noranti on Arnessk. They’d all been on Moya at the time. They must all have known.

Zee remembered, again, Chiana explaining the word frembeti. She must have looked at Zee, nine cycles old with her face bearing her first clumsy attempts at makeup, and thought how ironic it was that someone who came from where Zee came from would have to ask such a question.

She shuddered. Was that what people thought of when they looked at her? Zee thought back over dozens of conversations with Rygel and Chiana and Pilot; had they been looking at Grayza the whole time?

Was that what her parents saw?

Zee attacked the ceiling with renewed vigor. Carefully cutting bolts and peeling back metal occupied just enough of her brain to stop her from thinking. She might still feel awful, but at least her mind wasn’t making up horror stories to pass the time. Deke poked his head through the mouse hole just as Zee lowered the final panel to the ground.

“Hey,” he said, crawling in and waving his hand in the newly created half-motra of air above his head. “This place is downright spacious.”

“No, of course you can come in, no need to ask,” Zee said, propping the panel against the back wall.

“If you didn’t want me coming in, you shoulda built a door, not a ceiling.” Deke pushed a covered tray in Zee’s direction. “Dinner.”

“What, I’m not welcome at the table anymore?”

“Actually, Mom wanted to make you eat with us, but Dad convinced her to ‘give you space.’”

Zee lifted the top off the tray. Parrin roots stewed in the dried prillan berries. And smushed into a corner of the plate, the last of the kroldar. She poked it with her finger; it was cold.

“Are you okay?” Deke asked.

Zee dropped the cover back over the food. “You’re not my big brother, you know. We’re the same age. You don’t have to look after me.”

She wasn’t sure why she was being so short with Deke. It wasn’t like he had done anything wrong. But when Zee looked at him, her insides filled with something hot and prickly and painful. She couldn’t yet put a name to the feeling, but it made her want to put her brother somewhere far away where she couldn’t see him.

Deke stretched out his foot and kicked Zee lightly on the knee. “Hey, doofus. I’m your brother. I look after you, you look after me. That’s how it works.”

Somehow, that made it worse. Zee hugged her knees to her chest and buried her face in her arms.

“I know things are really crazy,” Deke said, “but nothing’s changed about us. We’re still the same people we were a few arns ago.”

Zee still didn’t look at him, so Deke kicked her, harder this time. Her head flew up in a rage.

“I heard Dad tell you once that the day he found out Mother was having you was the happiest day of his life,” she said. “What kind of day do you think it was when he found out about me?”

Deke, usually so quick with a response, didn’t seem to have an answer.

“Maybe you’re the same person you were this morning,” Zee said, “but I’m not.”

“Zee…”

“Go away,” Zee said, squeezing every ounce of conviction she had into her voice. She hoped she sounded more like a general commanding her troops than a whiny teenager. Maybe she even succeeded, because Deke sighed and crawled out into the corridor.

“I’ll be here whenever you want to talk,” he said, his voice echoing through the walls.

Zee kicked him through the mouse hole.

It was almost a full solar day before Zee saw anyone else. She ventured out of her crawlspace only once, deep into the sleep cycle, so that she could use the bathroom. The rest of the time she spent sleeping, picking at the meal Deke had brought her, and trying to teach the Stooges to play the Looney Tunes theme song.

She might happily have stayed there much longer—well, not happily, but less unhappily—but Mother’s patience, as always, ran out quickly. The next evening, Mother crouched down in front of the mouse hole and knocked on the edge to get Zee’s attention.

“Dinner time,” she said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Then you can sit with the rest of us while we eat.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Well, you’re going to do it anyway.”

“No.”

Mother stuck her head in through the mouse hole. Her dark hair hung like a curtain over the gap. “Either you come out, or I come in.”

And she would, and once she had, there was nothing Zee would be able to do to remove her. Zee growled in exasperation. “Fine. Move.”

The walk to the galley was mostly silent. As they passed Tier 7, Mother looked down at Zee—there was only a dench or so difference in their heights, these days—and said, “How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine,” Zee said, and Mother left it at that.

When they reached the galley, they found Dad loading fried parrin root onto a platter and Deke setting the table. Both of them stopped what they were doing when Zee entered, their eyes trained only on her.

“Hey, kiddo,” Dad said, returning to the parrin roots as if nothing had happened. “Pull up a pew.”

Zee stared at her father, looking cheerful if a little tired as he bustled around the galley, bringing things to the table. A horribly contrasting image popped into her head: Dad, chained up in a dark cell, with Grayza kneeling over him…

“Sit down, Zee.” Mother pushed gently on her shoulder.

The image stayed with Zee all through dinner. Every time she forced it out of her mind, it crept back in. Dad smiled at her while passing the teapot, and in her head, Grayza leaned over him, menacing. Dad laughed at one of Deke’s jokes, and in her head, he screamed for help. Zee didn’t even know if anything she was imagining had actually happened, but she couldn’t make it stop.

Fear rose up inside Zee like a wave, souring her stomach and filling her lungs. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. It was the worst fear she’d ever felt—worse than the time Moya got stuck in starburst, worse than the time Mother was arrested in the Luxan territories, and Zee and Deke had to wait on Moya while Dad got her out—but she couldn’t have said what she was afraid of. It was a nameless, baseless fear, existing without cause and, seemingly, without end.

“Zee?” Dad said. “Breathe, kiddo.”

But breathing was beyond her control, and every moment she sat here pushed it further from her. Zee shot to her feet and ran for the door, leaving her uneaten dinner behind.

Safe in the crawlspace, Zee curled up and let her breath slowly come back to her. The fear receded, though she could tell it wasn’t entirely gone; it was just hidden, shoved behind a door that could open again at any moment. There would be no warning.

Zee had been born and raised in space. She was used to floors that tilted and rattled at a moment’s notice. She could carry a cup of tea from the galley to her quarters in a spacestorm without spilling a drop. But she’d never noticed the firm floor her family had given her to stand on, until it, too, had started to shake.

Zee expected someone to come after her, but no one did. She wondered if it was Dad’s idea to leave her alone again. Maybe they’d just gotten tired of dealing with her. Mother had always said that Deke was the easy child. He didn’t pick fights, like Zee; he did what he was told, and if he didn’t like it, he fumed quietly. Deke never caused problems.

And that made sense, didn’t it? Deke was good. Deke had been wanted. Deke wasn’t the child of a ‘tspi-aeoh.

Zee held out her arm in front of her and pinched it. She watched the blood pool back in under the skin. Half of that blood came from Grayza. Half of Zee came from someone awful. Someone evil. Zee had her father’s height and eyes and lips, but other things—her hair, which she’d always thought came from Mother, her figure, the shape of her face—were Grayza’s. She remembered how familiar Grayza had looked when she first saw her. That was why. Grayza looked not unlike what Zee saw when she looked in the mirror.

What else had Zee inherited from her biological mother? What was lurking inside her that she couldn’t see?

Zee turned these questions over until they’d scraped her mind raw. She felt that if she thought about them one more time, her ears would start to bleed.

She also felt, she realized with some consternation, hungry. Apparently, a single plate of picked-over parrin roots couldn’t sustain you for a day, no matter how bad of a mood you were in. Zee crawled out into the corridor. It had been at least an arn; surely her family had abandoned the galley by now.

As she approached, however, she heard her parents’ voices echoing softly down the corridor. They were almost certainly talking about her. Zee could turn back and let them be, or she could walk in and interrupt them. Or there was the third option. Feeling very much like Deke, Zee pressed her face up to a crack in the galley door.

Mother and Dad sat at the table, the bottle of raslak that they thought Deke and Zee didn’t know about between them, a cup in front of each of them. They looked like the most essential versions of themselves: Mother was straight-backed and stiff, Dad slouched spinelessly over his cup.

“…looked like a panic attack,” Dad was saying.

Mother frowned. “What exactly is a ‘fit of panic?’” she asked, which must be how the phrase translated into Sebacean.

“It’s a medical term, on Earth. It’s when you get overwhelmed by something, and your brain kinda goes haywire for a little bit. You can’t breathe, you can’t think. Stops you cold.” Dad’s speech wasn’t quite slurred, but it sounded soft and malleable, his words like blocks of wet clay that could be smoothed together. “I guess if you had one of those in the Peacekeepers, you’d end up dead.”

“One way or another,” Mother said wryly. “But she’s not a Peacekeeper. These… picnic attacks, you called them? They’re not dangerous, are they?”

“Panic attacks. They’re not dangerous, but they’re not a good sign. And they’re not pleasant.”

“Well, how are they dealt with on Earth?”

“Booze or shrinks, depending on how good an HMO you got.”

Mother fixed him with her deadliest look. “John.”

“Doctors,” he said, sighing. “Psychologists. Like the ones who interviewed us when we visited, remember?”

“Those frellwits?”

“They’re not all like that,” Dad said. He swirled his raslak around in his cup and laughed. “Some of them are more like Zhaan, actually.”

Mother cocked her head slightly. “Like Zee?”

“No, Zhaan. Original flavor.”

“Aha,” Mother said, her face clearing. Her words were pointed; she seemed to be referring to some previous conversation that Zee hadn’t heard. “So they talk to you… consider your concerns… provide counsel…”

“Not this again. She needs space. I think tonight’s show made that clearer than ever.”

“No, you need space. You’re afraid.”

“Can you blame me?” Dad slammed his palm into the table, making both Zee and the raslak jump. Mother, on the other hand, seemed unimpressed. “You’re the one who said ‘no more lies,’ Aeryn. Well, I don’t have answers for some of the questions she’s gonna ask. God, we’ve had 15 years to think about this, and I still don’t have answers. God. I hate her!” He drained his raslak and pounded the cup down on the table. “Fifteen years, and she’s managed to fuck everything up again.”

Again. It rang in Zee’s ears, growing more grotesque with every reverberation. Zee knew that the “she” in question was now Grayza, not her. But if Grayza had frelled everything up again, then she’d done it before. When she brought Zee to Moya.

Zee had heard enough. She turned away from the galley door, resigning herself to a few more arns of hunger. To her surprise, however, she found Deke lurking a few motras behind her, a knowing look on his face. He held out a handful of food cubes.

Zee took them and walked past him, trying to hold her back as straight as her mother’s.

The next morning, Dad intercepted Zee on her way out of the galley. She was clutching a handful of jerlink berries, having intended to breakfast in the crawlspace—and lunch and dinner there, too, for that matter. Dad, however, had other plans.

“Why don’t you eat those on the way to the starburst chamber?” he said. “The hygic system’s acting up, and I could use some help fixing it.”

Zee highly suspected that Dad had an ulterior motive for his request; it sounded like Mother had won last night’s argument. “No, thanks,” she said, trying to duck under Dad’s arm.

Dad backed up, blocking off the corridor. “Come on, Zee, help an old blockhead out.” He thunked a fist lightly against his temple.

In a grim, grey cell, Grayza leaned down over her prey.

“Don’t,” Zee said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t pretend everything’s normal. Say what you’re going to say, or don’t, but don’t dress it up as something else.”

Dad drooped like the Hynerian royal banner on a breezeless day, and Zee could see immediately how much of his cheer had been a front. “What do you want me to say?” he asked.

“…she’s managed to fuck everything up again.”

“Nothing,” said Zee, and pushed past him.

Mother visited the crawlspace after lunch. She didn’t knock or wait outside the mouse hole; she just crawled right inside and scrunched herself up cross-legged by the entrance.

“It’s time for sparring practice,” she said.

Zee, who’d been lying down, listlessly watching a holo, didn’t sit up or even look away from the image. “Not today.”

Mother reached out, Prowler-quick, and grabbed the holo. She flicked it off. “It’s not a request.”

“Give that back!”

“You can have it after practice.” Mother crawled into the corridor and waited for Zee to join her, which Zee did after a few microts. She’d been attending sparring practice twice a weeken since she was old enough to form a fist, and the impulse to do what Mother said in matters like this was strong.

When she got to the gym, however, Zee knew she should’ve ignored her impulse. “Deke’s not here,” she said.

“He’ll train later,” Mother said. She stretched out her arms, and nodded for Zee to do the same. “I thought we’d have a one-on-one session today.”

Zee crossed her arms. “You mean you thought you could use sparring to make me talk.”

“It doesn’t matter what I thought. You’re here, so stretch.”

Zee glared at her, but she started to stretch. She tried to make it clear she was doing so under protest. When she was well and truly limber, Mother led her over to the punching bag and told her to practice pantak jabs.

“Good,” she said, after the first one. And then, after the second, “Harder.”

Zee poured as much power as she could into her hand. It bounced off the punching bag with stinging force. “Good,” Mother said again.

After a dozen jabs, Zee fell into a rhythm. Right hand back, elbow bent parallel to the floor; swing forward, aiming for the space just beyond the bag. Return to base position. Left hand back; swing forward. Return to base position. And again. It was mindlessly soothing, much like stripping ceiling panels in the crawlspace. She hardly noticed when Mother moved slightly behind her and started to speak.

“I don’t know what’s going on inside your head right now, Zee. Sometimes I feel like I’ve never really known. But I want to.”

Right back. Swing forward. Base position.

“Please, talk to me. Help me understand what you need.”

Left back. Swing forward. Base position.

“I love you so much.”

Zee slammed her right hand off the bag and let the momentum spin her around to face her mother. “I’m ready to spar,” she said.

Mother’s face fell. It didn’t fall very far—not like Dad, whose face could fall for metras when he was disappointed—but the hope slipped entirely out of her eyes. She stepped back and adopted a fighting stance. Zee followed her, maintaining a motra of buffer between them. They circled like that for a microt, and then Mother made the first move: a kick to the thigh, meant to sweep Zee off her feet. Zee sidestepped and went in for an open-hand strike, which Mother parried with her forearm and returned in kind. Zee ducked under Mother’s hand, came up on her left, and let the muscle memory of a few microts before carry her into a pantak jab to the shoulder.

It landed hard. The bones of Mother’s shoulder dug satisfyingly into Zee’s hand for a moment, before the force of the jab sent Mother to the floor. Mother blinked in surprise—Zee had never landed a pantak jab on a live opponent before—then laughed.

“Great work!” she said. She leapt lightly to her feet and moved back into position.

Zee backed away, shaking her hand. Shockwaves from the jab were still running up her arm, but that wasn’t what was bothering her.

It had felt good, hitting her mother. She had been so angry, and had been fighting so hard, and it had felt good, sending Mother to the floor.

“I’m done,” Zee said.

“Are you hurt?” Mother asked, dropping out of fighting stance. She reached for Zee’s hand, to inspect the damage, but Zee yanked it away before she could touch it.

“I’m just done!” she said, heading for the exit. “Keep the holo.”

The days passed slowly. Zee no longer left the crawlspace, even to sleep. She sneaked out during the sleep cycle to get provisions: blankets and cushions, food, tea. Other than that, she stayed in place; she had no interest in seeing anyone.

Unfortunately, Zee’s family was very interested in seeing her. Mother and Deke visited daily, often multiple times. Deke crawled right inside without asking. Mother usually stayed in the corridor, but if Zee was being particularly unresponsive—or if Mother was being particularly impatient—she’d come in as well, and stay a quarter of an arn at least. Zee tried to be nice to Deke, though she often failed; in addition to being angry and afraid, she was irritable these days, and Deke had only to say the slightest thing wrong to set her off. Visits from Deke always ended with Deke feeling hurt and Zee feeling guilty.

It was even harder to spare Mother’s feelings. She and Zee had been fighting for cycles, and it seemed it was impossible for Zee to stop, even though she really wanted to. The memory of the horrible pleasure Zee had felt when she landed the pantak jab curdled in her stomach, and every time she yelled at Mother to leave her alone, or snapped at a well-intentioned inquiry into her feelings, Zee became more and more certain that there was something wrong with her, something built into the core of her being that couldn’t help but spread pain. Something that enjoyed it.

The worst, though, was when Dad visited. He never came into the crawlspace, treating the mouse hole as some sort of invisible, burning door. Instead he sat with his back pressed against the outer wall. Zee knew he was there, because she could hear his jacket slide down Moya’s hull. When she pressed her hand against the wall, she imagined she could feel the heat of his body through it.

Usually, he brought an excuse with him. The amnexus conduits were acting up, there was a faulty connection in the neural cluster, some of the DRDs were on the fritz. Could Zee come help him out?

“I told you not to do that,” Zee said the first time. “Just say what you’re gonna say.”

But he didn’t seem to be able to stop. Dad was perfectly capable of dealing with any of those issues on his own—and anyway, Zee suspected that he was exaggerating them, because while Moya had had plenty of mechanical malfunctions in Zee’s life, she’d never had half a dozen within two weekens. But despite Zee’s obvious annoyance and the lack of any real urgency, he still opened up almost every visit with a request for help. After the first time, Zee always ignored him until he moved on to his real business.

Dad never answered any of the questions that were rattling in Zee’s head, making so much noise she could hardly hear her other thoughts. To be fair, Zee never asked any of them. She was afraid that the only thing worse than the noise might be the silence that followed after the answers. So instead, Dad talked around the questions. He mentioned everything but the real reason he was there.

Some days, all he did was talk about how much he loved her. How proud he was of her, how smart she was, how amazing. “I know,” Zee always said. “I love you too.” And that was half-true.

Some days, he tried to cheer her up, telling old jokes and stories from her childhood. Zee never managed to muster much enthusiasm, but she laughed in the right places and finished sentences where she was supposed to. It was easier, with him on the other side of a wall, to act normal. She didn’t see visions of Grayza or hear Dad talking about how she’d ruined his life. Zee thought maybe Dad went away from those visits feeling better. That was good; despite the formless anger and fear that Dad’s presence inspired in her lately, she wanted him to feel better.

Once, he said nothing for a long time, and when he finally spoke, Zee thought he might be crying. “I miss you, Zee.”

By the time Zee’s answer had worked its way out of her throat, he was gone.

One day, two weekens into her self-imposed solitude, Zee lay on her back in the crawlspace, staring at the discarded ceiling panels propped against the wall. She was considering how to use them to make a door for the mouse hole. Quite apart from keeping Mother and Deke out, a door presented an interesting technical challenge, and therefore a distraction—and Zee desperately needed those. She’d watched every holo and played every game she owned at least twice, and she was a monen ahead on the school syllabus that Dad had set for her and Deke at the beginning of the cycle. Dad’s made-up mechanical malfunctions were sounding more and more tempting, but hanging out with Dad would defeat the purpose of keeping her mind occupied.

Someone knocked on the edge of the mouse hole, and Zee groaned. “You’re gonna come in anyway,” she said, without bothering to look up. “So just come in.”

“All right, then,” said a voice that was neither Mother nor Deke’s. Zee scrambled into a sitting position just in time to see Chiana squeeze through the mouse hole.

“Chiana!” Zee said, more enthusiastically than she’d said anything in weekens. “What are you… how are you here?”

“I’m coming to Arnessk with you guys,” Chiana said. “You didn’t notice Moya stopping over Hyneria?”

Come to think of it, the floor had been shaking less than usual for the last arn. “Why?” Zee asked. As soon as she said it, though, the realized the answer. “You’re here for me, aren’t you?”

“Not just you,” Chiana said, completely unconvincingly. “I wanted to see all of you guys. It’s been too long since I’ve been on Moya.”

“They told you.”

For a moment, Chiana held up her cheerful façade, but she let it fall in the face of Zee’s glare. “Yeah, they told me.”

“You’re here to pull me out of my funk.”

“If that means cheer you up, then yeah. That’s why I’m here.”

Zee crossed her arms. “I don’t want to be cheered up.”

“Huh. That’s too bad.” Chiana reached into the bag slung across her shoulder and pulled out a scarf of deep blue Delvian silk. It matched the bright orange one that Chiana had tied around her waist as a sash. “’Cause I brought this for you, and I was going to show you how they’re tying them in the capital, but if you don’t want to be cheered up…”

It was not an artful ploy, but Zee fell for it anyway. “I guess I don’t have to be cheerful to play dress-up,” she said.

“I guess you don’t,” Chiana said. She sniffed delicately. “But first, go clean up. You’re stinkin’ up the place.”

Embarrassed, Zee realized that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d showered. It was within the last three days, anyway. Probably. She crawled sheepishly past Chiana and out into the corridor.

Chiana was waiting for her in her quarters when she stepped out of the showers.

“Much better!” Chiana said, smiling wide. She held up the scarf and pointed at the chair by Zee’s vanity. “Go ahead, sit down, I’ll tie this for you.”

“Let’s do it in the crawlspace,” Zee said. Her quarters were so open; there was nothing to stop any of her family from passing by and joining in the conversation.

“Nah, you want the mirror. To see yourself.” Chiana must have understood Zee’s problem, though, because she shut the privacy curtain without being asked. Zee, a little mollified, sat down by the mirror. Chiana stepped into place behind her, like a worker at one of the huge salons in the Hynerian capital, and started to wind the scarf through Zee’s hair in a complicated pattern. For perhaps 150 microts, Zee closed her eyes and let Chiana’s hands on her scalp lull her into an unthinking state.

“How are you doing?” Chiana said. Her hands didn’t stop moving, and Zee kept her eyes closed.

“Well, I’m getting sick of people asking me that.”

Chiana chuckled. “Is there something else you’d rather I asked?”

Zee considered this. “Not really.”

“Is there anything you want to ask me?”

Dozens of things. Hundreds. “I don’t know.”

“Hmm,” Chiana said, and then they both went quiet until she’d tied the final knot in Zee’s scarf. “There. You’re fit to attend the Royal Court of Pilink.”

Zee reached up to cautiously touch her hair. It looked delicate, but it held firm. She remembered Mother, finishing her tangled Interion Twist, and tears welled up precariously behind her eyes.

Chiana leaned down and spoke close into Zee’s ear. “If I leave for a moment, will you promise to be here when I get back?”

Zee closed her eyes, pushing the tears away. “You’re not going to bring my parents back with you, are you?”

“Nah,” Chiana said. “Floss my heart.”

“That’s cross your heart,” Zee said, but when she turned around, she saw Chiana was grinning. “I’ll be here. I promise.”

It wasn’t a long wait. Chiana returned 300 microts later, slipping through the privacy curtain with exaggerated stealth, like a Disruptor in a cheesy holo. She hopped onto Zee’s bed and dropped two cups and a shining silver bottle down in front of her.

“That’s Mother and Dad’s raslak!” Zee said, climbing onto the bed beside Chiana.

“We’re gonna have a tea party,” Chiana said. “Like when you were little.”

When Zee was little, Dad had almost always been there for the tea parties. Dad and Chiana and the Stooges, back before they’d gotten their names.

“Tea parties are an Earth thing, aren’t they?” Zee said, fiddling with one of the cups.

“Yeah,” Chiana said. “They were your father’s idea.”

Zee nodded, trying to shake off the tears that were making their way back into her eyes. “I’m not allowed to have raslak.”

“That’s fahrbot! You’re 14. You can have raslak.”

“I’m 15,” Zee said pointedly.

“Even better.”

Zee grabbed the bottle and unscrewed the cap. “Mother and Dad are gonna be mad.”

“Leave your parents to me,” Chiana said. “And don’t pour it yet. You gotta shake it first. Heats it up.”

The cool metal bottle warmed as Zee shook it. After 20 microts, it felt like a living thing in her hands, radiating the heat of running blood. Zee figured that meant it was ready. She tipped the bottle over carefully, sending a trickle of greenish liquid into her cup.

“Put your first two fingers around the bottom of the cup,” Chiana said. “Yeah, like that. And fill it up to the top of your fingers.”

When she was done, Zee handed the bottle to Chiana (who poured herself considerably more than Zee) and pursed her lips carefully around the rim of her cup. She breathed in. It smelled hot and astringent, a little like Moya’s hygic fluid, but hygic fluid didn’t make Zee light-headed.

Chiana raised her cup. “Down the hatch.”

“Down the hatch,” Zee agreed, and took a large gulp.

She almost coughed it back up—it tasted like it smelled, only moreso. But she could see Chiana grinning at her reaction, so she clamped her mouth shut and swallowed.

“Well,” Zee said, panting to cool the fire in her tongue and throat, “it’s not tea.”

“That’s kinda the point. Take another sip. Only… only a smaller one, this time.”

After a few more sips, Zee started to feel a pleasant, weightless sensation in her arms and chest. Her head, though, felt heavy—or maybe it was that her neck felt weak. The raslak had started tasting less like hygic fluid and more like water. Her thoughts slipped smoothly through her head, like oil.

“Why do people fight when they’re drunk?” she asked. “I feel way too good to fight.”

Chiana laughed. “You’re just drunk enough. If you got really stizzed, it’d be different.”

Zee rocked her head back and forth, enjoying the way it made her whole body feel like a pendulum.

“Hey, Zee?”

Zee stopped the pendulum at the apex of its swing and focused, with only a little difficulty, on Chiana. “Yeah?”

“Do you have anything you want to ask me?”

Zee was still just barely sober enough to realize that this was probably the reason Chiana had given her the raslak in the first place. She had a vague feeling that she should be angry about that, but it couldn’t quite cut through the stardust in her head. “Yeah,” she said. “Lots of things.”

“Like what?”

“Like… Am I like Grayza?”

Amazing. Here was this huge and heavy question that had haunted every conversation Zee had had for weekens, begging to be asked, but too big for her to force from her lips. And she’d just asked it. Like it was nothing.

“What do you mean, are you like her?” Chiana asked.

“I mean… I mean, I get my eyes from my dad, but I look like Grayza, too, right?”

“A little,” Chiana conceded.

“And I act like my dad sometimes. Do I act like Grayza, too?”

Chiana ran her finger around the rip of her cup, and Zee found herself tracking it with her eyes, round and round and round. “You’re nothing like Grayza.”

“I don’t believe that,” Zee said. “Nobody’s nothing like their mother.”

“Aeryn’s your mother.”

“You know what I mean. Come on, Chiana, you’re supposed to be the one who tells me the truth.”

“Well, that’s stupid. We should never have set things up like that.”

“Too late now!” Zee took another sip of her raslak. “How am I like Grayza?”

Chiana worked her lips, like she was forming the answer fully before she said it. “You… you talk like her, sometimes.”

“Like we have the same voice?”

“Yeah, but more like… the tone you use, sometimes. The way you hold yourself. The way you move your hands. Grayza was really… really confident, and you’ve got some of that.”

“I’m not confident.”

“You’re magra confident.”

“If I were confident, you wouldn’t need to get me drunk so I could ask questions.”

“Everyone’s got a Kraftin gauntlet.”

“A what?”

“A weak spot. Kraftin armor, it’s the strongest in the galaxy, right? Or it was ten thousand cycles ago. But their gauntlets were dren. So if you were going up against a Kraftin, you aimed for the hands.”

“An Achilles’ heel,” Zee said, remembering her dad’s phrase, and the story that went with it. Achilles’ mother had dipped him in the river Styx, and made him invulnerable—all except for the heel she held him by. Zee had asked Dad once why she couldn’t have just switched heels and dipped him a second time. There’s always a catch in myths, Dad had said. Real life, too.

“Sure,” Chiana said. “This is just your chilly zeal. Most of the time, you’re like Kraftin armor.”

Zee liked that. She pictured herself in armor, like a Luxan warrior headed into battle, plated shoulder to ankle in gleaming alloy. Standing tall, untouchable. Powerful.

Then she found the catch: Grayza probably would’ve liked that picture too.

“I think there’s something wrong with me,” Zee said.

“There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“I hit Mother.”

That got Chiana’s attention. Her body, which had been soft and slouched, sharpened into a straight line. “When?”

“When we were sparring, a few weekens ago.”

“Zee, you’re supposed to hit people when you’re sparring.”

Zee shook her head. “I hit Mother, and I liked it.”

To Zee’s annoyance, Chiana didn’t appear nearly as concerned about this revelation. “Well, you’ve hit her before in sparring, haven’t you? Did you ever like it before?”

“No, but once is enough, don’t you think?”

Chiana cocked her head. “It depends why you liked it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, were you angry?”

“Yeah,” Zee said. “I was. I still am.”

“But you haven’t gone out and hit anyone because of it.”

“No!” Zee said, horrified.

“Zee, everyone likes hitting things when they’re angry. It’s like sex, or really… really good food. It’s natural. And yeah, food and sex don’t hurt people, but that’s why good people stop themselves from hitting people. Like you. You’re a good person.”

Zee took another sip of raslak and let it settle into her stomach, while Chiana’s words settled into her head. “Sex can hurt people.”

“Yeah, it can,” Chiana said heavily. She squeezed Zee’s hand. “But you wouldn’t do that, either.”

For a moment, neither of them spoke. Zee lay back, letting her heavy head pull her down onto the blankets. Chiana snuggled close to her.

“Can I ask you something, now?” Chiana said.

“Go ahead.”

“Why are you angry at your mother?”

The tears that Zee had pushed back twice tonight broke free at last. They ran down her temples, wetting her ears and hair. “They keep saying they love me,” she gasped, her voice catching.

“That’s why you’re angry?”

Zee nodded and squeezed her eyes shut. “They don’t love me. I know they don’t love me, and they won’t stop saying it.”

A hand rested softly on Zee’s shoulder and tried to roll her over, but Zee kept stubbornly facing the ceiling. “Your parents love you, Zee,” Chiana said.

Zee shook her head, disturbing the tiny pools of tears around her temples. “I ruined their lives.”

“Do their lives look ruined to you?”

Zee sobbed so hard and unexpectedly that it turned into a gasp. “I’m hurting Dad.”

“Families hurt each other sometimes. It doesn’t mean they don’t love each other.”

“I hurt him by existing,” Zee said. The tears started again in earnest, distorting her words. “I shouldn’t have been born.”

“Hey, don’t say that.” Chiana rubbed at Zee’s shoulder, more urgently than soothingly.

“They didn’t want me.”

“Did they tell you that?”

“No.” Zee wiped her eyes, but as she was still crying, it didn’t do much. “But it’s true, isn’t it?”

“They want you.”

“Now,” Zee said, “maybe. But when you guys did the DNA scan, no one was hoping it was positive, were they?”

“I was.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“Hey.” Chiana jostled Zee’s shoulder again, and Zee, finally, looked at her. Her slitted pupils had widened into ovals, giving her an intense look. “I was.”

“You were? Why?”

Chiana nodded. “Don’t… don’t tell your father, yeah?”

“Okay,” Zee said immediately.

“When Grayza came on board, I was the one who took you from her. I held you for probably… probably an arn, while we were running the DNA scan. And I never wanted narls. You and Deke have always been narl enough for me. But I was in a… a bad place, back then, and I looked at you, and I saw this little girl, all alone in the world, like me. I saw this girl who came from… from dead, awful people, but I knew she didn’t have to grow up to be dead or awful herself, and I wanted to be part of that. I didn’t want to run anymore. I wanted to build something. Just like you do.”

When Zee dreamed about her future, as an adult, she didn’t dream of space. She didn’t imagine herself an explorer or an adventurer, the way Deke did. Zee loved her life—or she had, up until a few weekens ago—but she didn’t want to live like this forever. When Zee dreamed of the future, she imagined herself as an engineer, settled down on one planet, creating sound, solid things. Maybe on Arnessk. Building peace.

But she’d never told that to anyone.

“How did you…”

Chiana chuckled. “Your crawlspace didn’t build itself.” She sighed and sank back into her story. “From the moment I touched you, I wanted to be part of your life. And I felt so bad about that, because I could see it was eating Crichton up, and I knew better than anyone how he must feel. I felt like the most awful person in the universe, but I wanted you to be his. And when the scan came back positive, I didn’t say anything, but I was happy.”

Zee stared into Chiana’s eyes and slowly let herself believe what she was saying. When her doubt fled, it took with it the last of her resolve, and she threw herself, sobbing, into Chiana’s arms.

“Hey now,” Chiana said, in a quiet, halting voice. She was speaking English. “It’s okay.”

It wasn’t, but it didn’t matter. For the first time in weekens, Zee wasn’t alone.

Zee woke up the next morning, a little fuzzy-headed, to see her father’s head poking through the privacy curtain. She rubbed her eyes, which were gummed over with sleep and dried tears, feeling a little embarrassed. She never cried. Probably she could blame it on the raslak, though.

“Oh, hey,” Dad said. “Didn’t mean to wake you. Just wanted to let you guys know breakfast is on the table.”

Chiana blinked awake and uncurled herself from around Zee, yawning and stretching out her body to its fullest length. “You’re supposed to knock, Crichton. Girls need their privacy.”

“Girls need more than that, it looks like.” Dad nodded at the bottle of raslak on the floor by the bed. “You got my teenage daughter drunk?”

“Don’t be such a drone,” Chiana said. She rolled out of bed and scooped the bottle and two cups off the floor. “It’s not nearly as bad as what either of us were getting up to at Zee’s age.”

“I don’t exactly consider us role models, Chi.”

Chiana sashayed to the door, tucked the bottle under her arm, and used her free hand to stroke Dad’s face. “Sometimes you just need to loosen up a little,” she said. “You understand. Come on, Zee, let’s get breakfast.”

Chiana’s visit didn’t fix everything. Zee was still barely on speaking terms with her parents; visions of Grayza and Dad still floated through her mind at odd moments; she was still angry, depressed, and terrified. The only thing that could really fix everything would be to undo the essential fact of her conception. But Chiana gave her a reason to leave the crawlspace, an unthreatening hand to hold when family meals became overwhelming, an anchor in the shifting landscape of her life.

And she did fix one thing: Deke. After breakfast that first morning, Chiana dragged Zee off to the observatory to teach her to play Jexxon poker, but Zee stopped her before they got out the door.

“You wanna come, Deke?”

Deke looked up in surprise from his hekra porridge (cream of wheat, Dad called it, though Zee, who had only a theoretical understanding of both cream and wheat, didn’t see how one could come from the other). “Are you sure?” he asked, a little warily.

“Of course I’m sure,” Zee said, though she wasn’t. “Come play with us.”

So he did. And Zee discovered that his presence didn’t send her into a tailspin anymore. Chiana’s story had softened the edges of what Zee had realized was jealousy. Deke had been wanted by their parents, and Zee hadn’t, and that hurt—but Zee had been wanted by someone, at least. Chiana would never say outright that she had a favorite between Deke and Zee, but Zee understood Chiana’s story to mean that that the two of them shared a bond that Deke never could. Somehow, that evened the score.

Maybe that was a selfish, awful way to think about your brother. But Zee was learning to live with her selfish awfulness. And it was really good to have Deke back.

“Zee!”

Zee jumped, hitting her head on the top of the fridge, where she’d been rooting around for a late-night snack. “Dren!” she said, rubbing the sore spot. “Dren, dren, dren, frell.” She turned around, hand on her head. Dad was hanging back in the dimly-lit galley doorway.

“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” he said.

The words fell between them like the acid rain on Vendek; innocuous at first, but corrosive as they pooled and gathered strength.

Dad coughed. “I’ll, uh. Come back later.”

“No!” Zee held out a hand. “Have a snack with me.”

For a moment, it seemed like Dad hadn’t heard her. Then he stepped into the soft light of the galley. “We got any jekim salad left over?”

“Think so.”

Zee dug out the salad while Dad set out plates and forks. They didn’t speak, and Zee began to question the wisdom of her invitation. Chiana had been telling her for days that she needed to spend more time with her parents, that things would only get worse the longer she avoided them. “Just spend time with them,” she’d said. “You’ll remember that they’re just your stupid parents.”

It wasn’t working yet. Then again, by “time,” Chiana had probably meant “more than 100 microts.”

She’d probably also want them to talk.

“So,” Zee said after her first bite. “How are you?”

Dad was slow to answer. “I’m fine,” he said, anticlimactically. “How are you?”

“Oh, I’m… I’m…” To Zee’s horror, she felt tears gathering again. She bit down on the inside of her cheek. “I’m fine too. It’s nice to have Chiana here.”

“Yeah, Pip knows how to throw a party, all right,” Dad said. There was an edge to his voice. Zee wondered if he was still upset about the raslak.

They lapsed into silence again. What had they used to talk about? School. Tech. Earth. Moya’s next stop. How were they supposed to just pick back up again with those things, as if their every sentence wasn’t haunted by the darker, scarier questions Zee wasn’t asking? Were they supposed to sit here and eat their jekim salad and pretend?

“How’s your school work coming?”

Apparently so.

“Fine.”

“Is it gonna be ready for the Trunchbull when we land on Arnessk?”

Zee rolled her eyes. “Instructor Leshka’s not that bad. You just don’t like her ’cause she corrected your math that one time.”

“Some of us are just poor simple humans who can’t take the square root of six-digit numbers in our heads.”

Zee patted his hand condescendingly, then paused with her fingers still on his knuckles. She realized—she thought at about the same time he did—that it was the first time in nearly a monen that she had touched her father. The last time had been on the transport pod from Farolax, her hand clasped in both of his.

Dad turned his hand over, palm-up, and gently cupped his fingers around hers.

And Zee found herself, somehow, asking a question.

“You used to sing a song to me,” she said. “When I was little.”

“’Be My Baby,’” Dad said, naming the song he’d used as a lullaby for Deke and Zee until they were well past babyhood. He still broke it out from time to time, when he was in a particularly exuberant mood.

Zee shook her head. “Not that one. It was one just for me, I think. You haven’t sung it since I was really, really young. It was about falling apart, or something.”

“’I Fall to Pieces.’ Patsy Cline.”

“Yes! That’s it.”

“Why’re you thinking about that?”

Zee had spent much of the last monen tracking down her earliest memories, reexamining them to see if there were hints she’d missed—if she could possibly have known what her parents were hiding from her. She had vague memories of the sharper, angrier Dad who had lurked in the corners of her childhood, but she knew from years of discussion with Deke that he had those memories too. Mostly, Zee’s earliest memories were inconsequential: pinching Deke on the chin and getting in trouble, trying to hide her unwanted parrin under the galley table, a children’s holo lit up in garish colors.

When she pushed hard, however, she could bring up a hazy scene. Dad standing over her, lit from behind by dim bioluminescent bulbs, singing softly. She must have been only two or three cycles old. It was the earliest memory she had of her father acting like a father to her.

“I just remembered,” she said. “Can I hear it?”

“I’m not a great singer.”

“That’s never stopped you before.”

Dad ran his free hand down his face. “You really wanna hear it?”

It occurred to Zee that if Dad was putting up resistance, there was a chance she really didn’t want to hear it, but there was no turning back now. “Yeah.”

Dad took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and sang, low, rough, and a little flat, just as he always had.

I fall to pieces
Each time I see you again.
I fall to pieces.
How can I be just your friend?

You want me to act
Like we’ve never kissed.
You want me to forget--
Pretend we’ve never met.
And I try, and I try
But I haven’t yet.
You walk by, and
I fall to pieces.

I fall to pieces
Each time someone says your name.
I fall to pieces.
Time only adds to the flame.

You tell me to find
Someone else to love,
Someone who loves me too,
The way you used to do.
But each time I go out
With someone new,
You walk by, and
I fall to pieces.

When Dad opened his eyes, Zee had to hurry to brush her tears away. She needed to stop crying so much.

“Zee,” Dad said.

She stood up, pulling her hand from his grasp. “I’m fine.”

“Zee, kiddo, can you just tell me what’s going through your head?”

Zee trained her eyes on the wall past Dad’s head. “That’s a very sad song.”

“It’s not exactly a feel-good number, no.”

“And you never sang it to Deke. Just me.”

“That’s right,” Dad said reluctantly.

“Okay.” Zee’s voice sounded like Eidolon china—thin and flat and liable to crack at any moment. “I’m going to bed.”

“Zee.”

Zee turned back, halfway to the door. She expected Dad to be standing, reaching out for her, maybe, but he was still sitting, head hung, eyes not even on her.

“What?”

“You weren’t supposed to remember that.” He paused just long enough that she thought he was done. “I wish I hadn’t sung it to you.”

Zee didn’t know if he meant he wished he hadn’t sung it when she was little, or he wished he hadn’t sung it tonight.

“But you did,” she said.

He didn’t have an answer.

They were a weeken from Arnessk when Zee had the idea.

It wasn’t a good idea, exactly. There was no Eureka moment, no rush of excitement like when she finally got some tech to work. It didn’t make Zee happy to think about. But it was a solution, and no other had presented itself. So after dinner, when she and Chiana had settled down to watch a holo in Chiana’s quarters, Zee put her idea into motion.

“Can I stay with you for a while?”

Chiana paused the holo. “What d’you mean?”

“When we get back to Hyneria. I’d like to stay with you. I know you have important work to do, but I’m pretty self-sufficient. I wouldn’t bother you.”

“Zee…” Chiana set the holo aside. “You’re welcome with me any time. But you… you don’t want to leave Moya.”

“Don’t tell me what I want!”

“Fine. What do you want?”

“I told you. I want to stay with you.”

“Why?”

Zee blew a strand of hair out of her face. She had a petulant desire to say, “Because,” but she quashed it; satisfying as it might be, it was unlikely to persuade Chiana.

“Ever since I found out, everything’s just so… difficult,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “And I think I’m the one making it that way. I yell at Mother all the time, and Dad…”

She and Dad seemed to be able to hurt each other without saying a word.

“I don’t know how to stop,” Zee said. “And I’m tired of trying to live somewhere I don’t belong.”

“You belong with your family.”

Zee shook her head. “I wish I did. I think they wish I did. But I can’t do this anymore, Chiana, it’s too much. It’s like… no matter where I go on Moya, this thing is waiting for me, and I can’t get away. I want to be somewhere where I don’t have to think about any of it. Just for a while.”

Chiana tilted her head. “It’s another monen ‘til we get back to Hyneria. Just wait… wait a weeken or two before you ask your parents.”

“But…”

“If you still wanna go in two weekens, you’re welcome,” Chiana said. “Just give it a little more time. Maybe… maybe things’ll get better.”

Zee doubted it. But she wasn’t giving up anything by agreeing, and truth be told, she wasn’t looking forward to having this conversation with her parents. “Okay,” she said. “Two weekens.”

It took Zee a few microts to realize why she’d woken up. Moya had gone still. Not just unmoving, but still, inside and out. There were no DRDs chirping faintly in the distance, no hum of internal mechanics, and even the rush of amnexus and hygic fluids had dwindled to a trickle.

Something was wrong.

Zee tapped the nearest bioluminescent bulb once, bringing the lights in the crawlspace to 50 percent. She dug through the accumulated blankets until she found her comm.

“Pilot, what’s going on?”

No answer.

“Pilot?”

Zee punched at the comm, shook it, even tried holding it in different positions, but no matter what she did, neither Pilot nor anyone else answered her.

Something was very wrong.

Suddenly, the Stooges whirred to life. They had been resting comfortably in sleep mode in the back of the crawlspace, but now their eye-stalks were erect, their tiny flashlights glowing. Moe rolled forward and bumped Zee’s knee.

“What’s up?” she whispered, leaning over to examine him. He knocked into her knee again more insistently, then swiveled to face the mouse-hole, where Larry and Curly had gathered.

“You want me to follow you?”

He bumped her knee a third time.

Dad and Mother had drilled Deke and Zee a thousand times on emergency protocols. Fire? Put it out if it’s smaller than your hand; otherwise, get back and comm an adult. Hull breech? Take as deep a breath as you can and run for the nearest door. Intruder on the ship? Hide, and don’t come out unless the space you’re hiding is in immediate danger of becoming lethal. Zee suspected that in this situation, she was meant to stay in the crawlspace.

Moe started tapping a drumbeat on her knee.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m coming.”

Zee wriggled into the back of the crawlspace. Tucked into the corner, half-buried by food wrappers and broken game blobs, was the pulse pistol she’d been carrying when she met Grayza on Farolax. Ordinarily, Mother was strict about keeping pulse pistols in the armory when Deke and Zee weren’t training, but in the aftermath of that day’s chaos, no one had thought to check that Zee put hers back. Zee herself had forgotten about it.

She picked the pistol up, licked the cartridge to make sure it was still good, and followed the Stooges out into the corridor.

They traveled the corridors in formation: Moe in front, leading the way, then Zee, then Larry and Curly on either side of her and a few motras behind. The DRDs made as little noise as possible, forgoing all use of their grips so that the only sound they made was that of their wheels on the floor. Zee followed their lead, walking on the balls of her feet like Mother had taught her.

Moya was eerily dark. The overhead bulbs had gone out completely, something Zee didn’t think had ever happened in her entire life. The only light came from the Stooges’ faint flashlights. Every few microts, Zee looked over her shoulder; she was sure Larry and Curly were on lookout, but the dark made it seem as though someone might come up behind her at any moment.

Through Tier 7, skirting around command and the living quarters, down the maintenance ramp through the amnexus chamber. It was only as they passed the neural cluster that Zee realized that they were taking a very roundabout path to Pilot’s den. They arrived in silence 100 microts later. Everything in the den appeared normal: Pilot was at the controls, the lights were at 50 percent, and when Zee listened closely, she could hear more of Moya’s internal noises than she had outside.

“Pilot!” Zee said.

Pilot held an arm up to his mouth and gestured to the door. Zee closed it behind her.

“Zhaan,” Pilot said. “Thank the stars.”

Zee climbed up onto the control panel and sat cross-legged.

“What’s going on?”

“I believe there to be an intruder on Moya.”

“Who?”

Pilot shook his head. “Moya and I have lost control of most of her systems, including the DRDs. We are unable to surveil anything outside this room. All we know is what Moya can directly feel: We have stopped moving through space. A docking web was deployed 1000 microts ago. And all cell doors have been locked.”

“You think everyone’s locked in their cells?”

“Unless you have seen otherwise, that would be my conclusion.”

Zee’s heart picked up. Moya had been in a few pickles, but never anything like this. This whole situation felt like something out of Dad and Mother’s outlaw days—not something from real life.

And yet, she realized, she had been preparing for a moment like this for cycles. Dad and Mother must have feared—perhaps even expected—that things would go wrong again. That was why they’d taught Deke and Zee to fight, to hide, to run, to look around corners. That was why Zee could hit a half-motra target 10 out of 10 times from 100 paces.

She took a deep breath and felt the floor steady beneath her. She could do this.

“You’re still in control of the Stooges,” Zee said. “Because they’re on a different neural frequency?”

“Yes,” Pilot said. “1812 as well.”

“And the rest of the DRDs, you can’t see through them, but can you feel where they are?”

Pilot inclined his head. “That is one of Moya’s innate sensory functions. Most of the DRDs have deactivated, and are resting in command. Four, however, have clustered together, and are moving through the living quarters.”

“If I take the Stooges, can you use them to direct me toward those four?”

“I can,” Pilot said. “But…”

“But what?”

“I’m not sure I should.” Pilot cupped Zee’s face with his nearest arm. “I do not want anything to happen to you.”

Zee grabbed hold of Pilot’s arm, stroking it as she’d often seen Mother do. “If we’re right, Pilot, I’m the only one who can stop this, whatever it is. I have to go.”

Pilot let his arm drop slowly to the control panel. “You are so like your parents.”

“Does that mean you’ll do it?”

“I will. 1812 will meet you in the neural cluster.”

Zee dropped a kiss onto Pilot’s arm. “Thank you.”

“Be careful, Zhaan.”

Zee dropped to the floor and squared her shoulders, settling into Mother’s stance. You are so like your parents, Pilot had said. Zee didn’t have any of Mother’s DNA, but she was going to pretend otherwise. She thought she might need it out there.

“As careful as I can.”

As promised, 1812 joined them in the neural cluster. They fell into formation once again, with 1812 and Moe leading, and Larry and Curly trailing behind. Zee walked with her pistol out in front of her, and made the DRDs stop and check around corners before they turned. She thought the intruder was with the four active DRDs, but she might be wrong.

Their path, however, was unimpeded. They walked—and rolled—through silent, empty corridors for 500 microts before Moe and 1812 stopped dead, just around the corner from her parents’ quarters.

Zee stepped up to the edge of the corner. She could hear incautious footsteps and the whirring of DRDs heading in her direction, and she raised her pulse pistol into firing position. But the footsteps stopped, and a moment later, lights flared up around the corner.

“Well, I’ll be.” It was Dad’s voice. “If it isn’t Mommie Dearest.”

“Where is Velna?” said another voice, and Zee clapped a hand to her mouth to stop herself from gasping. She knew that voice. It was Grayza’s.

“Her name is Zhaan,” Mother said. “And if you think we’d tell you where she is, you’re stupider than you look.”

“I can make you talk, Crichton,” Grayza said.

Dad laughed, with more actual humor than Zee had heard from him since Farolax. “Goin’ for the golden oldies, Grayza? Gonna play ‘Free Bird’ next?”

“You don’t appreciate the gravity of your situation,” Grayza said. “I am not bluffing.”

“You wanna roofie me, you’ve gotta come in the cell. That puts you within punching distance of my wife.”

A pause. “Nevertheless,” Grayza said, sounding slightly offput, “I hold total command of this vessel, and I only need one person alive to tell me where Velna is. One press of this button, and I could have the DRDs shoot one of you. I could suck the air from the Nebari’s corridor. Or from… D’Argo, yes, that’s his name? From D’Argo’s. You can save your flesh and blood, Officer Sun. You need only turn over mine.”

“Get frelled,” Mother said.

Zee’s mind buzzed. She absolutely couldn’t let Grayza hurt Deke or Chiana or Mother—but getting shot or captured wouldn’t help them. She wished she could see Grayza, but even if Grayza were facing away from her, the DRDs were bound to notice her head if she peeked around the corner.

The DRDs. Grayza had specifically threatened Mother with the DRDs, not a gun. And if her talk of buttons was any indication, she was holding some sort of controller. Did that mean that Grayza wasn’t carrying a personal weapon?

There was no safe way to find out. Zee would just have to hope she was right. She tapped Moe with her foot, and the Stooges and 1812 turned to face her. Hoping beyond hope that Pilot would get the message, she pointed at each of the DRDs, made a pistol with her fingers, and mouthed, Shoot the DRDs.

Slowly, Moe raised and lowered his eye stalks.

Zee turned her pulse pistol setting down to “stun”—she might need Grayza’s help to undo whatever she’d done to Moya, and she wanted to minimize the risk of harming the controller—and swallowed bile. You are so like your parents. She held up three fingers. Then two. Then one.

In a single burst, Zee, the Stooges, and 1812 rounded the corner. The DRDs were already firing as they did; with Pilot and Moya’s senses at their disposal, they didn’t need to see Grayza’s DRDs to target them. Zee, on the other hand, had eyes only for Grayza, standing with her back to Zee, silhouetted by the light from Mother and Dad’s quarters.

At the sound of the first shot, Grayza turned. She was holding a blocky, two-handed controller.

Zee locked her aim on Grayza’s chest and fired.

It was over before Zee had time to process anything at all. Grayza’s DRDs got off a few return shots, but 1812 and the Stooges had the drop on them, and nobody on Zee’s side got so much as singed. Grayza’s DRDs powered down, and Grayza—Grayza dropped like a meteor, and didn’t get back up.

“Zee!”

That was Mother. She and Dad had pressed themselves up against the grate of their quarters. Dad pushed his arm into the corridor, grasping for the controller, but he couldn’t quite reach.

“I’ve got it.” Zee stepped over to Grayza, plucked the controller from her limp hands, and handed it to Dad.

“Thanks,” Dad said.

“Check her…” Mother started, but Zee was already on her knees, checking Grayza for weapons.

“She’s clear.”

“Zee, are you all right?” Mother asked.

“I’m fine,” Zee said. She stared down at Grayza. With her eyes closed, she looked shockingly like Zee. It was amazing, really, that Zee hadn’t seen it immediately on Farolax.

“John? Can you open the doors?”

“Gimme a sec. I don’t want to accidentally turn this corridor into a vacuum.”

Grayza’s eyes blinked open. Zee shot to her feet, aiming her pulse pistol at Grayza.

“Velna,” Grayza whispered. She raised herself slowly to her feet, keeping her hands in the air.

“My name’s not Velna.”

“Stun her again,” Mother said, but Zee didn’t even glance at her parents. Mother had always taught her never to take her eyes off a dangerous target.

“You are Velna Grayza more than you have ever been Zhaan Crichton,” Grayza said. Like Zee, she didn’t spare a glance for Mother and Dad. “It was your first name.”

“It’s Zhaan Sun-Crichton.”

“That is the name that you were given by these outlaws,” Grayza said. “They took you from me. I’ve come to take you back. There need be no violence. Come with me.”

“Just stun her, Zee!”

But Zee could not stun her. There was something powerful and cathartic happening in her head. All of the anger, all the fear, all the hatred and disgust she had felt for her parents and her life and herself in the past monen had come loose, running like a river undammed down to its mouth: the woman standing in front of her.

“You want me to come with you?”

Grayza lowered her hands slightly, so that she was holding them outstretched, as if to welcome Zee into her arms. “I want to know you. I am your mother. I gave birth to you. Painfully. Over many arns. And then you were taken from me.”

“You used me,” Zee said. “As a bargaining chip.”

“I brought you with me. You were in danger from the Peacekeepers as well. I hoped your father would see fit to help us. Instead, he abducted you. Velna—Zhaan, if you like—you are my daughter. I have done all of this, not to harm you, but to retrieve you. You are mine, just as much as you are John Crichton’s, but he has had 15 cycles with you, and I have had none. Come with me. Let me know my daughter.”

Zee’s hands were shaking. Stop it, she thought, and the pistol steadied in front of her. And then, without even thinking about it, she went one step further: She raised the setting from “stun” to “kill.”

“I am not yours,” she said. “I’m not coming with you. You ruined everything. You ‘tpi-aeoh my father!”

Grayza let her arms fall to her sides. “You say I ruined everything, but I am the reason you exist.”

“You are…” Zee started, but she had no answer. She gripped the pulse pistol tighter. She could do it. She wanted to do it.

“Zee,” Mother said. “Please. Just stun her.”

Zee had never heard Mother sound like she did right now. Afraid. Not even on Farolax had she sounded this frightened. She had seen, then, when Zee had changed the setting on the pistol. Zee let her eyes flit to her parents’ quarters for a fraction of a microt. Mother was pressed up to the grate. Dad was on the bed, fiddling frantically with the controller.

“She thinks I’m hers,” Zee said. “She tracked me down. Took over Moya. Threatened Deke. If she lives, won’t she try it again?”

Grayza stepped back, but she didn’t look half as afraid as Mother sounded.

“It may be that Grayza has to die,” Mother said. “But it shouldn’t be you that does it.”

Zee looked down the line of her pistol at Grayza’s forehead. It should be her. Grayza was everything evil inside of Zee, and it only made sense.

And she wanted to.

“Zee!” Mother shouted. “For once in your life, please. Please listen to me.”

Zee glanced back at her mother one more time. “Okay,” she said. “I’m listening.”

“I was raised as a Peacekeeper, you know that. I had no parents. I had no siblings. I loved and was loved by no one. When I was your age, I had already killed people. My dearest ambition was to learn to fly a Prowler so that I could kill more. It was the coldest, emptiest life imaginable. And every single thing your father and I have done, since the moment you came to us, was to make your life as different from that as possible. Everything we have ever done was to prevent you from ever having to make a choice like this.”

The grate slid open. Dad must have worked out the controller. Mother stepped slowly out into the corridor, approaching Zee at a skilnek’s pace.

“Please, Zee. Choose to be my daughter. Choose to let me protect you.”

Mother was in Zee’s line of sight, now. She was crying. She held out her hands.

“Give me the pulse pistol.”

Zee looked from Mother on her left, her hands outstretched, to Grayza, pressed up against the wall. And made the only choice she could.

She handed Mother the gun.

Immediately, Mother spun to face Grayza, springing into firing position. Dad ran past both of them and threw his arms around Zee. Suddenly feeling very faint, Zee let herself collapse against him. She heard her parents talking as if through a plate of glass.

“Take her to Scorpy’s old cell,” Dad was saying. “I’ll lock it down for you.”

And then Mother and Grayza were gone, and Dad and Zee were alone in the corridor, huddled together on the floor. How had they gotten there? Zee didn’t remember sitting down.

“Hey, kiddo,” Dad said, kissing her on the temple. “It’s okay. You did good.”

“I did?”

“You’re a rock star, Zee. A superhero.” Dad paused. “Do you think you can walk for a bit?”

Zee nodded, and let Dad help her shakily to her feet. He slung an arm around her waist and guided her along the corridor. Zee leaned on him as much as she could; she couldn’t really feel her legs.

In the galley, Dad pushed her down into a chair and gave her a cup of water and a handful of food cubes. She stared at them; she didn’t feel substantial enough to do real-world things like eat.

“At least drink the water,” Dad said. “You’re in shock.”

Zee raised the cup to her lips, spilling some on the way up. Her hands were shaking again.

“Is Mother going to kill Grayza?”

Dad sank into the chair opposite her. “Yeah, she is. You were right about Grayza. She’s not gonna stop chasing you.”

Zee nodded. She was, she thought, past feeling anything. It was hard enough sipping water without spilling; she simply didn’t have the wherewithal to feel sad or horrified or even happy that Grayza was going to die.

“Where are Deke and Chiana?” she said, suddenly registering the absence of the rest of the family. “Are they okay?”

“They’re fine,” Dad said. “I commed them on the way here. Didn’t you hear?”

Thinking back, Zee realized she couldn’t remember any of the walk over. “I guess I missed it.”

Zee gulped her water. Her hands shook even harder, and suddenly, she was starving. She stuffed a food cube in her mouth, then another. When they were all gone, she felt better. Not back to her normal self—what even was her normal self, these days?—but stronger. Clearer.

“How does that thing work?” Zee said, nodding at the controller.

“It’s a Trojan horse,” Dad said. Zee stared at him blankly. “It means it uses a beacon on board Moya to interface with her neural systems and cut off control.”

“A beacon on Moya? Where?”

“If I had to guess,” Dad said, “on you.”

“What do you mean, on me?”

Dad stood up and rummaged through one of the drawers where they stashed odds and ends. “When Grayza saw you on Farolax, did she touch you?”

“She grabbed my arms.”

“Your upper arms?” Dad said. He pulled an old pair of oculars from the detritus in the drawer and put them on.

“Yeah.”

Dad leaned down next to Zee so that his nose was nearly touching her skin. He ran his gaze slowly up her arm.

“Aha,” he said. He took off the oculars and fitted them on Zee’s head. “Here, have a look.”

Zee focused on the patch of skin on her left arm that he was pointing at. At first, she saw nothing, so she bent down closer. As her eye neared her skin, she saw it: A tiny, spidery metal dot, latched on to her arm.

“She put that on me?”

“Seems like,” Dad said. He pulled a bottle from a nearby cupboard and used it to wet a rag. “Nanobot. Water-resistant. It’s probably been mapping Moya’s systems for weekens.”

“So it wasn’t an accident that she met us on Farolax. She knew we would be there.”

“That’d be my guess.” Dad ran the rag firmly down Zee’s arm. “There. Take a look for me, would you? Did I get it?”

Zee peered down at the rag. The nanobot wriggled on the edge of the cloth, sizzling slightly. “You got it.”

“Bimra vinegar. Dissolves most water-resistant adhesives. It’s also great on French fries.”

“How did she know where we were?”

“You mom and I thought she might be in contact with Peacekeepers, but this was no Peacekeeper attack. Peacekeepers bring guns, for one thing. But it wouldn’t be too hard to track us down, even without help. Your mom and I, we’ve got a reputation.”

Zee swirled the dregs of her water around. “Are we in danger? I mean, if we’re that easy to find…”

Dad dropped into the seat across from her. “I don’t want to scare you.”

“Then answer my question.”

“God, you are…” Dad laughed. “You are something else. It’s not an easy question to answer, Zee. I have enemies. We have enemies, and it might seem like they’re all gone, but I guess tonight shows they’re not. But we also have allies, now, which we never used to have. Your Uncle Rygel, the Eidolons. And there are political reasons why the Peacekeepers have to at least publically have our backs. So we’re careful, yeah, but we also have to live our lives.”

Never in Zee’s life had she gotten an answer quite like that from her father. She’d spent 14—no, 15—cycles questioning him about the time before she was born, but even when he’d answered her, he’d always given her the safe version of the truth. This answer, though, seemed closer to what she and Deke came up with when they cobbled together her interrogations and his eavesdropping. But now it came straight, as Dad would say, from the horse’s mouth.

If these were the kinds of answers she was going to get, maybe Zee could stand to start asking questions again.

“Aeryn,” Dad said.

Zee twisted around in her seat. Mother had arrived in the galley. She made her way to the table and sat down next to Zee.

“It’s done,” she said.

“You killed her?” Zee said.

“Yes.” Mother frowned at her. “Are you all right?”

It was strange, given all that had just happened, but Zee felt more right than she had in weekens. She had a vague sense that that might go away soon, but for now, she was sitting with her parents, talking to them, and it didn’t feel like the walls were caving in.

“I’m okay,” Zee said.

Mother wrapped a hand around Zee’s head and stroked her hair soothingly. “You should get some rest.”

There was no way Zee was getting back to sleep. Not when the questions seemed to finally have come unlocked in her head. “Are you glad she’s dead?”

Mother leveled an eye at her. “Are you?”

“I asked first.”

“Yes,” Mother said. “I’m glad she’s dead. But you understand, don’t you, that that’s not why I killed her?”

Zee nodded. “What about you, Daddy?” she said. By the time she realized she’d used her childhood name for him, Dad had started answering.

“I don’t know what I am. I’m relieved that she can’t hurt us anymore. Beyond that… I guess I’ll find out when I find out.”

Dad ducked his head, and Zee remembered the way he’d looked the night she’d eavesdropped on his and Mother’s conversation, sagging into the table.

“What was it like, when I first came?”

“What do you mean?” Dad said.

“A few weekens ago, I was coming to get a snack, and I overheard you guys talking. You said that Grayza had frelled everything up again. So she frelled everything up the first time when she brought me to Moya, right? So how did things get frelled up, exactly?”

Mother and Dad looked at each other, silently strategizing.

“Just answer me, please,” Zee said.

“When Grayza brought you here,” Dad said, starting out slowly and picking up speed with every word, “it wasn’t the first time she frelled things up, strictly speaking. She’d been frelling things up off and on for years. And it wasn’t just her, either. There were… other things.”

“Scorpius?” Zee guessed.

“It’s a long story.”

“I can handle it.”

“I know you can,” Dad said, looking from her to Mother and back again. “If you want to know… anything, if there’s anything you want to know, we’ll tell you. Right?”

“Anything,” Mother agreed. “But it’s not the kind of story you can tell all in one night.”

“Then tell me the parts about Grayza. Tell me the parts about me. Please. I need to know that stuff now. I can’t wait.”

Mother took one more long look at Zee and nodded curtly. “Grayza was a Peacekeeper commandant,” she said without preamble. “We first crossed paths with her when we were trying to take down Scorpius. She learned of your father’s wormhole knowledge and pursued him relentlessly.”

“I know that part,” Zee said, “Dad told me, on the transport pod.”

“You want to know what happened when you came into the picture,” Dad said. He hung his head, then let his gaze rise on a breath to meet Zee’s eyes. “It wasn’t easy. When Grayza showed up with you, I still hadn’t told your mother what she’d done.”

“She didn’t know?”

“I wasn’t on Moya when it happened,” Mother said. “Your father and I were having some issues, and I’d taken some time away to… process my feelings.”

This, of all things, pierced Zee’s shock. She’d never known her parents as anything other than a stable unit. The idea of a Moya without Mother simply didn’t compute.

“And when she came back, things were… complicated,” Dad said, either ignoring or not noticing Zee’s shock. “It was just easier not to bring it up. Boy, did that bite me in the ass.”

“Was it bad? When you found out about me?”

“It was…” Dad looked at Mother, as if he didn’t know the answer, and she might. But Mother said nothing. “Yeah,” Dad said eventually. “It was bad. I had to tell your mom about Grayza, and she was pissed I hadn’t told her.”

“I wasn’t pissed,” Mother said, getting the English right through long practice. “I was upset. About what happened to you, and the fact that I wasn’t there when it did, and the fact that you didn’t trust me enough to tell me.”

“It wasn’t about…”

“I know,” Mother said. “We’ve been through this all before, many times. I’m only telling Zee, so she can understand.”

“I don’t, though,” Zee said. “Why didn’t you tell Mother?”

Dad sighed, in that way he had that seemed to let out as much disappointment as it did breath. “Shame. A little bit of fear at how she’d take it. And mostly I just didn’t want to talk about it. If I didn’t tell your mom, I could pretend it never happened.”

“But then I came, and you couldn’t pretend.”

“That’s about the sum of it.”

Zee swallowed. No tears tonight. “If you could go back and make it not have happened…”

“No,” Dad said before she could finish the question. “Not for a second. Not if it meant losing you.”

“But when you did the genetic scan to make sure I was your child… If I’d asked you then…”

Dad reached out and clasped Zee’s hands in his, just as he had weekens ago, on the transport pod from Farolax. “Zee, one thing I’ve learned—something you’ll learn, when your mom and I tell you the whole whole story of what happened before you were born—one thing I’ve learned the hard way is that you’re not one person your whole life. The universe changes you, and if you try to go back to a place you’ve been before, you usually don’t fit. The guy who sat in the maintenance bay, waiting to hear if you were his kid, he doesn’t exist anymore. You changed him. And this guy, right here? I’m your father. And I would never want anything that took you from me.”

Zee’s resolve broke. One tear slipped the escape horizon of her eye, then another, then another, until she was crying, really crying, into her mother’s warm, solid shoulder.

Mother’s arms wrapped around her, and Zee thought that maybe it was okay to cry. Just this once.

Zee slept for fourteen arns that night. When she woke up, breakfast and lunch had already been eaten, and Dad had filled Deke and Chiana in on the previous night’s events.

“I can’t believe you got real combat experience before me,” Deke said, watching Zee shovel leftover grolak into her mouth.

“That’s what you’re taking from this?” Zee said, rolling her eyes.

“I’m just saying, if one of us was going to take down an intruder…”

“I saved your life, nurfer!” She kicked him under the table.

Deke scooted out of her way, laughing. “Seriously, though,” he said, as he calmed down. “Can I ask?”

“Of course,” Zee said, after a moment. The careful collection and inspection of information was Deke and Zee’s shared passion. They had always been a team, working together to unearth every secret they could. What one of them witnessed, the other learned. Always.

Except for Chiana’s secret, Zee thought, and for a moment, the thought made her sad—that this was something that would always divide her from Deke, even as it brought her closer to Chiana. But maybe growing up meant growing secrets. Maybe only children could tell one person everything.

Or maybe not. Zee wrapped the thought up in her sadness and tucked them both away for further consideration.

“What was it like?”

Zee chewed the inside of her cheek. “It was like… I don’t know. Scary. Not like when Mother and Dad tell their stories, not fun scary, but really, really scary. But honestly that wasn’t the worst part, because I had all their training, and I knew. I was the only one who could do anything, so fear didn’t matter. I had to do it anyway.”

“What was the worst part?” Deke asked.

“After,” Zee said. “When Grayza was disarmed, and I… I didn’t know what…”

Deke stared at her, hanging on her next word like it was the ending of a mystery holo. But Zee didn’t know how the sentence ended either.

“Just, after,” Zee said, finally.

“Oh.” Deke looked down at his hands, disappointed.

“I’m not trying to hide it from you, I just don’t know what to say.”

“I get it,” Deke said, although Zee suspected that he didn’t.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “Mother and Dad told me after that they would tell me anything.”

“Anything?”

“Anything I want to know.”

“About Grayza?”

“About anything.” She grinned. “Want to help me hold them to their word?”

Deke’s face lit up.

They spent the afternoon making a list. It started with the big questions, the obvious ones, the ones they’d argued over pretty much since they were old enough to talk. How did Dad know about wormholes? Who was Scorpius, and what made him dangerous? How had Mother left the Peacekeepers?

Then they moved on to questions inspired by last night’s revelations. Why had Mother left Moya? What had been going on, at the time Zee was born, that had made things so difficult? Why did Scorpius have his own cell on Moya?

After that, they dug back into cycles of unanswered questions, details they’d wondered and forgotten about, subjects they hadn’t bothered to probe their parents about. How had the original D’Argo and Zhaan died? Who were the other people they’d heard their parents mention, Sikozu and Jool and Stark and Crais and Talyn? Why had Dad gone so weird and quiet the time they’d purchased fannik wool from the Royal Planet? Why did Mother and Uncle Rygel always drink together on the same day every cycle? What in the galaxy was a “Maldis”?

They wrote down all of their questions, and after dinner, Zee looked her dad square in the eye and said, “Dad. It’s time for us to talk.”

The five of them—Chiana came too, of course—settled down in the pilot’s den, so that Pilot could participate. Pilot rested one arm around Zee’s shoulders while he punched buttons on his console with another, and Zee noticed, for the first time, that she knew what the buttons did in that sequence, even though she’d never been taught. She added the question to her list.

It was a long conversation—longer, really, than the four arns they sat in the pilot’s den, longer than the weeken left on the way to Arnessk, longer than all the cycles that Zee lived on Moya. In one way or another, it was a conversation that lasted the rest of her parents’ lives.

But that day, Mother and Dad and Chiana and Pilot answered every single question on Deke and Zee’s list, and several more they hadn’t thought to ask. It was not an easy conversation, but it was fascinating, and at times, much happier than Zee or Deke had ever anticipated. Mixed up in all the bad times, all the awful secrets, there were good times that their parents had never told them about. The funny stories could not be so cleanly separated from the horrific.

“And then D’Argo…” Dad was laughing so hard that he had to stop for a moment. “D’Argo goes, ‘Yes. No. Bite me.’ Just every single word Chiana taught him, all in a row.”

Everyone laughed, even Pilot, and Chiana elbowed Dad lightly in the ribs. “You weren’t even there, fekkik. You were off flirting with your old girlfriend.”

“She was sixteen,” Dad said, rolling his eyes. “I didn’t flirt with her.”

“Okay, but she… but she flirted with you.”

“Well, I did look a whole lot like her boyfriend.”

They all laughed again, and as Mother moved on to another story, about another one of Dad’s old girlfriends, Chiana leaned over and blew gently on Zee’s ear. Zee squirmed, giggling.

“How you doing?” Chiana whispered.

“I’m okay,” Zee said, and meant it.

“Have you thought any more about… about Hyneria?”

Zee turned and threw her arms around Chiana. She spoke into her ear, letting Chiana’s soft white hair tickle her face.

“Thank you so much for saying I could stay with you,” Zee whispered. “But I don’t think I need to. Not right now.”

Someday, perhaps, Zee would spend a summer on Hyneria with Chiana. Someday, she would move off Moya entirely, to live with the Eidolons, or the Interions, or perhaps even independent Sebaceans. Someday, she would build whole cities. Someday, she would build a family of her own.

But today, she was in the heart of her living ship, laughing with her mother and father. Today, this was where she was meant to be.