Aya’s lower lip quivered. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
‘Use the cloth, please.’
Aya gave her nose a perfunctory rub. ‘I don’t know why they – why they – I hate Opal. I hate her!’ Her words were ragged now. Angry.
Tessa raised her eyebrows. ‘Opal was involved in this?’ She didn’t even try to keep the edge out of her voice.
Aya nodded hard. ‘Palmer, too. I hate him also.’
Aya’s most frequent playmates – or they had been, before this. Their parents were going to get hell incarnate on their doorsteps before the day was out, but for the time being, Tessa put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders and squeezed. ‘Tell me what they did,’ she said.
‘Opal told everybody that I’m scared of – that I’m scared of outside. Etty told me that was stupid, and Palmer said I was a baby, and – and they kept being mean, and I told them to stop it but they didn’t, and then—’ The sobs started again.
Tessa put both her arms around Aya now, and let her cry. She knew what had come next. The little bastards had shoved her in a cargo drone port, closed the door, and made her think they were going to pop the hatch. They didn’t have the auth codes for it, but Aya didn’t know that. Her screaming was what brought one of the nearby mech techs running.
‘I hate them,’ Aya said again. ‘I’m not going to school anymore.’
That . . . okay, that wasn’t on the table, but Tessa didn’t think it was the time to argue. ‘They did a horrible thing to you, honey,’ she said. ‘I am so, so sorry.’
‘Why did they do that?’ It was a genuine question, brittle with betrayal.
‘I don’t know. Sometimes . . . sometimes kids think it’s funny to be mean to each other.’ Tessa reached back to the times she’d been teased, to the times she’d teased in response or for no reason at all. ‘I don’t know why.’
‘It wasn’t funny.’
‘No, it most definitely was not funny.’
‘And I hate living on a ship.’
Tessa blinked. This turn wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it surprised her nonetheless. ‘I know you’re scared of outside, but our home is so good. Yeah? It’s safe here. You’re safe with me, and your grandpa, and our hexmates, and our friends—’
‘I hate it.’
‘You know those kids couldn’t have opened the hatch, right? There are codes that—’
‘I don’t want to live on a ship anymore. I want to live on a planet.’
Tessa sighed. ‘Planets have dangerous things, too.’
Aya wiped her nose with her sleeve. She pulled close to her mother, away from the walls, away from the emptiness outside. ‘Not like here.’
Tessa searched for the right response, the right comfort, some of that motherly instinct bullshit you were supposed to just have. She found nothing.
Aya sniffled mightily and said: ‘Can I say a swear word?’
Tessa remembered a couple tendays prior, when she’d knocked a mug of mek onto her workbench while repairing a cleanerbot. A cascade of profanities had exited her mouth before she’d noticed the kids had entered the room. Don’t say stuff like that, Tessa had told them at the time. I only said it because I was mad. She’d spent several days after trying to make Ky stop gleefully chanting ‘son of a bitch’ – and had won that particular skirmish – but hadn’t realised Aya sponged up a lesson from the exchange, too. ‘Yes,’ Tessa said. ‘This is a time when a swear word is entirely appropriate.’
Aya took a breath. ‘I fucking hate them,’ she said. ‘I’m gonna kick all their asses.’
Tessa smothered the laugh pressing against her lips. She gave a serious nod. ‘That was two swear words.’
‘Well, I’m really mad.’
‘And you know fighting solves nothing, right?’
‘Ugh, Mom.’ Aya rolled her bloodshot eyes. ‘I didn’t mean like that. I just meant . . . I meant . . .’
‘I know.’ Tessa put her arm around her daughter and kissed the top of her head. ‘I want to kick all their asses, too.’
Eyas
Sunny had become a habit, and Eyas didn’t know what to make of that. It wasn’t romance, she knew that much. Romance had never been her thing. She watched him as he traced the path back from the bed to where his pants had ended up. He picked up the rumpled pair and dug around in a pocket. ‘Do you mind if I . . . ?’ he asked, holding a retrieved redreed pipe and an accompanying tin.
Eyas shook her head. ‘Not at all.’ He’d never done this before, and she found it endearing. This wasn’t part of a seductive script. There was nothing in this for her. The man wanted a smoke. On the clock though he was, something had shifted enough for him to feel comfortable not spending every second entertaining her. They were just . . . hanging out now. She liked that.
He returned to bed, leaving the pants where they’d been. ‘Do you want some?’
‘Not really my thing.’ She reached for his bottle of Laru kick, an ever-present part of these evenings. ‘This, however, is.’
Sunny nodded as he filled his pipe. ‘Help yourself.’
He puffed; she poured. They sat side by side, leaning against propped pillows, close enough to feel the warm brush of the other’s bare skin but nowhere in the realm of a cuddle. Eyas felt perfectly at ease. No pretence, no bullshit. No ‘M.’ She felt like herself, nothing more or less. Judging by the content neutrality on Sunny’s face, he felt the same.
It was really nice.
‘Is this what you always wanted to be?’ Eyas asked, cupping her glass in the palm of her hand. Sintalin benefited from a bit of warmth, she’d learned.
Sunny exhaled. The smoke twisted up toward the air filter above. ‘You mean, a host?’ His face shifted into a far-away smile. ‘Not my first choice. I was going to be a Monster Maker.’
‘A what now?’
‘A Monster Maker! Didn’t you play that sim?’
‘Oh, stars.’ Eyas shut her eyes and laughed. ‘I’d forgotten about that. Where you go around the galaxy scanning different animals to . . . collect their DNA, or something.’
‘Yeah! And then you smash them together to make hybrids!’
‘This was for some superficially educational purpose, right?’
‘Yeah, yeah, you did it to solve problems. Say, like – say you’ve got to cross a flooded area. You’ve got DNA scans for something with long legs, and scans for something that can move through water. You punch ’em both into your Monsteriser—’
‘Your—’
‘Your Monsteriser. Eyas, please, this is serious technology we’re discussing.’
‘Of course, I’m sorry.’ She swallowed her smile. ‘Please explain how a Monsteriser works.’
‘Well . . . I can’t, but that’s beside the point. The point is, it makes a monster. It is the most crucial tool a Monster Maker has.’ He bowed his head. ‘It was a very, very hard day when my dad broke the news that none of it was real.’
Eyas patted his shoulder. ‘My condolences.’
Sunny scrunched his face into a parody of grief. ‘Thank you.’
‘So once you got over the shock,’ she said, ‘you decided the only thing left for you was a life of getting people off.’