‘How do you know that?’ Aya said. It was a direct challenge, a question that demanded an answer.
‘I—’
‘She doesn’t,’ Pop said. ‘She wants you to feel better.’
Tessa glared at her father. ‘How is that helping?’
He shrugged. ‘She wants the truth, Tess. She’s old enough to understand what happened, so she’s old enough for – hey, hey, quit it, buddy.’ He turned his attention to his grandson, who was pulling hard at his remaining hair.
His refuting her in front of her daughter was irritating, but he was – all the more irritatingly – right. Tessa folded her hands together and spoke to her daughter, who was growing up too fast. ‘I don’t know that it won’t happen again. I’m bothered by it, and I’m scared, too. But I also know that . . . that kind of thing isn’t normal here. Our home is a safe place, Aya. It really is.’
‘That’s not—’ Aya struggled. She understood so much, and yet, not quite enough to pick apart her feelings. ‘I’m not scared about it happening again.’
‘Then what?’
‘I’m not scared.’ She frowned harder. ‘You said we can’t go live on a planet because bad stuff happens there. But – but bad stuff does happen here. I don’t understand why we can’t live on the ground if bad stuff happens here, too. If it happens everywhere, then . . . then it’s everywhere.’
Aya’s words were clumsy, but Tessa understood. Every lesson she’d tried to impart was based in principle, rather than practicality. No, we can’t move planetside, because it’s too dangerous. No, you can’t have creds, because you need to learn to trade. No, you can’t watch Martian vids, because they solve every problem with violence, and that’s not our way. No, you can’t keep all the cookies to yourself, they belong to the hex, and you have to share, because we share. That’s what we do. That’s who we are.
But now there was one news story, one unpleasant headline, that had thrown all that out of whack. There was danger in the Fleet, and it came from people who hadn’t cared about trade, who hadn’t minded violence – and those people were Exodan. That was the part that bothered Tessa the most. Everybody was so focused on the grounder, they sidestepped the one sentence that had shaken her: the patrols were pretty sure the dead guy’s crew was Exodan, and would anybody who knew anything please come forward?
She looked at her daughter, bags packed, brow furrowed. Her daughter, who didn’t understand that rooms cost money, who had unabashedly called on extended family for help when she lacked the ability to trade. Fear was the primary driver for Aya wanting to be elsewhere, despite how not scared she claimed to be. But maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe it wasn’t that Aya didn’t want to be Exodan. She was Exodan already.
Maybe, in her daughter’s eyes, it was the Fleet that wasn’t Exodan anymore.
‘I think,’ Tessa said, getting to her feet, ‘I think we could do with something out of the ordinary this evening. How about . . . fish fry for dinner?’
Aya looked suspicious. ‘We only do that on birthdays.’
‘Well, I want to treat my kid. Is that allowed?’
Tessa watched her daughter wrestle between a nagging existential problem and the promise of greasy, crispy, calorie-laden food. ‘Can we go to the waterball game, too?’ she said.
‘Is there a game tonight?’ Tessa asked her father.
He nodded. ‘Fast Hands versus Meteors,’ he said. ‘Just a scrimmage, not a qualifier.’
‘Still, that sounds fun,’ Tessa said. She wasn’t much for waterball, but for her kid, she’d put up with a scrimmage. She smiled. ‘Sure. We can go to the game.’
‘Looks like it’s you and me tonight, buddy,’ Pop said to Ky, who was dozing off on his shoulder.
‘No,’ Tessa said. ‘No, we should all go.’ She took in her family, the mess, the room that had been hers. ‘It’s more fun if we go together.’
Eyas
Eyas hurried into the Centre, her heart a touch lighter. Her supervisor hadn’t said anything over the vox except that patrol was there and wanted to talk to the grounder’s caretaker. That had to mean progress. The stasis chamber holding the corpse had been left undisturbed since she’d cleaned the body over a tenday ago. Finally, finally patrol had found something. They’d found someone to take him home.
She headed to one of the family waiting rooms, where she’d asked for patrol to wait for her. The door swung open at her gesture, and a woman wearing a distinctive shoulder patch sat on one of the couches inside.
The patroller stood. ‘Hello, M. I’m Patroller Ruby Boothe,’ she said. ‘I understand you’re the one looking after Sawyer Gursky.’ She was full-time, her patch indicated, but oddly, she didn’t have a volunteer second with her. Under any other circumstances, Eyas would’ve reported her, but in this case, she got the impression the absence was for discretion’s sake. Perhaps the patroller didn’t want to stoke the gossip further. If so, Eyas respected that.
The addition of a last name to Sawyer’s first should’ve kept Eyas’ mood aloft, but the grim look on the woman’s face prompted a spike of concern. ‘You found his family?’
The twitch of Patroller Boothe’s mouth said otherwise. She gestured for Eyas to sit, then pulled out her scrib. ‘Sawyer Gursky,’ she read. ‘Twenty-four Solar years of age, born on Mushtullo, no siblings. We had to do some digging, but he’s a descendant of the Arvelo family on the Al-Qaum. Housing records say they left to grab some ground right after contact.’
‘No relations here, then?’ This wasn’t a surprise, given what Sawyer had said during their brief interaction, but she’d been hoping she remembered wrong.
‘No.’ Boothe cleared her throat. ‘We don’t have much communication with anybody in Central space, so it took a while to find the proper folks to talk to. Local law enforcement helped us out in the end.’ She was dancing around something. Whatever it was, it bothered her. ‘There was an outbreak of saltlick fever that tore through the Human district on Mushtullo about thirteen standards ago.’
‘I don’t know saltlick fever.’
‘Neither did I. One of those wildfire mutations you hear about from time to time. Some minor alien thing that jumps species and fucks everyone over for a few tendays until imubots can be updated. I’ll spare you the details. It was . . . well, it was bad. He lost his whole family. Grandparents, parents, everybody. Sawyer was the only one that made it.’
Eyas converted standards to Solars. ‘He would’ve been . . . what? Six?’
‘’Round about.’
‘Stars.’ She frowned. ‘Why did he remain on Mushtullo, then? He must have had relatives elsewhere.’
The patroller shrugged. ‘I have no idea. Maybe they weren’t close. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe they didn’t care. Grounders, y’know?’
Eyas didn’t care for that assumption. She gave a noncommittal ‘mmm’ and waited for Boothe to get to the point.
‘Anyway, we couldn’t find much about him, but based on his bank records and known addresses, it looks like he bounced around until adulthood – some kind of foster home setup, or friends, maybe. I don’t know. He worked a bunch of odd jobs, then he wound up here.’
Eyas sighed. Trying something new. ‘So who’d he record as his next of kin?’
‘That’s the shitty bit,’ the patroller said. She tossed her scrib onto the table between them. ‘He didn’t.’