A wave crashed against a rock and sent up fine spray into True's face. She ducked away and fell on her butt. Blinking salt water out of her stinging eyes, she straightened up, swiping wet sand off her behind, before squatting down again and wrapping her arms around her legs. She went back to studying the weird green sort of crab in the shallow tidal pool, muttering observations into her gear, which was set to record. The crab-thing waved a claw at her, as if saying, Go away! Quit bothering me! She grinned.

"Whatcha lookin' at?" Uly asked from behind her.

"Don't know," True said, annoyed.

"C'n I see?" Without waiting for an answer, Uly crouched down beside her. "Euw, gross. Do those pinch?" He reached out, and the claws nipped. "Ow!"

"Guess so," True said, grinning again. "You bleeding?"

"Nuh-uh." Uly pouted over his reddened fingers.

"Um, the claws aren't sharp on the inside," True told her gear. "I don't think, anyway. But they look strong." She pulled a hand inside her jacket sleeve and reached down into the pool to pick it up. Julia said sometimes things like this oozed poison. Secreted, True corrected herself. Oozed wasn't very scientific. "Go wash your hands," she said over her shoulder.

He did, then came back. "Is this for Julia?"

"Uh-huh."

"Can I help?"

"You are so annoying."

"Well?"

She let out a noise and said, "Wrap up your hands. Hold it like this--here. Don't let it pinch you again." She turned her voice recorder off.

"I'm not." He took it carefully and squinted at the claws it waved.

True scooted backwards slightly and sat back on a mostly dry rock. She shaded her eyes against the ferocious glitter of the waves, like someone had thrown handfuls of ground glass out into the water. The sun beat down on her head and shoulders, and when she pushed her hair out of her face, the top of her head felt hot. The wind off the sea was almost cold, though--it would be Moon Cross in a few weeks, the beginning of winter.

She looked over her shoulder at O'Neill Point, which bulged out and up from the land, hundreds of feet high. A mile up the beach, Singh Point formed an almost-twin to O'Neill, rising higher but not as far out into the water.

Someone shouted to her--"Hey there!"--and she waved back, battling a blush that nobody would see anyway. Baines and Walman were bringing in the morning's catch, the little one-sail fishing boat bobbing wildly in the open sea before gliding into the calmer waters of Virginia Inlet. They would offload it, eat lunch, and spend the afternoon cutting the fish they'd caught. She thought about joining them, but the chance to hang around Walman lost out to the reality of fish guts.

She flexed her toes in the cool sand and took a deep breath of sea air, salty and fishy and fresh and wild.

Ever since she'd gotten on this planet, she thought she loved every new place best, but New Pacifica was really the best. Sometimes she thought it might be nice to go back to the desert, with its oven heat and tough, gnarled plant life (her dad said she was bonkers if she missed that, but she did), or the mountains, with their caps of snow and about one square foot of level ground in the whole place, or the savannah, broad plains of grass that went on forever. But she would come back here, to the sea and the forests, the cliffs and the caves.

Her toes were getting a little cold, so she washed her feet free of sand and stuck her shoes back on. "Uly?"

"Uh-huh."

"Do you ever think . . ." She chewed her lip. She'd been thinking this, but preparing to say it out loud, it sounded sort of stupid. "Do you ever think maybe there's places people are meant to be?"

Uly looked up from the crab-thing, blinking at her a little. "What do you mean?"

True reached over and took the creature back. It was looking dried-out and unhappy, so she set it gently back in the pool. It sank in and started scuttling away. "I mean, like, you just belong."

"Like here?" Uly plumped back in the wet sand, looking around and breathing in the way she had.

"I guess."

He thought that over, and she looked at him. If anyone ever belonged someplace right away, it was Uly, and the place was G889.

"Know what I think?" he said finally.

Boy, did that beg for a snarky remark. True couldn't think of one right away, so she just said, "What?"

He looked over his shoulder at her. "I think," he said very seriously, "that you 'n' me, we always belonged here."

She looked at him skeptically. "Always?"

He nodded. "Even when we were back on the stations. We were really supposed to be here." He drew up his legs, wrapping his arms around them. "Maybe that's why I had the Syndrome," he said. "I was missing G889 so bad it made me sick."

"Okay," True said, pointing at him. "That's just making things up. How would you even know about G889 to miss it?" It was a neat idea, but it didn't make any sense.

He shrugged. "I dunno. I said maybe."

"And anyway, what about me? I didn't have the Syndrome. Your theory is unsound," she said loftily.

He threw wet sand at her. She shrieked, chucked a handful back, and they had a sandfight for a few minutes until Uly got some in his eye. "Ow! Ow! Owwww! Quit!"

"Stop rubbing! You'll grind it in! Hold still, let me--"

"Hey, that's cold!"

Once the sand was all washed out, they sat down again. Putting her emptied water bottle back in her pack, True found some bread wrapped up in plastic, which she split in half and shared with him as a silent apology.

He munched cheerfully, forgiving her right away. "But really," he said with his mouth full. "It's going to be so cool when all the other kids get here, and the Terrians fix them. Aren't you excited? Any day now," he said, echoing what his mom told him every time he asked when the colony ship was getting here. "Any day."

True didn't say anything. She'd never told Uly how on the stations, other kids usually didn't like her. They said she was weird, and bossy, and too boylike. Which was so not true.

Maybe a little.

But she saw no reason that the kids coming to G889 should be any different from the kids on the stations. They'd be worse, even. At least the kids she'd known on the stations had been drone kids, too. Her dad said these would probably be a bunch of top and mid-level kids. Their parents could afford units that weren't cramped little cubes, and they didn't know what it was like to put magazine pictures on the walls because it cost too much to buy fancy holo-screens that showed different windows every day.

True bit down on the end of her braid. She wasn't a drone anymore. Dad said they were out of debt because of Devon. And even if they had still been in debt, they were staying here, so it didn't matter. The stations were twenty-two years away, and the memories of cold, blocky steel and cramped units seemed dim and unreal. Here, everyone was going to live in the dorms until they got houses built, no matter what level they'd lived on in the stations. When they built the houses, they were all going to be big. Huge. And nobody would even need holo-screens, because they would have real windows that showed the real world outside, and instead of just looking, they could go out the door and run around.

"What about the healthy kids?" she asked. "I bet they won't like it. I bet they'll whine."

"No, they won't," Uly said cheerfully. The red in his eye was fading already.

"I bet they're scared of everything."

"So what? You were too."

"Was not."

"You screamed all the time," he said. "At everything. Bugs and rocks and birds--"

"You take that back."

He leapt to his feet and darted off. "Make me!" floated down the beach.

She raced after him, managing to forget the threat of more kids in New Pacifica. She was catching up when he skidded to a halt, spraying sand in front of him, and grabbed his gear. She jogged to a stop and thought about splashing him while he wasn't paying attention.

Before she could go down to the water and grab a handful, Uly said, "Yuh-huh. She's here. Yeah." He looked at her. "How come you turned your gear off?" he wanted to know.

Ooops. She'd shut it all the way off, not just the recorder. "'Cause I felt like it," she said, reaching up to flick it on.

"--are holding in orbit," Devon said. "True, there you are."

"Orbit?" True said. "Who?"

"The colony ship!" Uly yelled, jumping up and down on the sand. "It's here! It's here!"

True went cold.

Devon laughed. "Settle down, honey, they've still got to land. Come on up into town, both of you. We're going to need your help."

"'Kay." Uly switched off and grabbed her hand. "Come on! Let's go!"

"My bag," True said, jogging back for it. Slinging it over one shoulder, she dashed up the beach again, the pack bumping against one hip. "You got everything?" she yelled at Baines and Walman, who were dumping their fish into cold storage containers and piling those in the coolness of a cave as quickly as they could.

"We're fine," Baines shouted. "G'wan." Walman flapped a hand.

Well, darn.

Uly didn't wait for her, but started climbing up the wooden steps. Slinging her bag on her back, True started after him. "Come on, slowpoke!" he called down.

"Why are you so happy?" she grouched back.

He paused to look down at her. "Why aren't you?"

She puffed slightly as she got to the step below his. "It's all going to be different," she said breathlessly. "There's going to be whole bunches of people now--"

"It's not like they're strangers," he argued, starting up again.

"To me they are. You know them, I don't."

"Oh . . . yeah. I guess. But it'll be different better," he said confidently. "It's going to be great. You'll see."

John saw his daughter and Uly racing each other to the door, and shook his head. How they had the energy for that after climbing up from the beach, he'd never know.

Alonzo looked at them and laughed. "At least someone's excited about this."

"Hey, I'm excited," John said as they ambled along. "I'm just not like some people who think everything's going to be hunky-dory easy."

After two years, Alonzo didn't have to ask who some people was. "You really think something’s going to happen with this landing?"

"I figure we should be prepared. The Council busted its ass to keep us from landing. Doesn’t make any sense they’d just wave and smile at the colony ship."

Alonzo shrugged, a yeah-I-guess sort of shrug. John knew that Alonzo thought he was being his usual pessimistic self. So did Devon, but she at least knew that it was better to prepare for the worst and get the best than the other way around.

He pushed open the door and found most of the Eden Advance team milling around the gathering space. As usual, the tiny group looked lost and sparse in the big room, with its rows of tables and benches. Julia and Yale were huddled in a corner, hammering out details. Morgan hunched over the communications console, hitting buttons like a classical pianist playing the Minute Waltz in thirty seconds. Devon asked him something, and he nodded, rattling off a string of numbers.

The guy was useful. Who knew?

True waved at him. "Dad! Dad! Where were you? The colony ship’s here!"

"I heard a rumor." He ruffled her sweaty hair. "Got those blueprints for me, True-girl?"

She brandished her data pad. "Right here."

"Great. Be ready, I’m up first. Where’s Uly?"

True pointed. "Over there."

The junior Adair perched on his chair, rocking back and forth slightly, his eyes shining. John grinned at him, then turned to his daughter again. "How you doing? Excited?"

She shrugged, but jittered from foot to foot like she had on that long-ago first day of kindergarten.

He tapped Devon on the shoulder. "Hey, lady."

She spun. "What took you so long?"

"I had to stop and do my hair," he drawled. "What’s the status topside?"

"They’re holding. They don’t exactly understand what’s going on, but they’re holding." She said it all a little too fast. "I’ve given them a quick briefing, and they’re getting the proper people up into the bridge to talk to us."

"That’d be Braxton on the other end for me," he said, before she could give him information he’d given her in the first place. "Got a gear channel?"

"Right, yes--" She checked her datapad. "Twenty-four-six-eleven. Don’t forget to--"

"--key through the main comm system first," he finished for her. "Got it, Adair." He tapped in a series of commands, and mechanical gibberish sounded in his ear as the gear started routing through Morgan’s carefully constructed improvisation. He winced and dragged the headset down around his neck.

Devon kept scrolling through pages on her datapad, up and down, scanning the same pages over and over as if she might be missing something vitally important. He reached out and cupped her face in one hand. "Hey."

She looked up.

"Breathe," he ordered.

She frowned at him. "What?"

"Just do it. Breathe." The gear beeped in his ear, fully routed, but he had to get Devon settled first. She was jumpy, gearing up into totalitarianism, and needed to relax. She was the center of this operation--always had been. He rubbed his thumb over her cheekbone. "In through the nose and hold it." When she obeyed, he counted to ten and said, "’Kay, out."

She let the air go, tension visibly dissipating.

"Better?" he asked.

She did it again. "Yes," she said, and smiled at him.

They stood close, an island of calm in a sea of chaos. He leaned down and kissed her. "Let’s do this thing."

She kissed him back, then stepped away and pivoted on her heel. "Okay, everybody!" she called out, catching the attention of the whole room. Even Morgan paused in his mad button-pushing. "It’s a little earlier than we were expecting but we have planned this and we are ready, right?"

A cheer greeted this.

"I need Alonzo, True, and Uly in here with John, Morgan, and me."

"Everyone else out to the vehicles," John said. "You know what to do."

About half the group made for the door, and John motioned True closer to him. "Cargo level first, kiddo." While she scrolled through blueprints, tongue caught between her teeth, he put his gear back on, dialed the number, and flipped the eyepiece around. "John Danziger, head of Ops for New Pacifica. Hey, boss, you read me?"

---

Adam Braxton stared in disbelief at the face in his gear display. "What are you doing down there, Jack? You're supposed to be asleep on the advance ship, two years back toward home."

Danziger's voice and image crackled slightly, as if they were being jury-rig routed. "Long, long story. I'll tell you when you get planetside. Meantime, we got some housekeeping to take care of. There's one hell of a good chance some of your cargo pods have been tampered with, enough to bring the whole ship down."

Braxton frowned. "That's a pretty wild story."

"Yeah, and I hope I'm wrong. But just in case--"

"All right, I'll run a diagnostic." He swung around, reaching out for a panel.

"Computer diagnostic's a good start, but it might not cut it," Danziger said. "I'd say a good old-fashioned eyeball check. Make that a double check--two different sets of eyeballs. Cargo pods, and escape pods too, just to be on the safe side."

"You--"

"I'm sure."

It sounded batshit crazy, but he'd trained John Danziger, back in Chicago block. The man didn't fly off the handle for anything. "That could take awhile," he noted, setting the maintenance computer to running its diagnostic, "and we've got a ship full of people who want to get planetside."

"Their problem, not mine."

"Ain’t that the truth."

"Keep me posted?"

"Will do." Braxton set him on standby and called out his crew.

Across the cabin, the head doctor stood quietly speaking on his gear. "Four of them. Yes. No. Camelli, Taganaki, McNab, and Johnson. No, I really wouldn't recommend it. I understand we may have no other choice but to go to the escape pods, but until that time--" He broke off, listened some more, and sighed deeply. "Devon, I don't want to scare them."

Braxton curled his lip at nothing. Let the top-level crybabies get scared. Better than dying because they couldn't get themselves to the escape pods in time.

The computer diagnostic came up clean. Reports started coming in, and he bounced them to Danziger on automatic. Clean, clean, clean . . .

"Hey, boss, we got one fine mess here."

Braxton's attention snapped to the transmission. "What's that?"

"Have a look," his guy said, and the view in Braxton's eyepiece shifted from the other man's face to an open panel. "Melted all to shit."

"Damn me," Braxton breathed, staring at the mess of electronics like a man gazing at a slaughter. "Why didn't the computer catch it?"

"Don't know, but it'll never release."

"Right." Braxton took in a breath and let it out. "Right. Go on, check the next one down." He brought Danziger off standby. "We found one. Listen to this--"

"Melted, am I right? Like someone took a torch to it. You try to release it and it'll drag the ship out of orbit."

"Yeah," Braxton said slowly. "How'd you know?"

The other man smiled grimly. "Part of that long story. You're what, halfway through?"

"Yeah, and--" His gear beeped, signaling someone else trying to get ahold of him. "Wait."

---

"Three?" Devon asked in disbelief.

"They weren’t taking any chances," John said, holding his datapad out so she could see. Three sections of the cargo level blinked bright red. Three cargo pods that would never release, that would in fact pull the whole colony ship to screaming death if they tried. "That’s not even the really fun part. Diagnostic shows that all power’s been cut to the escape pods. Collectively, they couldn’t run a night light, much less the life-support systems."

She pictured the possible outcome of using the untrustworthy, unpowered escape pods and broke out in a cold sweat. "Is there another option?"

"One," he said.

---

"You want us to land her over mass," Braxton said slowly, hoping it would sound more sensible in his own voice. It didn’t.

"I said it was a rock and a hard place." A sudden splatter of static obliterated part of Danziger’s next words. "--risk those pods, you’ll never get home. There’s your rock."

"Yeah, but the hard place could smear us a millimeter thin if we get it wrong. We've got close to seven extra kilotons riding here."

Danziger crossed his arms. "I guess you’d better get it right."

Willis waved at him from the console. "Braxton, over here."

"Hang on," he said, and went to see what the pilot wanted.

She leaned back in her seat to look up into his face. "What’s the max power you can give me to the underside thrusters in the troposphere?"

"You’re not going to do this."

"You got a better idea? As long as we don’t release those three sabotaged cargos and we keep on our toes, we should be able to land her." She jerked her thumb toward the blue-green planet out the front window. "I don’t want to spend my life on that dirtball, do you?"

Braxton stared at it for a second, then looked at the ceiling and swore. Then he turned to his gauges and looked over them. "I can safely give you about twenty-five percent extra on the right side," he said over his shoulder.

"Twenty-five? Seven kilotons is thirty-four percent over mass."

"Any more than twenty-five, the blowback’s gonna take us all out."

Willis let out her breath, doing her piloty calculations. "Fine. Twenty-five it is." She flexed her fingers over the controls.

Braxton switched his gear off hold. "All right. We're in."

Danziger nodded, as if he’d expected nothing less. "See you on the ground," he said, and blinked out.

---

John took his gear off and nodded at her, indicating that the ops crew was in, and Devon nodded back. She turned back to her side of the bargain. "It’s just a precaution, Miguel."

Miguel Vasquez snapped, "I don’t like it! Pushing them all into escape pods--you know the delicacy of these children."

"Uly came through perfectly fine."

"There are four children still in cold sleep. I doubt Uly was. Braxton!"

"Yeah, what," said a voice off Miguel’s screen.

"How much fuel do we have?"

"Not enough to orbit until we can repair the releases or power up those pods," the other voice said. "We’re going down, Doc, whether it’s under our own power or not."

Devon judged the moment right. "Miguel, even without power, those escape pods are specifically designed for an uncontrolled landing. They have shielding, they have padding, they have supplies . . . It’s the best place anybody could be under these circumstances. Certainly better than wandering the corridors, asking what the shank’s going on."

The doctor breathed for a moment, then pressed his lips together. "Fine. Fine." The screen erupted into static. He'd cut her off.

At least he'd agreed first.

---

The doctor's voice boomed over the ship's PA. "All medical personnel--"

Braxton flipped his own gear on to the ops announcement channel. "Guys, this is just a precaution, but get to your escape pods. Repeat, this is just a precaution. Strap yourself in but don’t release them or close the doors. Keep your gear on. We’re going to land over mass." He closed the channel and sat down, strapping himself in.

Willis looked at him sharply. "You’re staying?"

"I trust you normally," he said dryly, hitting buttons, "but it seems to me you could use backup."

"Thanks."

"No charge."

They didn’t say what they both knew--the closer they got to the ground, the smaller the chances anybody in the cockpit would live long enough to get to an escape pod if it all went to hell.

Braxton barely noticed when Vasquez scurried out to his safe escape pod. Willis snapped orders over her shoulder as she attempted to compensate for the extra weight. "Vector’s too steep. I need back thrusters, forty percent."

He shoved a lever and felt the slight shift as the back thrusters kicked in, changing the angle of their descent. They dropped like a stone through the upper atmosphere, the temperature inside the cockpit rising with the increasing air friction outside. He kept an eye on the fuel level, calculating desperately the amount the twenty-five percent extra would require. "Cutting back thrusters now."

"Roger that. Crossing the mesopause--altitude is ninety."

---

Devon squinted at the image on the big screen. "It’s tilting. Why is it tilting?"

"Heavier side," John said. "Unless they compensate soon, it’ll flip them over and start 'em spinning." His voice was low, but her son had sharp ears.

Uly grabbed her hand. "Mom! Are they gonna crash and blow up?"

Her blood chilled. "Not if I can help it," she said as calmly as possible.

"We need to tell the Terrians," Uly said. "Where’s it going to land?"

The landing would more than likely send shock waves through the ground, and while the Terrians wouldn't thank them for the impact itself, they might appreciate the warning. "You’re right," she said. "It’ll be in . . ." she caught up a map. ". . . about this area. Can you do that, sweetie?"

Uly nodded, his face pinched and serious, and squatted down, pressing his hands flat to the earth.

---

The horizon leveled out as Willis lit the right underside thrusters. "Altitude fifty-four. We’re in the stratosphere. Punch up underside thrusters now please."

Using the side of his hand, Braxton shoved a row of levers up, then carefully nudged three of them up even further. He stared at the distance between twenty-five and thirty-four, wondering if he had the fuel . . . if he dared risk the blowback . . . if nine percent was enough to just crack the Virginia like an egg.

The fuel gauge dipped lower, lower, lower--if they sucked it dry, all the thrusters would cut out together, and the rest of their lives would be contained in a very short, nasty freefall.

---

The vehicles stood waiting. All fifteen advancers stood in the square, ready to go. Julia had her diaglove strapped on and Alonzo held her bag, stuffed to the bursting point. Right now, though, they could only watch.

Like a shooting star, the ship screamed through the sky. They could see it with naked eyes now. The whole group pressed close together as if physical contact could avert disaster.

Bess turned away, hunched protectively over her swollen belly as if the child within could somehow see. She began to whisper a prayer, her voice muffled against Morgan's shoulder. "--full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art--"

Devon held Uly against her, ready to turn him away from an explosion. She thought, What were we thinking? Even more nightmare pilgrimages would have been better than this. Ripples of terror washed through her mind, that this was it, this was where it would end, all her promises going up in flames. All those people she’d convinced to come here--

Her free hand groped for John’s. His fingers wove through hers. "Getting close," he said quietly, half to True, pressed against his side, and half to Devon. "She’s slowing--"

Devon thought, Enough?

---

Willis’s voice was icy cool. "We are at twenty-five--fifteen--"

Too fast, Braxton thought. Too damn fast--they were going to crack like an egg.

Unless--

Without letting himself overthink, he slid the three levers up to thirty-four. He counted seconds off under his breath and flicked them back down, half a second before the disastrous blowback reaction would have started.

"Ten--five--three--two--"

With twin lurches that wrenched Braxton’s restraints to their limit, the colony ship slammed into the ground.

---

Even from kilometers away, the thud reverberated, sending some of them staggering.

"Did they hit?"

"Did they make it?"

"Dad?" True asked uncertainly.

Alonzo said into his gear, "Virginia, this is New Pacifica. Sheila, do you copy? Sheila? C’mon!"

---

Braxton sagged in his seat, the acrid smell of stressed electronics in his nose. His shoulders and chest throbbed under the straps. He undid them and massaged the spots where he was going to have amazing bruises. Damn, he hoped nothing vital had cracked. "Nice one, Willis."

Her straps already undone, she rolled one shoulder gingerly, then the other. "Light as a feather." She keyed the comm.

---

"Virginia to New Pacifica. Come in, New Pacifica."

"Virginia! You guys okay?"

"We are on the ground, and oh so glad to be here."

He let out a whoop, one echoed by the rest of the advance crew. "Nice of you to drop by," he said, once they’d settled. "Coordinates?"

"On their way."

Devon peered over his shoulder. "That’s only two and a half klicks from here."

"Well," Alonzo said, "she is the second-best pilot for the money."

Devon rolled her eyes. "All right, people, to the vehicles. We have some colonists to pick up!"

They rushed for the vehicles, but Devon stayed where she was. She felt as if, when she looked down, she would be able to see every individual joint in her body trembling and not to be trusted.

John paused and turned. "Well?" he said. "You’re going to be late, y’know."

With that, she felt the strength rush back into her again, and she grinned at him. "You wouldn’t leave without me," she said, and went to take her place in the cockpit of one of the transrovers.

The air tasted strange.

That was the first thing Trent Sadler noticed as he wheeled his son’s chair down the gangplank. The air flooded into his lungs, cool and somehow thick. He felt in his pocket for his son’s inhaler.

"Wow," his son whispered, a little wheeze in his voice. "Oh wow."

Trent crouched. "Son," he said, holding up the inhaler.

Max sighed deeply, but opened his mouth for the medicine. Trent listened to his breathing, wondering if that landing had done permanent damage. The doctor in their pod had looked all the children over and cleared them to go outside, but what if something had broken inside Max that the diaglove hadn’t picked up on?

And this alien air, it didn’t feel like air at all. It hadn’t been filtered, treated, heated, or cooled. It couldn’t be good for Max to breathe this stuff.

"Dad," Max said, "Look at the sky. Look."

"Mmm," he said. Where was a doctor when you needed one? He stood up, looking around. Every doctor he could see was involved with a child already. Even the nurses were busy. He might have to settle for a medtech.

A sharp whistle cut through the babble, and Max cried, "Look, it’s Uly’s mom!"

Trent straightened, his heart thudding. It was Devon, standing on a slight rise. Even though her clothes were well-worn and the sun had darkened her skin, she still looked fit and beautiful. "Thanks," she said to a huge man to one side of her, who stood with his arms around two kids. "Can everyone hear me? Everyone? How about in the back? Can you all see me?"

General noises of assent answered her.

"Good." She laughed a little. "I’m used to addressing a group of fifteen. This is going to take a little adjustment." She spread her arms wide. "Welcome to G889. This isn’t a VR, this isn’t a dream, this is home."

Trent started clapping, and a few others followed suit. She waited until it died out to continue. "I know to you it’s only been a few days since we left the stations. For us in Eden Advance, though, it’s been two years, filled with adjustments, hard work, and unexpected challenges. But they’ve also been full of discovery and wonder. I think it’s safe to say those two years have changed us forever."

The advance group, spaced around her, exchanged glances and grins.

Her face fell into serious lines. "You all knew my son Uly. He was eight when we left. No Syndrome child has ever lived past the age of nine."

Trent felt his heart go cold. Was she going to say that she had lost Uly? That even leaving everything behind and bringing him to this place hadn’t done any good? He put his hand on Max’s head, the metal of his son’s headpiece cold under his palm.

"Uly, honey, come here."

The smaller of the two children with the huge man stepped away and climbed the rise. She put her hands on his narrow shoulders and turned him to face the crowd. "This is Uly today."

A deep, deep silence fell, broken only by the hish of wind through the long grass. Trent couldn’t tear his eyes from the child she held close. He was afraid to blink, just in case it was an illusion.

The Uly he’d known had been tiny, pale, and barely strong enough to walk a block on his own. This boy was tanned and smiling, his tumbled curls shining golden-brown in the son. He was thin, true, but it was the wiry, leggy look of a growing boy.

A normal, healthy, growing boy.

"My son is ten," she said, and the dazzling smile broke out again. "He was born with the Syndrome, and he’s ten."

Uly twisted around to look up at his mother. "Mo-om. Ten and a half."

As if his petulant correction had broken a spell, laughter erupted, and then cheers. Next to Trent, Maggie Shaw burst into tears, and her husband put his arms around her.

A small hand tugged at his shirt. "Dad? Am I going to be like that in two years? Huh?"

"Yes," Trent vowed, kissing the top of his head. "I swear, Max, you will." The thin, thready hope that had pulled him away from the stations had just bloomed. It could happen. A Syndrome child could live. Not the limp-along existence their children had been doomed to since their diagnosis, but real, glowing, growing life.

"New Pacifica is about two and a half kilometers to the northeast," Devon said once the celebration had died down. "The ground is too uneven for chairs, so the Syndrome children are going to ride in the Transrovers. We may have to make a couple of trips, but everything is ready and waiting for you once you get to town."

The group's silence broke up into excited babbling. Trent glanced around. "Max, I'll be right back." He stepped away to find a doctor, but the best he could do was a harried nurse who promised to get to Max next. Well, it was better than nothing. Biting back a sigh, he returned to find the huge man who had stood at Devon's side crouched in front of his son's chair.

"Hey, buddy. I got a seat in that Transrover all ready for you, what do you say?"

"It's way high up," Max said doubtfully.

"Yeah, you bet. You can see everything." The man grinned and held out his arms. "Come on, you know you want to."

"Excuse me!" Trent interrupted. "Are you a medical professional?"

The huge man spared him a glance. "No, but I am an experienced father." He pointed at a skinny girl loading bags into the big transport. "That’s her over there, if you wanna check my credentials."

Of course, his child was healthy, and always had been. The sour puddle of envy settling in his stomach was so familiar Trent barely noticed it. "Look, my son is a Syndrome child," he said, dropping a protective hand to Max's frail shoulder. "You can’t sling him around like--"

"A kid?"

Trent took in his breath through his nose. "Thank you for trying to help," he said evenly, "but I would feel more comfortable with someone who’s trained in handling children like Max."

The man straightened up, hooking his hands in his back pockets. "Whatever you say," he said, his eyes cool. "I’ll get Julia over here. That’s Dr. Julia Heller. She’s trained." He glanced down at Max and, before Trent could do anything about it, gave his hair a ruffle. "Next time, buddy."

The woman who came didn't look very much like a doctor, dressed in patched pants and a faded shirt instead of a pristine lab coat. But she took Max's vitals with cheerful competency. "Good numbers," she told him. "Let's get you into that Transrover."

The big vehicle was another shock. They had made some attempt at comfort by lining the bed with blankets and cushions, but those couldn't disguise the fact that this was a cargo vehicle, not a passenger one. "Excuse me," Trent said. "Isn't there something--safer? There aren't any restraints in that thing--"

The big man, swinging himself up into one of the side-along cargo bins, gave him a disgusted look. "How fast do you think we'll be going, buddy?"

Trent's eyes narrowed. "My son is very delicate--"

"Trust me when I say, you could walk faster than this."

Before Trent could formulate a properly scathing reply, Dr. Heller cut in. "Danziger's right. The Rover's top speed isn't very fast, and it's barely two and a half klicks to New Pacifica. A lot of parents are riding with their children. If you'd feel safer--"

"Yes," Trent said. "Yes, I would."

He had to crawl up the fat tire, his slick-soled shoes slipping on the rubber. Danziger didn't offer to help, but instead hoisted children into the cargo bin, teasing them and pointing out how far they could see from their height. They giggled or stared, completely comfortable with this rough-handed giant. Well, children didn't always know what was good for them.

Trent got Max settled into a corner, wrapping a blanket around his legs. "How do you feel, son?"

"M'okay," Max said, staring out over the rolling hills. "The doctor said my numbers were good. Do you think I could walk?"

"It's much too far," Trent said automatically.

"Some of the other kids are."

"Those are the healthy ones, son, you know that."

Max rested his chin on the lip of the cargo bed. "Uly's walking."

"He's healthy now." A shiver of hope ran through Trent as he said it. "Just be patient. You'll be taking long walks someday."

Max sighed but didn't say anything more. He just kept staring out at the landscape as if drinking it in. Trent brushed a hand over his hair. The great gamble, the biggest risk he'd ever taken or would ever take, was going to pay off. He knew it. Trent had left behind his home, his job, everything that was familiar and safe, but he would do more than that for Max.

And maybe now that the journey was behind them, he could turn his energy to his relationship with Devon Adair. It had been on hold far too long.

The line of Rovers filled up with parents and children. Chatter and giggles filled the air, excitement crackling like electricity. There was a squeal of, "Omygod, a bird! A real bird!" from Marie O’Connor. Most of the children and even some of the parents jumped up to see.

The advancers looked at them tolerantly, grinning. Trent could pick them out as advancers the moment he saw them. Even apart from the faded and worn clothing and the sun-darkened skin, there was a comfortable competency about the way they walked over the uneven ground and squinted against the falling sun. They seemed to read each others' minds, making sure that things were taken care of while all around them, colonists stared and fumbled.

Trent wondered if he would ever become so comfortable in this strange place.

"Hey, Max! Max!"

Using the side of the Max hoisted himself to a halfway standing position. "Uly! Here!"

"Hey!" Uly clambered up the wheel and crawled into the bed next to Max. "You’re finally here, this is so cool!"

Close to, he looked even more healthy than he had. His skin was tanned, his hair streaky with sun, and he didn’t have a single piece of medical apparatus on his body. Trent stared at him, wondering if his hand would pass through this dream of a healthy boy.

Max poked Uly, hard, in the upper arm.

"Hey, what was that for?" Uly complained amiably.

"Wanted to see if you were for real," Max said.

"I am."

"How?" Max asked bluntly.

All over the Transrover, heads turned. Suddenly, Uly and Max were the focus of everyone’s attention.

"Um," Uly said uncomfortably.

"It’s this natural setting, isn’t it?" Danielle Grant said. "I always knew it would help, but--" She wrapped her arms around her pale, undersized four-year-old. Melissa stared enviously at Uly.

"You’re gonna love it here," Uly said quickly. "It’s the best place ever."

"I will if it’ll make me well," Max said.

"It will. Promise." Uly looked around. "Uhoh, I think we’re going. I’ll talk to you later, ‘kay?"

"You don’t want to ride?" Trent asked.

"No, I like walking," Uly said. He stood up, swung his legs over the side of the vehicle, and before Trent could so much as put out a hand, the boy had launched himself into open space.

For a moment, Uly seemed to hang in the air, arms out, knees bent, overlong hair flying. Then gravity took over and he dropped to the ground.

All Trent’s breath whooshed out at once. "Uly!"

Uly turned, blinking. "What?"

"You could have really hurt yourself."

"What? Oh, no, it’s not that far."

Trent looked down. From here, it seemed like six feet at least.

"Anyway, the ground’s soft," Uly said.

That could be true. He could swear he’d seen Uly’s feet sink in, almost to the ankle, before he’d straightened up. Of course, he’d seen it from an angle.

"Wow," Max said. "Dad, will I be able to do that?"

"No," Trent said firmly.

"See you later," Uly called out, and rushed away.

"Hang on, everyone, we’re starting up," Danziger called from the front of the vehicle. Trent tensed, putting an arm around Max. There was a great lurch and they set off across the uneven ground, rocking from side to side.

Trent winced. "It's not far," he told his son.

"I know." Max pointed. "Look, Dad. Are those trees?"

"I suppose it must be," Trent said doubtfully. "Though Earth trees were green."

Danielle leaned over. "The leaves have turned, Trent. It’s autumn, right? Isn’t it?" she asked Dr. Heller.

"That’s right," Dr. Heller said.

Danielle let out a happy sigh. "It’s so much more beautiful than the museums and the VRs." She grinned hugely. "Can you imagine, real seasons?" She hugged Melissa close. "You can play in the leaves, sweetie."

"Now?" Melissa asked.

Danielle hesitated, then smiled brightly. "Next year. When you’re better."

"Winter starts in about a month," Danziger said. "You guys can have snowball fights."

Max's eyes lit up. "Dad! Snow!"

"No," Trent said firmly. "Max, it'll be too cold for you."

"But--"

"Do you want to get sick?"

"I am sick," Max mumbled.

"You have a condition," Trent corrected. "But you will get sick if you go out in the snow."

Max sighed and looked at the trees again.

Trent was just starting to get a little queasy from the lurching when Danziger climbed back into the cargo bed. He called out, "Okay, everyone, listen up." The chatter cut off as if a switch had been flipped. "We're going to get into New Pacifica in a few minutes. It's not going to be what you're expecting. We had some changes in plans, but you all have a roof and a bed."

"What about the hospital?" Trent asked.

Dr. Heller stood up, anchoring herself to a support pole. "If you want to admit your children to the hospital for tonight, I can show you where that is, but give us about half an hour to get the staff familiarized and all the machinery on."

"For right now, find the door with your name on it and put your stuff in your rooms," Danziger said.

Trent frowned. "Aren’t there drones or robots for that?"

Danziger paused and stared down at him. "Where did you live on the stations?" he said.

Strange question. "Level four east," Trent said. "Manhattan block."

Danziger nodded, as if a suspicion had been confirmed. "Uh-huh. Yeah. Well, there aren't any drones here, and the robots we do have are doing more important stuff. You'll have to carry your own luggage."

They were coming up on a cluster of long, low buildings . . . two or three, from what Trent could see. Storehouses, he thought. The town itself couldn't be too far away. Then he saw the openings in the walls. He frowned.

Why would a storehouse need windows?

The big vehicle halted. Max tried to stand. "Dad? Are we there?"

"Not just yet, son," he said, making him sit down again. They couldn't be. These boxy buildings couldn't be anything but storehouses. They were made out of wood.

"All right, end of the line," Danziger said, leaping down. "All ashore who's goin' ashore."

"Wait," Ben O’Connor said. "This is it?"

"New Pacifica. Population a hell of a lot more than it was this morning."

Trent stared, waiting for him to admit his joke, climb back up into the Rover, and tell the driver to keep going. But the door opened and a bearded man joined Danziger on the ground. "Who's first?" he called out.

Oh God. This was it.

Four raw wooden buildings arranged around a square. You could walk from one edge to the other in five minutes. Less. This was New Pacifica? This was where they were supposed to live for the rest of their lives?

"Those are the dorms," Danziger said, pointing at two of the buildings. "A's are over in the far corner of the northern one, Z's are right about here. They're two-person rooms, so you might be sharing."

"Sharing?" Horror piled on top of horror. "Sharing private quarters?"

"If you don't feel like sharing, we have plenty of tents," Danziger drawled.

"This is temporary, right?"

Danziger and the bearded man exchanged looks. "You mean will you be living here forever? No. But unpack anyway."

Still boggling, Trent managed to get himself and Max out of the Rover without killing either of them. He looked around for the chair, but Max said, "Dad, I wanna walk, please can I walk, please?"

It was only a few steps to the nearest door. Trent sighed. "Hold my hand and be careful, son. This ground is uneven." He looked again at the dorms, already missing his big level-four unit back at the stations, with holo-frames, original art, and every amenity known to mankind. God knew who had it now.

"It's all one level, you know."

Trent turned to see Danziger looking past him at the dorms. "Excuse me?"

"The dorms," he said, flashing a smile like a shark's. "All one level. That's the way it is around here."

Before Trent could answer that very odd statement, the man had climbed up into the Transrover to retrieve another child.

---

"Here it is," Julia said, a bubble of pride swelling up in her. "The hospital." She loved this neat, straight building, all warm pale wood. It had been the very first building that had gone up. Devon's idea, but one that nobody had voted against, a bit of generosity that still warmed Julia. They'd slept here for a month, so delirious with joy at having a real roof over their heads that the increased lack of privacy had barely bothered them. As it was, Morgan had managed to get Bess pregnant here, a fact that still made Danziger's eye twitch slightly.

As Julia always did, she smiled up at the sign over the double doors, which said "New Pacifica General." Underneath those words, if the light hit it right, you could sometimes read the traces of what Alonzo had originally painted: "The Dr. Feelgood Center for Full Body Medicine." She had made him paint over it while the rest of the advancers crowded behind their tents to muffle their whoops of laughter.

She pushed the double doors open rather grandly, propping them open with the rocks that were kept outside for that purpose. The phalanx of doctors, nurses, and med-techs shuffled in behind her, their footsteps tentative on the wooden floor.

The setting sun flooded the western windows, but most of the hospital was cloaked in darkness. Julia moved through the shadows with the ease of experience, her sturdy boots thumping cheerfully. "We usually don't have the electricity on in here," she called out over her shoulder. "But the solar panels have been absorbing all day." She checked the battery levels and found them full to the brim. "Any machines we need for tonight should be just fine."

She opened the switchbox and used the side of her hand to flip several switches at a time, with thick ka-chunk noises. She liked that brisk, competent sound, echoing around her hospital. With each ka-chunk, another group of overhead lights switched on, illuminating the rows of beds, the sturdy tables, the quiet machines. Danziger had worked himself practically blind over the electrical diagrams, balancing the mind-boggling amount of power needed against the depressingly finite capacities of the solar panels that they’d been able to get back from the Grendlers.

"Offices are on the eastern end," she said, closing the switchbox. "There's a nurse's station for every ten beds. That door down there opens up to the medical dorms. As soon as we get around to it, there's going to be a passageway, so when winter comes you won't have to go out in the cold." She turned, still talking. "There are enough beds to accommodate any non-Syndrome--" She stopped.

Most of the people she'd led in here were still huddled back by the doors, looking around as if they'd asked for a full cardiopulmonary/respiratory monitoring system and gotten a stethoscope. A few of them had fanned out, stepping gingerly around the straight wooden beds, twitching at their lab coats again and again as if making sure nobody could mistake them for someone who worked in a place like this.

Julia hooked her hands behind her back, suddenly aware of her messy hair, the frayed hem of her shirt, the rip starting on one knee. She drew herself very straight and finished her sentence. "To accommodate any non-Syndrome patients. We also have cots in storage that can be set up in the event of a quarantine situation."

The head nurse nudged a freestanding wooden panel set up between two beds. It had little wheels at the base. MacDonald nudged it again, harder, and raised a brow when it skidded away from her.

That had been Baines's idea, those moving walls. "We designed the layout for optimum modularity," Julia said. "All the furniture--Everything can be moved very easily. If we need to."

Miguel Vasquez picked up a corner of the blanket on one bed, rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger with an incredulous expression on his face. Julia just stopped herself from yanking it out of his grasp and smoothing it down. It was one of the ones she'd made herself.

She cleared her throat. "It's perfectly sterile, I assure you. The fiber is a flax-like plant that grows wild, and all the dyes are vegetal." The crew had spent weeks on those blankets, the lumpy first attempts spread proudly over their own beds.

Miguel dropped the blanket and wiped his fingers on his lab coat.

"We--uh--we lucked out a little," Julia said into the echoing silence. "We didn't lose too many machines to Grendlers, and we managed to trade for most of them back. What we have should be sufficient."

They looked at her, obviously with not a clue what a Grendler was. Of course. How would they know?

Miguel nodded a few times, then patted her heavily on the shoulder. His voice was too hearty. "Don't worry, Dr. Heller. This should be--fine." He looked around, and when his eyes met MacDonald's, his pasted-on smile slipped a little. "For the time being."

Sitting at a long bench table around the edge of the square, chowing on the mess of vegetables and processed protein that he'd been served on a clunky grey-green clay plate, Braxton listened to the saga of the past two years with a raised brow. Traveling for months on end, evading the Council, dealing with illness, weather, alien creatures, penal colonists . . . it was like an adventure right out of the holocinemas.

"Sounds like you got enough excitement down here for anyone," he said to Danziger, who sat across from him.

"Hell, yeah," Danziger said under the sound of Devon Adair’s recital. "We were so excited sometimes we could hardly stand it."

Braxton laughed. "You’ll be glad to get back home."

True looked up at that. "We’re not going back," she said.

Braxton looked around, barely suppressing a shudder. What a shitty place. "Don’t joke like that, kiddo."

Danziger said, "It’s not a joke. We’re staying here."

The fork froze halfway to Braxton’s lips. He stared at the younger man, who met his gaze steadily, as if he’d been waiting the whole night to say that.

Braxton set the fork down and picked up his cup. It was almost empty. He took care of that, then held it out. "True, how about you go get me some more--" He paused, trying to remember what kind of alien fruit had gone in the cider. "Some more."

She didn’t take it. "Anything you want to say to my dad, you can say in front of me," she said instead.

"Baby," Danziger said. "Give us a moment."

She looked from one man to the other, then let out a huff of exasperation and snatched Braxton’s mug. God, she’s grown, he thought. Although she didn’t look a thing like her dad, the way she stalked off toward the bar brought back memories of the adolescent Jack Danziger, mostly rage and sass.

Braxton looked away from the child, to the father, and said, "Are you out of your fucking mind?"

"No," Danziger said.

"You’re staying here," Braxton said.

"Yeah."

"Here." Braxton slapped the wooden table--god, real wood!--for emphasis.

"Figured we might move around a little from this exact spot."

"Don’t mess with me, Jack--" He caught the warning flash. "John." There were times to call a man by his childhood nickname, and this wasn’t one of them. Although if you asked Braxton, John was behaving like a kid, impulsive and thoughtless. "You’re not a drone anymore. You’re out of debt. Both of you. You’re full citizens."

"Right," John drawled. "We’ll get back and the Council’s gonna say, ‘Damn, are you out of debt? Well, here, here’s a nice two-bedroom unit for you, a good job where you’re not just a faceless robot, and a place for your kid in university.’" He gave a humorless laugh. "You know better. You’ve seen it. Back there, citizenship’s just on paper. Nothing would change."

"And this is better?" Braxton looked around. "We’re eating food grown in dirt, off clay plates, in a wooden shack. You’re kidding me, right? You don’t have to do this."

John looked around, too, and shrugged. "Yeah, but see, I want to."

"Want to?" Braxton echoed incredulously.

John looked back at him. "I like it here. True likes it here. Good place to be."

"Right. It’s Nirvana."

"Hell, no, but it’s better than what we left behind."

There was a ripple of laughter at something the Adair woman said, and John glanced over his shoulder. Adair happened to look their way, and for a moment her smile shifted from the bright, public, pasted-on one to something warm and intimate.

John returned it.

"So that’s it," Braxton said sharply.

John looked back. "What?"

"The Adair woman. You're bangin' her."

John's fist was halfway to his face when it paused in the air. Braxton could almost see the muscles tremble as he lowered his hand. "Say that again," he said in a low voice, "and you will lose a tooth."

"What are you, in love with her?"

John looked him in eye. "Yeah."

---

Trent ate his meal slowly, so involved in Devon’s story that he hardly noticed the strange-tasting vegetables. He had a hard time processing the fact that it had all happened just in the short time since he'd last seen Devon.

"But we made it, we're here, and now so are you," Devon finished up. "You all have a whole new life waiting, and I'm so eager to get it started." To scattered, tentative applause, she sat down across from Trent. "Whew." She took a drink, but her voice was still husky from speaking for so long.

"Hey, Mom," Uly said. "How come you didn’t say anything about the--"

"Easy, honey," she cut in.

"But--"

"Remember, we were going to wait a little while to tell everything about our friends?"

Uly persisted. "But I--"

"Honey," Devon said.

He must have heard the steel in her voice, because he let out a sigh and started eating again. Trent couldn’t look away from him, not even to wonder about the odd exchange, and neither could any of the other parents at the table. Devon's son shoveled down food like it was going out of style, a perfectly normal appetite for a ten-year-old. Trent's own son, on the other hand, poked at his salad without scooping any onto the fork.

Devon leaned over and said, "Hi, Max-a-million. Don't you like your salad?"

"It's okay," he said listlessly.

Uly rolled his eyes. "But it has vitamins," he said in a mockery of his mother's voice. "Vitamins are good for you."

She rolled her eyes, too. "Okay, honey, that's just about enough from you. How about you go get some dessert for the table?"

"What is it?"

"Fruit. And if you get us a box, you can save all the greenfruit for yourself."

"Cool!" Uly rushed off. Trent stared after him, trying to picture Max running.

"He's right, you know," Devon said, drawing his attention. "The salad may not taste wonderful, but it does have a lot of necessary vitamins and minerals."

"Good, good," Dr. Miguel Vasquez said. "We need that after all the cold sleep."

"It must be something about the soil," Trent said. "Or maybe being grown under real sunlight. It doesn't taste quite like the vegetables on the stations."

Devon hesitated an instant before saying rather casually, "No reason it should. The greens are native to this planet."

Darla Ketchum dropped her fork. "You mean these are indigenous plants?" She yanked the plate away from her younger daughter and said to her older one, "Molly, spit that out."

"Wait, Darla, it's perfectly fine!" Devon said before Molly could follow orders. "I promise you, Julia tested everything thoroughly, and we've been eating them for months with no ill effects."

"They seem to be perfectly fine," Miguel said to Darla. "Angie really should eat. She needs her strength."

Darla looked down at the plate, then with enormous reluctance put it back in front of her younger daughter. Angie promptly scooped up an entire forkful of the lettuce she’d toyed with earlier.

Miguel said, "I'm sorry I wasn't here, Devon."

Devon waved a hand. "It was just one of those things. You couldn't have helped it. Plus, Julia did a wonderful job taking care of us."

"Yes, it looks like she has."

Rita Vasquez shot her husband a look, but didn't say anything.

"She was tireless," Devon said. She laughed a little. "Some days I thought we'd have to knock her out with her own sedaderm. But it all paid off. We couldn't cultivate anything on the move, so we got a lot of our nutrition from native flora and fauna." She smiled. "It was better than spirulina. That's something we got tired of very fast."

"You can cultivate now," Darla's husband Rob said. "What's wrong with Earth vegetables?"

"Not all of them do well in this soil, and even the ones that finally took aren't mature. Frankly, I think it's going to prove more efficient in the long run to plant the native fruits and vegetables. And you'll find ones you like."

Max let his fork drop with a clatter. His plate was still almost full, but Trent let it go. He wasn’t surprised Max didn’t like the taste of alien vegetables.

Uly came back, toting a crate full of fruit. Instead of leaping to her feet and relieving her child of the burden, Devon glanced over her shoulder. "Got that, honey?"

"Uh-hunh," the boy grunted. He set it on the bench and picked out a yellow, waxy-skinned ovoid. "Max, look, these ones are so good. You gotta peel 'em but they're real sweet. I can peel it all in one piece, look." Tongue caught between his teeth, he dug his fingernails into the peel.

"Can I have one?" Angie asked.

Darla cleared her throat. "Aren't you full, baby?"

"They're really very good, Darla," Devon said, picking one out. "A little like an orange, but not quite. Uly, why don't you split that up and let everyone have a piece? There's plenty more in here."

In order to support her, Trent took one of the sections and bit in warily. Tart, sweet juice flooded his mouth, and he looked at the greeny-orange flesh in surprise. "It's--it's not bad," he said. He hesitated, then handed Max a piece. "Go ahead and try it, son."

The fruit made the rounds of the table. Even Darla eventually tried it, and gave Angie a piece, after the little girl pestered her for five minutes straight.

"Would you like some more?" Devon asked him. "You'll have to peel this one, I'm afraid."

"No, that's fine. They're great, but I'm full."

She smiled at him, stopping his heart, and started peeling for herself. "How do you like New Pacifica?"

"It's not what I was expecting," he said diplomatically.

She split the peeled fruit into several sections and started eating one. "Well, no. But plans changed."

"I can't believe you went through all that. It must have been horrible." He wished he could have been here for her.

"Parts of it," she allowed. "But not everything."

"Well, it hasn't disagreed with you too much. You look incredible."

She blinked at him, as if surprised. "Well. Thank you."

He edged closer, secure in the knowledge that nobody was paying attention, not even their children. "Can I talk to you?"

"We are talking," she said.

"No, I mean, in private." Through the babble of conversation all over the square, Trent could just hear that someone had put on music--something old-fashioned and jazzy. He opened his mouth to suggest a dance when a deep voice intruded.

"Hey, Adair."

Him again, Trent thought in disgust.

But Devon looked almost ludicrously happy to see him. "Hey, Danziger."

Uly jumped up on the bench to see him better. "Hi, John! Where's True? You gotta meet True," he said to Max.

"She's over there." John swung him down from the bench with ease, and Uly darted off. John shifted the crate of fruit and sat in the vacated space next to Devon. She was on the tall side for a woman, but next to that hulking brute she looked almost delicate.

She said, "Everyone, this is John Danziger, head of ops. I couldn’t do without him."

"Well, hell," Danziger said. "A colony ship should land every day if you’re gonna be this nice to me." He pointed at her plate, and the several sections of fruit still on it. "You done with that?"

She made a noncommittal noise, and, to Trent’s horror, Danziger hooked a finger in the side of the plate and pulled it over in front of him. Devon barely seemed to notice. "John, these are the Doctors Vasquez, Miguel and Rita. The Ketchums are over there--that’s Rob and Darla, and their daughters Molly and Angie. Oh--yes--Trent Sadler and his son Max."

"We’ve met," Trent said.

"Not officially," Danziger said. He wiped juice off his fingers and shook hands all around, even with the children. His hand was calloused and rough, and his grip so strong that Trent had to massage his hand under the table. He stared at Danziger, wondering if that had been intentional.

The other man didn’t seem to notice. "So listen," he said to Devon when that was taken care of. "Morgan’s had the music on for ten minutes and Bess is too fat to jitterbug. If we don’t get some people on that floor soon, he’s gonna cry."

"Well, nobody wants to see that," she said.

"Nope. Figure you and I should set the example, what do you say?"

"As long as it’s for a good cause," she returned, getting to her feet. "Everyone, please feel free to join us." Almost before she was done speaking, Danziger had hauled her off like a caveman.

They danced alone for only a few measures before more couples trickled out. Staring at them, Trent tried to convince himself that they really were just setting the example. But he had danced with Devon before, at society functions. In a formal gown, heels, and perfectly matched jewelry, she’d never smiled the way she did now, in hiking boots and patched pants, dancing with a drone.

Darla said, "Trent."

He tore his eyes away from Devon. All the adults at the table were looking at him with varying degrees of pity and sympathy.

"It doesn’t mean anything," Darla said. "It can’t possibly."

"Right," he said hollowly, looking at the way Devon laughed through a spin. "It can’t possibly."

---

Julia pulled her lab coat around her and pushed her hair back into place. Pins were working their way out of her neat upsweep. She’d already lost one down her collar. It was somewhere in the small of her back, slithering around between cloth and skin, driving her crazy. Had she forgotten how annoying they were? Or had the nature of hairpins changed in just two years?

She’d spent most of those two years with her hair in a sloppy ponytail, or loose folded-over bun, or perhaps a half-tail if she had more than fifteen minutes between waking up and the start of her daily duties. Nobody cared if her hair fell in her eyes, just as long as they stayed healthy. She’d forgotten what it was like to have those things matter.

By some miracle, there had been a lab coat and some hair pins in her things. She’d put the costume of the refined, brilliant, controlled doctor over her real clothes. So far, she was passing.

With everyone at dinner, she could pretend the hospital was all hers again. The quiet settled around her like a cloud, the soft beep-beep of monitors somehow enhancing rather than diminishing. She’d turned off all the lights to save energy, except for the ones around four beds at the end.

She looked at the little occupants and sighed.

Four of the colony children hadn’t come completely out of cold sleep, but sunk instead into one of the shallow comas that were such a feature of end-stage Syndrome. The illness was roughly degenerative by age, and they were all over the age of seven, which translated to living on borrowed time.

Miguel had spent a lot of time reassuring the worried parents, all but promising that they would be out soon. He had quietly instructed Julia to key their gear channels and his own into her speed-dial, however--an instruction she hadn’t needed, and had resented mightily.

She went from bed to bed with her diaglove, checking vitals and recording stats. Mona looked the best, comparatively speaking. Of course, at seven years and two months, she was the youngest of the four.

Lynnie, their old woman at nine years and three months, looked the worst.

Since there was nobody to see, Julia brushed the little girl’s dark hair out of her eyes. Her own tanned fingers looked dark as coal next to the dead pale of Lynnie’s skin, and it felt too cool under her fingers. If not for the steady beep of the heart monitor, Julia would have checked her pulse.

Instead, she picked up the holo that sat next to Lynnie’s bed. It showed a fuzzy-headed baby, wearing the slightly dazed look of every baby in every image recording since time began, sitting on the lap of a dark-haired boy. Lynnie and her older brother. He held her steady with both hands, grinning so hugely at the camera that Julia could see the gap where his two front teeth had fallen out.

She sighed and set it down, looking at Lynnie. Nine years hadn’t done much for the little girl. She looked as if she’d had more weight when the holo was taken than she did right now. And her big brother’s protectiveness might have kept her from falling to the floor on that long-ago day, but it hadn’t saved her from the Syndrome.

Resting her hand on Lynnie’s forehead, Julia wondered if even the Terrians could save her.

"Any better?"

Julia jolted, then pressed a hand to her thudding heart. "Miguel?"

The senior doctor came into the puddle of light. "Did I frighten you?"

"Startled," she corrected, lifting her datapad and generating a graph of Lynnie’s levels. "She’s a little bit better," she said, handing it over.

"Very small improvement," he said, studying it.

"But improvement," she returned.

"The others?"

Julia glanced around. "I estimate Mona will be out within the hour, and Suchiko and Brendon perhaps before midnight."

He checked the children’s levels thoroughly before concurring, and she had to bite back a sigh. She’d forgotten what it was like to be the most junior member of a medical team. She’d ruled supreme over the medtent for two years, and now had to readjust to having other doctors around.

He ejected Mona’s datachip from his pad and dropped it into the box on the end of the bed. Then he turned to Julia and beckoned her away from the beds, toward the offices. She followed, very afraid she knew what this was about.

He stopped at her desk and turned with a benevolent smile. "I’ve been meaning to talk to you all day. I want to commend you on your discretion."

"Thank you," she said, wondering if she could just flee.

The lines around his eyes crinkled benevolently. "We had some good times, didn’t we?"

"Yes," she said faintly. "We did." She tried to emphasize the past tense.

Apparently, she hadn’t emphasized it enough, because he continued reminiscing. "Do you remember the dinner we had? In that restaurant in the inner ring?"

"Very good lobster," she said at random, wondering desperately if she could just hide under her desk until he was done.

"And the weekend we spent in your unit with wine and cheese?"

"Yes." She actually didn’t remember that weekend, but she had the feeling that if she’d said so, he wouldn’t have heard it. Miguel Vasquez rarely heard anything he didn’t want to hear.

He smiled warmly at her. "You’re a wonderful woman, Julia. Very beautiful, very intelligent." His smile turned regretful. "But I really am committed to working things out with Rita."

"Of course," she said, praying that would be it.

"Now, we’re going to be working very closely for the next few months, if not more. I just wanted to make quite sure that you understood the current status of our relationship."

"It’s going to be completely professional," she said swiftly. "Completely."

"I’m so glad you understand." He put a hand on her shoulder, and she looked at it incredulously. "I truly do regret that you were hurt, my dear. I don’t pretend that if things had been different, I--well. We probably shouldn’t talk about that."

"No, no." She stepped back. She should tell him about Alonzo right now, so he wouldn’t get any ideas. "There’s something I should--"

"Hey, Jules!"

She spun. "Alonzo?"

He paused just inside the door. "Sorry--am I interrupting something?"

"No, of course not," Miguel said, rather heartily. "A professional discussion."

"We’re done now," Julia said firmly.

"Good, great. Listen, have you eaten?"

Her stomach growled, and she put her hand over it in surprise. "Oh--well, actually not."

"Jeez. I thought you were a doctor." He shook his head at Miguel. "She’s got all these initials after her name and she doesn’t know how to take care of herself." He sat on the edge of her desk and took her hands in his. "Well, here’s the plan. We’re putting some food in you, then I’ll stuff Morgan in a closet and put on some real music. And then we’re dancing the night away. What do you say? Tempted?"

She couldn’t help smiling, even as she wanted to drag Alonzo out of the hospital before he said one thing more. "Yes, but--" She looked over her shoulder. "I’m the physician on duty in here. I can’t just--"

"You’ve been in here all evening! Dr. Vasquez’ll take over, won’t you?" He turned to Miguel. "You don’t mind. You’ve eaten and everything."

"I’d be happy," Miguel said stiffly.

"See? He’d love to. He’s dying to. C’mon."

Following Alonzo out the door, she paused to glance over her shoulder. Miguel still stood at her desk, a stunned look on his face. Her own face went hot, and she hurried out.

---

Alonzo felt like he’d missed something in there. It sure hadn’t looked like a professional discussion, not with Vasquez’s hand on Julia’s shoulder like that. Maybe the old guy had a case on her. Alonzo could understand that. Julia would tell him if it was important, so in the meantime he wasn’t going to worry.

She already looked better with some food in her. He leaned over and stole another pin.

"Alonzo!" she yelped as her whole hairstyle slid to one side. "Stop that."

"Nuh-uh," he said, stuffing the hairpins in his pocket. "I hate your hair up."

"It’s my hair." She tried to bat his hand away, but he got the last couple of pins and it all fell around her shoulders. She made an exasperated noise.

Across the table, Sheila shook her head. "You can’t take him anywhere. You remember that one bar, ‘Lonzo?"

"There were a lot of bars," he said, peeling a piece of greenfruit. "Which one, exactly?"

"There was a singer there. Name of Marla?"

"Right. Big, uh, personality."

Julia looked at him sideways. "You’re a great connoisseur of . . . personality."

He grinned at her. "But I still like yours the best."

"Man, I feel for you," Jovay said to Alonzo. "Two years in real time."

Sheila peered at Alonzo. "Looks like it was rough," she commented. "You got a dent in that pretty face, don’t you?"

"Huh?"

She touched her nose.

Alonzo laughed, fingering the bump on the bridge of his once-straight nose. "Oh, yeah . . . that. That’s a story."

Julia muttered, "Alonzo--"

"So what was it?" Jovay wanted to know. "Wild animal? Penal colonist? Fall off a cliff?"

Alonzo shook his head at each option. "Baseball in the face."

"No VR ever did that," Sheila objected.

"Not a VR. We played real baseball." Alonzo grinned. "Real baseball, real ball, real bats . . ."

"Damn," Jovay said in awe. On the stations, even the top levels didn’t have room for stadiums. "But how’d that break your nose?"

He looked at Julia.

She sighed deeply. "Go ahead." She dug into her salad.

Alonzo settled into the story, propping his elbows on the table. He loved this story, even though it drove Julia crazy. "We got the idea of ball games over our first winter. Because, damn, it was boring holed up there. So we made balls and bats, y’know, just sort of improvising. Well, you saw our numbers, man, we couldn’t have two full teams. We had to go with one outfielder, and the robot was the umpire. Come spring and we find out, Jules here has never played. Not even in VR."

They all looked at Julia, who looked down at her plate. "I had other priorities as a child," she mumbled defensively.

He put his arm around her shoulders, cuddling her into his side for a moment. "So, see, we had to teach her. And the thing about Jules here is, she’s like super genius brain woman, she gets everything first time around. Except baseball. She could not hit that dumb ball."

"I did a couple of times," she defended herself.

"Sure you did, and it went boink-boink-boink--" With his hands, he demonstrated a baseball bouncing no more a few feet away from him. She made a face at him. He grinned and turned back to his friends. "So finally Danz just loses all patience and yells, ‘C’mon ya weenie, put some muscle in it!’ And that pissed her off real good."

"He always says that was his intention," Julia said dryly. "Actually, he was just being a jerk."

"And I pitch, and she swings and crack and phwoosh and wham and I’m lying on the ground spouting blood like a shankin’ fountain."

"I didn’t mean to," she said as his friends roared with laughter.

"I know, baby, I know. If you’d meant to, you’d’ve hit it at him."

"So you played a lot of ball?" Jovay asked.

"Actually--" Alonzo had to stop and think. "We got in--what, Jules, two games? Before--"

"Maybe three . . . but then . . ." The laughter leached out of Julia’s face like water draining. "We started getting sick. Eben died and then we had to leave Devon--nobody really felt like playing baseball after that."

"Oh, yeah," Sheila said sympathetically. "Yeah, I can see."

Looking at her, Alonzo got a shock. Sheila could feel bad for them, but she hadn’t known Eben--funny Eben who played practical jokes and flirted even-handedly with every guy in camp from Yale to Uly, and who pitched fastballs like rockets. And Sheila would never, could never, understand the helpless horror of the six weeks Devon had been in cryo, or the miracle of getting her back again. She couldn’t understand the strangeness of their first days, or the bitter day-by-day survival of winter, or the way the camp felt at night, when they all huddled around the same fire, listening to the familiar rise and fall of each others’ voices and knowing that for one more night, the darkness wouldn’t eat them alive.

For a moment, one of his best friends looked like a stranger.

"We had a few games here," he said quickly, to break the spell. "Not a lot, but some--hey, you know, Jules, we can actually play a real game now! We’ve got more than enough people--"

"Not until it warms up," she said. "Moon Cross is only a few weeks away."

"Moon Cross?" Sheila questioned.

Again that jolt. Alonzo was so used to Moon Cross meaning the start of winter, cold, the earth and the Terrians settling in to sleep, that he’d forgotten that they were just two strange words to Sheila. "Winter," he said. "No ball games, it’s too cold. But when it warms up, we can have a lot of teams. It could be like a league. We’d have a tournament, and--"

"Whoa there, rocket boy," Jovay laughed. "Aren’t you forgetting something?"

"What?"

"When it warms up, you won’t be here."

"Jovay!" Sheila hissed, and tilted her head at Julia.

Feeling his neck creak, Alonzo looked around at her. She sat, moving the last piece of leafy green around her plate. Every so often, the fork scratched against the unglazed pottery.

"Oh man," Jovay said. "Oh--wow. Man. Sorry. Didn’t you know? Didn’t he tell you? Lonz, didn’t you--"

"He told me," she said. "I knew."

It was one of the unwritten codes of sleepjumping. Don’t let ‘em fall for you. Don’t let it get serious. Don’t let them believe it’s going to be forever, because forever’s eaten up by one jump. Other sleepjumpers knew better, but they all had to take care with lovers who lived in real time.

Sheila and Jovay looked at him accusingly. How could he explain to them how it had been? He had followed the code and told her, way back, way before their first winter. But back then, his departure had been a nebulous, hazy event far in the future. Now it was here, and he’d broken the code anyway.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Julia put down her knife and fork with the same precision as she would a live lascalpel. There was still a little food left on her plate. He would have bothered her into eating it in other circumstances, but the atmosphere felt oddly delicate--like a crystal cobweb. He didn’t want to shatter it.

Her voice fell into the air like pebbles dropping into a pond. "You promised me a dance." Soft and quiet, and very, very careful.

"I did, didn’t I?" He reached down and took her hand, feeling the familiar narrow-boned construction of it as if it were the first time he’d ever touched her. "Well. Come on then."

He danced with her to one of Morgan’s old-fashioned slow tunes, something with dreamy piano under slow lyrics asking wistfully not to be forgotten.

Her body moved soft against his, totally familiar. Julia, he thought helplessly. She’d never asked him for anything, and he’d ended up giving more than he ever had to anyone else. With an odd sideways jolt of his heart, he realized he’d been with her about twenty times longer than he’d ever been with anyone.

But he would leave. It was what he did. Sleepjumpers left, and he was a sleepjumper, and just like he’d done before, he would leave.

The advancers had gotten used to rising before dawn. The sun was barely nosing over the edge of the horizon when John finished his shower. Rubbing his hair dry, he looked up and down the long shower building for his daughter. Instead, he saw only her shoes, sitting outside the stall she’d picked. He frowned. "True!"

"Almost done!"

"Angel, over a thousand people still have to use these showers, and they’re not gonna thank you for using up all their hot water."

"Not do-one!" True caroled.

Muffled laughter drifted from other stalls, and he groaned. Oh, he was gonna get ragged on today. "Five minutes," he shouted through the door. "I told you five minutes!"

"I haven’t washed my hair yet!"

"The hell with your hair! Get out of the damn shower! People are waiting!" Not exactly a lie; Ketchum and his older girl had drifted into the building while he was yelling, and stood staring wide-eyed at him.

"I’m not done!"

He nodded at the pair and resumed yelling. "You have thirty seconds to get done! Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight--"

She started singing, very loudly and very off-key. He kept counting, hit zero, and waited for the water to turn off. It didn’t.

John shook his head. She’d asked for it. He went outside and found the pipes that fed into the water heater. He traced the one that led back to his daughter’s shower, found a valve, and gave it a good sharp twist.

A blood-curdling scream cut the morning air.

Unperturbed, he strolled back into the building. "I told you thirty seconds, True-girl," he pointed out.

"It’s freezing!" she wailed. From the other stalls, he could hear downright hilarity now.

"Guess you’d better finish up then, huh?" He looked around. The Ketchums were all but edging away. He nodded. "Morning."

"Morning," the father said, too polite not to.

"You look about ready to report me," John observed.

Ketchum looked apprehensive. "Well--don’t you think you’re being a little hard on her?"

"Everyone says that," he complained, "but nobody ever says how hard she is on me." He looked at Ketchum’s girl. "Molly, right? How old are you?"

"Twelve," Molly said softly.

"Twelve," John echoed. He looked back up at her dad. "Mine’s almost thirteen. Your turn’s coming." He gestured down the building. "Pick a stall, any stall. They’ve all got hot water; I just messed with hers."

The curtain on the stall swished open. True, her hair dripping down the back of her shirt, stormed past them. John paused just long enough to re-open the hot-water valve before strolling after her. Her rebellious mutters drifted back to him, and he rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m goin’ to Daddy Hell."

---

To Rob’s astonishment, Danziger seemed to be on perfectly good terms with his daughter at breakfast. He had expected icy fury, maybe more shouting. He himself had never bellowed at Molly or Angie like that, and couldn’t imagine doing so anytime in the future.

But True bubbled over with chatter, and the advancer Rob sat next to seemed sublimely unconcerned. "That’s just Danziger," Bess Martin told him. "He fights with all his favorite girls. You should see him get into it with Devon. It’s pretty funny."

Darla said delicately, "Are they really--ah--"

Bess glanced at Molly and Angie, all ears, and apparently opted for the less explicit answer. "Together? Mmmhm. Took ‘em a year to figure it out, but they’re in it now." She crossed her arms over her belly. "Listen, there’s a pool going on them if you want in."

Rob blinked. "A pool? You mean betting?"

"I’m down for Danziger popping the question sometime this winter."

"Ludicrous," her husband proclaimed, waving a dripping slice of fruit. "Insanity. Spring at least."

Bess rolled her eyes but otherwise ignored it. "Standard bet’s a full day’s work. You in?"

"No," Darla said. She cut her eyes at Rob--do you hear that?

Embarrassed for her rudeness, he smiled at them. "Not right now."

They weren’t stupid. Bess smiled back and said, "Well, I’m running the book," but they made excuses and left within moments.

Darla said, "Finally! Can you believe that? How is it their business?"

He thought about pointing out that she’d started it, asking about Devon’s private life. He decided against it. "It’s not as if they have holo sets," he told her. "They’ve got to do something, I suppose."

She probably would have argued the point with him, but just then, Angie reached for a piece of Pacifica apple and Darla’s attention was diverted.

It seemed friendly to him. Close--all these advancers were very close. Nothing like the anonymity of their block on the stations, where they’d lived next door to one couple for five years without knowing their names. He thought of old books he’d read that talked about small-town life on Earth, where everyone knew everyone else, and their business as well. New Pacifica, in-town population one thousand, two hundred and sixty-seven. Out-town population, zippo. Nada.

This place, so very, very small, and yet so unthinkably huge at the same time. Paradoxical; dizzy-making. He looked at Molly and saw her staring out the window at the impossibly blue sky.

She caught him looking and smiled, the expression briefly lighting up her face. Rob couldn't help but smile back. His self-contained little girl, curled up like a shrimp in a shell. She’d never looked like this on the stations.

---

By the time they started the tours, True could already tell she wasn’t going to like any of the kids that had come in the colony ship. So far, they’d whined about the food, complained about their beds, and made fun of the dorms. If her dad hadn’t been right there, True would have kicked every last one of them in the shins.

"We call this Downtown," her dad told the group as they stood on the porch. "Half of it’s offices and storage. Other half--here where we’ve been eating--we call this the gathering space."

"Gathering space," one boy sneered. "What is this, the twentieth century? Are we all hippies now?"

It was, almost word-for-word, what her dad had said when Devon had coined the term for the big multi-purpose room. But it stung, coming from somebody who hadn’t so much as picked up a hammer to help build it. True glared.

Her dad gritted his teeth, but managed to make his voice mild, as if he hadn't heard. "You kids'll meet there tomorrow for school, and whenever Devon calls a meeting, we'll meet in there. Which we will. The woman's crazy for meetings."

"What else is there to do here?" the same boy muttered.

The boy’s mother said, "Ryan." Her tone was warning, but it was a lot milder and a lot less effective than anything her dad would have said if she’d been that rude to someone’s face.

There were more snotty comments, not all of them from Ryan, when they walked out of the center of town to see the garage, the weaving shed, the smokehouse, and the farm. True’s ire weakened a little when she got to show off the poultry she’d been raising, Earth chickens and the larger G889 equivalent. True had named them tommy-birds because her dad had said they reminded him of a boss he’d once had, fat and placid and dumb enough to wander off a cliff without noticing.

Some people cooed, though they stayed well back from the beaks, which could punch through tin if the tommy-birds ever did get annoyed. Then a lady stepped in a goat plop and about had a fit.

"Christ, it's just sh--poop," her dad said, obviously fighting for patience. True slid her gaze toward him, wondering if he was annoyed enough that he’d pretend not to notice if she did kick some of the kids in the shins. He gave her a warning look. She sighed and behaved herself.

"It's probably teeming with bacteria," the lady said.

"Yeah, well, get used to it. This ain't the stations."

The lady left to change shoes, and probably to burn the poopy ones. True wondered what would happen the first time she got assigned to spread fertilizer on the vegetable patch, and grinned wickedly.

They set off for the coast. True caught up with her dad, and he tucked her under his arm. "Hang in there," he muttered. "Almost done."

"They're complaining about everything," she groused.

"Their problem. Where else are they gonna go?"

"Biodome in winter," she suggested.

"Tents in a rainstorm."

"The desert, anytime." True could feel the tension ease out of his arm where it rested on her shoulders, and she grinned up at him. "Do you think any of them will go back? To the stations, I mean."

He shrugged. "They signed on for lifetime occupancy, angel."

"Yeah, but they thought it was gonna be exactly like back there."

"It's not what we were expecting either," he reminded her. "Are you gonna go back?"

"Hell no," she said forcefully. "Even if Mr. Braxton wants us to," she added, just in case he was thinking about it. "We're never leaving, ever, right?"

He gave her a noogie, and she squealed. "You got it, angel. The Danzigers are rooted. Couldn't blast us out with dynamite."

Reassured, she glanced over her shoulder to check on their group. "Da-ad," she sighed. "We're losing them."

He stopped and turned, waiting for the group of straggling colonists to catch up.

"Can't we--stop and rest a moment?" one mother wheezed.

"We'll get to Singh Point in under five minutes," True's dad said. "You can rest there."

"Mr. Danziger, Angie's getting pretty worn out," said a dad, hefting the little girl he carried. She was one of the few Syndrome kids who'd come along on the tour, pale as paper and thin as a stick. She rested her head on her dad's shoulder.

True's dad sighed. "Couple minutes," he said. "Not too long."

Everyone who hadn't flopped to the ground did so, catching their breath. Man, True thought, watching them pant and wipe away sweat. They'd'a totally died if they'd had to trek across the continent. She wondered how Devon's tour group was doing.

"I told you it would be too strenuous," Angie’s mom fussed. "I told you. Most of your friends stayed behind. Rob, I'll take her back to the hospital."

"No-o-o!" Angie wailed. "Mom, let me see the for-real ocean, please?"

"I've got her, Darla," the dad said. "She's okay."

"I don't like it. Maybe we should all go back." She turned to her other daughter, sitting quietly in the grass and staring out at the bulge of the point. "Molly, you feel tired, don't you? You do. How about we go back? You can see all this some other time."

"This is the last part, Darla," her husband said. "C'mon, baby, we'll just finish up."

"But Molly--"

"I'm not tired, Mom," Molly said. "I want to see the ocean too."

True turned to look at her thoughtfully.

"Rest's over," True's dad said. "Let's go."

Amid groans and complaints, everyone got to their feet, brushing grass off their butts. Someone found a bug on their leg and screamed. True rolled her eyes.

Even though they tried to slow down to the group's pace, True and her dad still reached the point before anybody else. "Are we going down to the beach?" she asked hopefully.

He nudged his sunshades higher up on his nose. "That was the plan, but I don't think anyone will want to."

"Too bad for them," she said. "They could've seen some dead fish."

He laughed out loud. "Yeah, they would've loved that."

The first few colonists caught up with them at that point. "Finally, we can--" The man stopped mid-moan and stared, mesmerized by his first glimpse of the sea.

The others straggled up, panting, complaining, and falling silent as they saw the sea. True didn’t blame them. She’d stood here--right here--for close to an hour the very first time she’d seen it.

The sea stretched out, filling the horizon in every direction with deep, wrinkled grey-blue. At the base of the cliff, far, far below, the waves smashed themselves on the rocks, sending up explosions of spray and foam. It boiled like a live thing, wilder and more powerful than anything humankind could control.

True, looking at their awed faces, decided that they might not be so bad.

Then Ryan said, "Big deal. It's a bunch of water." He yawned hugely and stretched out on the grass. "Wake me up when something interesting happens."

That was it. True stepped on him.

He yelped, jackknifing to a sitting position. "What was that for?"

She turned big, innocent eyes on him. "Sorry. Didn't see you."

"Bullshit," he said rudely.

"Is that what you're full of?"

His hands balled into fists. "You little brat, how'd you like to get a--"

She stood her ground. "Just you try it--"

Parental scolds came simultaneously.

"Ryan!"

"True!"

"We didn't do anything," they said in perfect concert, then broke off, glaring at each other.

True's dad said, "Fine, keep it that way." He started pointing out the boats and the cutting tables on the beach far below. Some of the colonists liked the idea of sailing, but nobody looked happy to hear about fish duty.

Molly and Angie's mom asked where the elevator was, and looked like she might have a heart attack on the spot when True's dad showed her the stairs. She looked even less happy when Angie said in an obviously encouraging tone, "Mommy, it's just like the machine you had to get rid of. Your butt is going to look great."

After ten or fifteen minutes, everyone wanted to go back, and they headed off down the point with a lot more energy than they'd climbed up with. True shook her head. Boy, this looked great. Devon would say to give them a chance, but True wasn't sure she wanted to waste the time.

She turned around and found one person still on the point. Actually, on the very edge, sitting with her legs dangling into empty space, looking out at the sea like it was the answer to every question she'd ever asked.

"You know," True said, standing at her back, "you could fall off, sitting on the edge like that. It's a really long way down."

Molly twisted around to look up at her. "Have you ever fallen off?"

True blinked. Even Uly didn't know how often she sat on the edge just like that, against her dad's express, fish-and-filter-duty-for-a-month orders. "I'm still here, aren't I?" she said, wondering if it had been a lucky guess.

"Oh my God! Molly!" Her mom rushed up and grabbed her arm. "Get away from there, do you have any idea how dangerous, oh my God--" She turned on True. "And you, little girl, does your father know you're encouraging other children to put themselves in danger?"

True blinked, taken completely aback. "What?"

"She didn't encourage me to do anything, Mom," Molly said, getting carefully to her feet. "I'm fine."

"Don't get away from me, Molly. I mean it. This place is dangerous."

True watched them go, wondering if getting to know Molly would be worth being around her mom.

---

Alonzo finished his tour and saw his group of colonists off with a glad heart. Seemed like they’d spent more time dumping on what the advancers had built here than they’d spent looking at it. So there were open fields of indigenous plants instead of greenhouses, he thought grouchily. So the bathrooms were outside. So all the blankets and curtains had been woven by hand instead of coming packaged in plastic. So what? Wasn’t it better than seeing their kids die? Geez.

He flipped up a section of the bar and went behind it, rooting in the shelves for a clean mug. Most of them were still in the kitchens, getting washed. He should go in there and help, he thought without enthusiasm. The colonists should go in there and help, except they’d probably break every other mug.

His quest successful, he filled his mug with some of the tart, just-going-alcoholic cider they’d made in the summer. Propping his elbows on the bar, he wondered if they’d ever gather in a group again in one of the booths, the big empty room echoing with their laughter.

He sighed and took another drink.

The base of his neck prickled, and he looked up to see someone standing on the other side of the bar, staring at him. After a moment, he identified her. It was the lady doctor Vasquez.

"Uh--" he said. "Can I help you? Are you lost?"

"What’s your name?" she asked, hugging her elbows. She looked sort of like his Tía Stella, but thinner, like she’d tried to whittle down her natural roundness and had only half-succeeded. And his auntie never would have worn her hair all twisted back and pinned down like that, or gone out in public without a speck of jewelry on her person.

"Alonzo Solace," he said, wondering if she was coming on to him. "You’re--uh--Dr. Rita, aren’t you?"

"Yes," she said, but didn’t elaborate. She just kept staring with familiar brown eyes.

"Well . . . pleased to meet you. Uh. Did you need something?"

She came out of her apparent trance with a little jolt. "No," she said. "No, nothing." She turned and left, and it was only when the door shut behind her that Alonzo realized he'd spoken Spanish for the first time since he’d left home. Not only that, she'd answered in the same language--the language that had been outlawed on the stations, along with everything else that wasn’t English, for the past fifty years.

He vaulted over the bar and rushed to the door, wrenching it open to stare out into the square. But she’d already disappeared.

Ryan’s mom gave him hell, of course. She’d been giving him hell on a more or less daily basis for the past two years, so he was able to tune it out. He knew it all anyway--behave yourself blah blah you don’t get a second chance to make a first blah blah blah I just don’t know what I’m going to blabbity blah blah.

He looked at the garage as they passed. It was standing open, and he could see a really cool little one-seater inside. On that thing, he could go rocketing away across those endless fields. Zoom, zip! All by himself. All he had to do was steal it. Those stupid advancers probably didn't even have it voice-locked. He shot his mom a crafty look and sidled crabwise away from her.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Nowhere," he said automatically.

"You’re coming to the hospital, aren’t you?"

"What? No."

"Yes, you are." She caught his wrist, just like he was six.

He wrenched it out of her grip. "I’ve got dirt and grass all over me," he said. "They’ll never let me in."

"They have sterilizers," she said. "Come along, Ryan. We’re going to see your sister."

Feet dragging, head drooping, he followed. If he got into it with her now, they’d be screaming until sunset, and he’d still have to visit the stupid hospital.

A nurse made him wash his face and hands even though he’d gone through the sterilizer, so by the time he approached his sister’s bed, his mom had been there for ten minutes already. She gave him a look like it was his fault he was late. "Say hello to your sister, Ryan," she ordered.

He looked down at the wasted figure. She was paler than the sheets, not that he could see a whole lot of her with all the hookups for monitors. They looked to him, as they always did, like tentacles sucking the life out of his sister. "Hey, Lynnie," he muttered.

Her eyelids just barely fluttered.

His mom saw it, of course. She never missed anything when it came to Lynnie. "Tell her what you did today."

"Walked around," he said.

"More than that."

He turned on her. "What's the point? She's in a stinkin' coma."

"She can hear us," his mom said stubbornly. "Tell her about this planet. Tell her about the sky, and the sun, and the ocean."

"What is with everybody and that dumb ocean? It's just a bunch of water." He’d looked at it and thought of a boat that he could use to sail away beyond the horizon and leave everything behind.

"Tell her about the grass, then." She looked down at her daughter. "There’s real grass, honey. It’s so pretty . . . and the forest . . . all the trees . . ." She turned on Ryan suddenly. "Tell her."

He stuffed his hands in his pockets, staring out the window above his sister’s head. The beeps of her heart monitor drilled into his head like Chinese Water Torture.

"Ryan," his mother said warningly.

He said, "You’re not missing much, Big L. This place sucks." He spun around and stalked away.

His mother yelled, "Ryan! Ryan Anthony McNab! You come back here!"

He kept going, blocking his ears, speeding up his pace until he was practically running, because he’d never be able to live it down if he started bawling like a damn baby right there in the middle of the hospital.

---

John had a few choice words for Devon on the subject of ungrateful colonists, but when she dropped into the bench next to him, he swallowed them. She looked like she’d been through the wars.

"Told ya you shouldn’t’ve given out your gear channel," he said instead.

"I only gave it out to people who really needed to know," she muttered.

"And they gave it out to everyone." He slipped a hand under her hair and rubbed the back of her neck, which felt like one big knot under his fingers. "Congratulations, Adair, you got yourself a bouncing baby town."

She dropped her head forward. "As long as we don’t get colic, I think we’ll make it through the first few weeks. Don’t stop that or I’ll break all your fingers."

"Good thing for you threats turn me on," he said, continuing his massage. The knots were starting to unravel, but slowly. "So how many of those calls were from parents wanting to crucify you for putting their darlings on work detail?"

Her mouth slid into a pout. "Most of them."

"And I was . . ." When she clammed up, he leaned closer and crooned in her ear, "C’mon, gimme those three little words every guy wants to hear."

"You were right," she grumbled.

"Can I get a recording of that?"

She scowled at him. "All right, it’s not a very popular idea, but I stand behind it. They’re part of this community and they need to contribute. Besides, it’s the most efficient method of making sure they’re being looked after. For heaven’s sake, it’s not as if I asked them put their sick children to work--just the healthy ones."

"Get used to it, Madam Governor," he advised. "Speaking from experience, it’s not gonna be your last unpopular policy."

She widened her eyes in overdone surprise. "What? You mean some of these people are going to argue with every little thing I say? Gosh, I wonder what that’s like?"

"Think of me as boot camp."

"I think you’re a lot of things," she said. "Boots enter into most of them." He snickered, and she grinned at him. "How was your tour group?"

He thought. "I didn’t kill anyone," he offered. "True only maimed one person."

"Oh," she moaned.

"The kid deserved it. He was running his mouth the entire time. I almost sewed his lips shut when we were in Bess’s shed."

"Who was it?"

"Ryan something."

"Ryan McNab," she said, relaxing. "In that case, he probably did deserve it."

"Wow," John said. "Kid must be a pill and a half."

"He’s--um--a challenge."

"Right. Help me out here; are we talking after-school detention challenge, or juvie court challenge?"

"Let me put it this way," she said. "Given a few more years on the stations, his record might have rivaled mine."

When it came to Devon’s teenage exploits, the phrase as long as your arm wasn’t so much metaphorical as literal. It made John’s own trouble-making days look like a choirboy’s adventures. He took his hand off her neck. "You’re kidding."

Devon tipped her head back in a yawn and said at the end of it, "For his mom’s sake, I wish I was. You name it, he’s done it. Shoplifting, possession, destruction of property, drinking, hacking, and that’s just since he turned fifteen." Belatedly, she realized her massage had ceased. "Hey, don’t stop."

"Quit whining and explain to me why you’re letting a kid with that kind of rap sheet near my garage."

Her brows snapped together. "What am I supposed to do, chain him out on the cliffs? This place is about second chances, John. Everyone deserves one."

"Sounds to me like he used his up, along with his third, fourth, and tenth chances."

"Then we’ll give him an eleventh," she snapped. "As many as it takes."

"Yeah, what if he takes himself off a cliff in the process?"

"These people came here for their children, John. A lot of them came for both their children. This is a place to start over."

He raked his fingers through his hair. "Things are hard enough already, and there’s going to be a bunch of fucked-up little punks running around, creating havoc?"

"The term is emotionally disturbed," Devon said dryly. "And it’s not as if we can do anything to change it."

"No, it’s not, is it?" But he still would have appreciated some advance notice.

She looked down at her knees, then back at him. "I should’ve told you before." There was an apology in the words, unspoken.

That was enough to make the ire subside. He thought about letting it stand at that, but found himself saying, "You’re telling me now. That’s something."

She smiled a little. "Ryan’s the most extreme example, I’ll admit. But the Syndrome siblings don’t have it easy. They’re confused, they’re angry, they feel helpless--even more so than their parents--and they’re trying to cope as best they can. Raising hell is a very healthy reaction to their situation."

"Now you sound like one of the shrinks."

"I should; I’ve spent enough time with them."

He considered the situation and finally shrugged. So, another bump in the road. Like it had been so smooth before. "I won’t coddle them," he warned. "They push me, I’ll push back."

"I’m depending on it," she said.

They sat for a few minutes, watching people straggle into the gathering space for lunch. He turned his head to study her. She had a little more color to her now, but she still didn’t look a hundred percent. "Got your pills on you?"

She patted one pocket. "Right here." Her voice was bright, as if she were trying to lighten the mood between them.

He took her hand and pulled her up from the bench. "Brace yourself, gorgeous, I’m taking you to lunch at the ritziest joint in town."

"Oh, boy," she said in a sultry voice. "And me without my mink."

Predictably, she was mobbed almost as soon as she stepped foot into the gathering space. John glared until most of them cleared out, and it was a measure of how tired she was that she didn’t bother telling him off for it. When they were finally left to themselves, he looked around. "Y'know, I was picturing this place full of kids rollin' around in suits and chairs. Most of this crowd, you'd never be able to tell."

She crossed her arms. "I know. The holos kept showing kids that were more like robots than--"

"Whoa, hey! I'm on your side here, lady."

"Sorry. Old reflex." She smiled at him and continued in a less strident tone. "The Syndrome’s degenerative. They don’t need the suit until sometime in the second-to-last year. They don’t need the chair until a year to six months before--ah--before the end."

John scanned the tables and found Uly, chattering away to a crew of his immuno-suited buddies. Some were in chairs. Suddenly, the accouterments didn’t seem like funny clothes or machinery to him. They looked like countdowns.

The end, she’d said, so determinedly casual. The only end to the Syndrome--at least, on the stations.

It had just been the first couple of days that Uly had been suited and chaired. Then he'd been taken by the Terrians and returned, made new. It was easy to forget. Easier to underestimate.

"How long was Uly in the chair?" he asked.

"Three months." She tried to smile, and it was a piss-poor attempt. "He was never even supposed to get the suit. We were scheduled to leave before that. But red tape--you know."

He knew. His contract had been pushed back and back, forcing him to take last-minute jobs with crappy pay to make ends meet. Those had been thin times for himself and True, but he’d never given a thought to how Devon must have taken each delay, watching her kid get more and more frail as his body broke down.

Twelve to six months, minus three . . .

"You really almost lost him, didn't you?" he said quietly, stroking one hand down her back.

For a moment, he thought she wasn't going to answer, then she sighed. "I really almost did."

They were silent through the line. She put her hand in his, and he held it, thinking about narrow escapes.

---

Uly found most of his friends sitting at a table near the front. Their parents had all gone to get them food. "Hi, guys," he said, sitting down.

They broke off talking to look at him.

"Whuh?" he demanded with a mouthful of food.

"Nothing," Max said, in a way that really meant something.

"What?" he said again.

"What’s it like being healthy?" Angie asked.

Max said, "Angie!"

"It’s good," Uly said. "It’s great. I can do anything now."

"Like what?" Hari Bakshi demanded.

Uly’s mind went blank as he tried to remember what he couldn’t used to do. He could barely remember what it was like to have the Syndrome. It had all receded in his brain. "I went fishing the other day," he said. "In a boat. On the ocean."

"I saw the ocean today," Angie said. "What else?"

"I climb trees all the time. Like the one in the square? I climb that a lot."

Impressed looks bounced around the table.

Uly warmed to his subject. "I can work. My mom always says that. She says, ‘You’re perfectly healthy and you can help out.'" He made a face. "But that’s okay, that’s sort of fun sometimes actually. And I can talk to--" Uly broke off. His mom wanted to wait to tell everyone about the Terrian healing, and if he started talking about the Terrian parts of himself, well, his friends would never let up until they figured it out.

Max looked at him curiously. "Talk to who?"

"Everybody," Uly said, unable to come up with a good lie.

"We can talk to everybody now," Marie O’Connor pointed out.

"Not if they have, like, a cold or something," Uly said. He rushed on. "And swimming, I can swim. I swam in the summer. All the time. Like every day."

This, of course, distracted everyone right away. "Really?" Angie asked, bright-eyed. "Where?"

"The ocean," he said. "There’s these pools, see--"

"You can’t," Max said. "The ocean is really dirty. I read a book. It has this nasty stuff in it that’ll kill anybody even if they’re healthy--"

"That’s on Earth," Uly said when he figured it out. "You’re not on Earth anymore. Nobody’s ever dumped chemicals and things in these oceans." And they never would, he thought fiercely.

Max’s jaw jutted. "My dad wouldn’t like it if I swam in the ocean. I bet it’d make me sick."

"Everything makes us sick," Angie said.

Everyone laughed at that, but Marie started coughing mid-giggle. Over by the food line, Uly said her dad’s head turn, but she stopped coughing just as he stepped out of line.

He came over anyway, hovering over her. "Honey? How are you?"

"I’m okay, Dad."

"Here--I’ve got your inhaler--"

"I don’t need it."

"Just in case."

She sighed and submitted. Her dad listened to her breathe for a moment before he went away satisfied. He had to get in the back of the line again.

Seeing that reminded Uly that nobody else had eaten yet. He pushed his plate toward his friend. "You guys want something? I can get seconds."

Most of them said they weren’t hungry, but Angie reached out for a piece of fruit. "Bet my mom’s not going to get me any of this," she said, munching. "She doesn’t like indijus stuff."

"What stuff?"

"I don’t know, that’s what she called it last night. I love this," she added, and took another.

"Uly," Hari said. "How long did it take? Before you got well?"

"Yeah," Marie said. "Did it take a long time? Are we still going to be sick at the end of the winter?"

"No, no," Angie said. "I bet next week," she pointed at Max, "you’ll be out of your chair. And you guys’ll be out of your suits," she said to Marie and Hari. "And I’ll be swimming in the ocean."

"No, you won’t," Max said. "It takes longer than that, doesn’t it?" he asked Uly.

"Uh," Uly said. "It was--kind of--sudden?"

"What do you mean?"

"Um--I don’t know if I can exactly explain." Yes he could, he thought grouchily. He could if only his mom hadn’t told him not to. It didn’t make sense to him. He wanted to tell them everything, and take them away right now, to the Terrians, so they could get fixed and then he wouldn’t be the only one anymore.

Angie’s eyes went wide with hope. "Did you just wake up one morning and you were better?"

"Something like that," he mumbled. "Kind of."

He was saved by Max’s dad, who came to the table with two plates full of food. "Dad," Max said. "Uly says he swam in the ocean."

"Don’t be ridiculous," Max’s dad said. "Uly’s mom would never allow him to do something so dangerous."

Uly stared at him. "She does, though," he said. "She lets me do lots of things now."

Max’s dad gave him one of those smiles that meant the grown-up didn’t believe you. None of the advancers ever gave him that smile. He hated it.

Angie whispered, "I believe you."

"Thanks," he whispered back.

"Can I have more fruit?"

He gave it to her. His appetite was suddenly gone.

More parents came, with food. They fussed and fluttered over their kids, asking them to eat, warning them that they’d go back in the hospital after lunch. His friends ate, not very much by Uly’s standards, but their parents spoke happily about their appetites.

Uly sat watching them like True looking at a new species for Julia. He’d known all these kids since he was little. He and Max had been diagnosed at the same time. But they all looked like strangers now--little and skinny and pale. And young.

Since when had his friends been so young?

---

Devon sent True over to help Uly with clearing up. As they made their way between the tables and then into the kitchen, heads turned as colonists stared at Uly, then quickly returned to what they’d been doing. Kids pointed and whispered to each other or their parents.

"Everybody keeps looking at you," True said to him. "What is with that?"

"Mom says it’s because I’m healthy," Uly said. "They’re not used to it."

"Doesn’t it bug you?"

"No," he claimed, but True could tell he was lying a little.

At the serving table, they helped Cameron pack fruit back into crates and scoop chowder into a container so they could put it in the cold room before it spoiled. The bearded cook sighed at the amount that was left. "These kids don’t hardly have appetites," he told them. "Not like you."

Uly grinned through the half a greenfruit he already had in his mouth.

"And the parents kept asking what I put in this. Sure, yeah, for flavor I used a pinch of arsenic and just a sprinkle of nuclear waste." He rolled his eyes and hoisted the container of chowder. "They got all bent out of shape because I used indigenous ingredients."

As Cameron walked away toward the cold room, Uly said, "Oh, indigenous," as if he’d just figured something out.

"What?" True asked him.

"Angie said her mom said not to eat indijus stuff. I didn’t know what she meant."

"It means it’s from G889."

"I knew that," he said.

"They think things from here are going to poison them or something," True said scornfully. "They’re such babies."

"They are not!"

"Are too. I was right yesterday. They’re all scared of everything."

"You shut up! They are not!"

Although taken aback by Uly’s sudden ferocity, True jumped right in. "You should’ve seen them this morning," she said. "It was pitiful. They should just go back to the stations, if you ask me."

"Nobody asked you," Uly said, shoving a big platter across the table so hard that it fell off the edge. Leftover bread flew and crumbs scattered in every direction, and when the platter hit the ground, it broke into three jagged pieces.

"Damn it, Uly, now look what you did!"

"So what," he said. "And you’re not s’posed to cuss."

"Are you going to tattle?" she mocked. "Are you going to tattle like a little baby?"

"I am not a baby!" he yelled.

"You are too, you and all those kids, you’re all--"

"Enough!"

Startled out of her rage, True looked up to see her dad looming over them.

"Enough," he said again. "Can it, you two."

They rushed to defend themselves.

"But she said--"

"He broke--"

"She called me--"

"I know," Dad said. "I heard. Most of the town heard. Who broke the plate?"

"Him," True said.

"Me," Uly mumbled at the same time.

"Okay. Pick up the pieces. Don’t cut yourself. You two done here?"

True looked up and down the table. "Almost."

"Fine. Uly, finish up. True, come with me. You both need to simmer down. Apart."

Most of the time, True would have protested being hauled away like a little kid, but the fight with Uly had shaken her. They fought a lot, sure, but not like this. He’d been really mad. Usually, she was the one who got mad, and he just sort of played along.

Probably she shouldn’t’ve called his friends babies. But he hadn’t even sat with her at lunch.

"Sorry, Dad," she muttered after a minute.

He grunted.

"Where’re we going?"

"We’re going to meet the ops crew and go see how bad the ship looks."

Struck by a sudden impulse, she announced, "I want to work on the ship with you guys." If she was on the ship, she wouldn’t have to be on work detail with those annoying colonist kids.

He looked down at her. "What? Today? That’s why I’m taking you."

"No, I mean for regular. Instead of work detail. C’mon, Dad, I’ll be a big help. You always say I’m a big help."

They rounded the corner of Downtown and the garage came into view. Most of the ops crew was already there. Mr. Braxton stood by the garage doors, his arms crossed. "We’ll talk about it later," her dad said.

Okay, fine. She’d be such an incredible help today that he’d have to let her come work on the ship.

As they walked up, Mr. Braxton said, "Talk to you?"

Her dad swung the garage door open. "Come on in."

True trailed along behind and heard Mr. Braxton say, "They didn’t find anything."

"I know," her dad said.

"They scanned us all. Like fucking criminals or something."

Her dad pinched the bridge of his nose. "I explained this. They scanned you looking for a compulsion chip, not criminal tendencies."

"Funny how your top-level twinkie latched right onto the drones, isn’t it?"

Her dad’s voice came through his teeth. "She is not a twinkie, and she’s not latching onto anybody. It was a member of the crew last time, we figured good odds it would be this time."

"Yeah, well, it wasn’t, was it?"

True eased back even further. O-kay. So apparently she was not the only one in her family who was in a fight.

On the way out to the landing site, True rode in the back seat of the dune rail, holding on to her dad’s big box of equipment, which took up the rest of the space. She hung her head over the side, watching the ground rush by underneath and letting the wind ruffle her hair and howl in her ears. It almost, but not quite, muffled the tense, low-voiced words between her dad and Mr. Braxton. When silence fell in the front seat, it was even worse.

She pulled her head back in and slid down in the seat, digging her chin into her chest. Everything was changing, and it all seemed to be changing for the worse. She wished the colony ship had never landed.

---

Lynnie struggled out of the darkness. She hated the comas that came more and more often now, dragging her down into their muddy depths until she was all alone in the dark.

The world came back in pieces--silence giving way to the mechanical beeps and twitters of the medical machines, emptiness replaced with the feel of sheets and sensors against her skin, numbness turning into the feel of the breathing tube in her nose, pushing oxygen down her throat.

It hurt to be conscious, but even that was better than the dark.

"Honestly, Ryan, what were you--"

"Mom, she’s waking up."

"Lynnie?"

Her mother’s hand closed around hers. Mustering all her energy, Lynnie tried to squeeze her hand.

"Her fingers twitched. Lynnie? Honey? Ryan, get the doctor."

Lynnie dragged her eyes open. The world wavered and swung, then her mother’s face slowly settled into focus. "Mama?"

Her mother’s fingers tightened around hers. "I’m here."

Her throat hurt. They must have intubated her while she was under. "Are we going soon?"

Her mother leaned closer. "What?"

Lynnie tried to speak louder. "Going soon?"

"Where?"

Where? Lynnie’s entire life had been about this trip for the past four years. "Planet," she managed. "New--planet."

Her mother touched her face, stroking her hair lightly so as not to dislodge her breathing tube. "Sweetie--we’re there."

"What?" How could they be there? She was still sick. G889 was supposed to make her better.

"On G889. We landed yesterday."

Familiar footsteps approached, and Lynnie looked past her mother to see Ryan and Dr. Vasquez. "Ry--" she said.

He gave her knee a rough pat through the blanket. "Took you long enough," he said with forced cheer.

"We’re here?" she asked him.

"Yeah," he said. "We landed. You’ve been lying around for a day, lazybones." His hand, still on her knee, trembled.

Dr. Vasquez said brightly, "Let’s have a look at your numbers, young lady!"

Lynnie let him pick up her arm for the blood sample and listen to her heart and do all the other dull and painful doctor things that always happened. She avoided her brother’s and mother’s gazes, staring up at the fluorescent lights on the ceiling. They were the same as the lights in the station hospital, all white and glaring.

G889 was just like the stations. It hadn’t worked. And now she was going to die.

Devon didn't have to physically drag anybody from their beds in the morning, but it was a close thing. Breakfast was late and unappetizing, and from the looks Cameron was giving her, he would have rather had no help at all than what he'd gotten. She thanked him profusely, reminded him of the colonists' inexperience with actual cooking, and begged for patience--a process she was going to have to get used to, she thought ruefully.

During breakfast, she dealt with so many requests to switch duties that she resorted to announcing, "There will be no switching of duties. I appreciate that nobody is used to this kind of work, but it's all necessary to the smooth function of this community, and you will have to get used to it as soon as possible. Remember that duties will rotate on a daily basis. The only people who will stay on one detail are the work leaders, who know what they're doing and who will teach you. That's final. Please don't ask me again."

"Nice," John said, helping her down from the table top. "So about the people you're putting under me--"

She started to snarl, then recognized the button-pushing look in his eye. "You," she muttered. "No switching means no switching."

"Got it, but I'm not looking forward to weekend tinkerers who think they're God's gift to a tool belt."

"Opinion noted and filed," she said crisply and took a bite. "Oh, my god." She reached for the salt shaker in the middle of the table. "Did these things start out life as eggs?"

"That’s the legend. What I'd give for a bottle of ketchup."

Uly leaned forward. "Hey, Mom," he said. "When are we gonna bring the Terrians to see my friends?"

For what felt like the seventieth time, she said, "Honey, be patient. Julia and I have got to talk to the medical staff, show them your records--and don't forget that the Terrians won't take any kids whose parents haven't given permission." That had been an absolute condition. Devon hadn't forgotten the fear that had almost eaten her alive when Uly had been taken. She still wasn't entirely sure the Terrians understood the concept of parents and children--according to Uly, it worked differently for them--but they'd agreed.

"When are you gonna do that?" he persisted.

"After breakfast."

"Can I come?"

"Why don't you wait a little while, and let them get used to the idea. I'm sure they'll all want to talk to you later."

His face fell, then brightened with a new thought. "If they want to talk this afternoon, can I get out of work detail?" He was on fish duty that afternoon.

She chose something from her vast repertoire of Mom Looks--in this case, You're Pushing It, Young Man. He sat back in his seat with a sigh. "True doesn't have to rotate," he muttered.

"That's cuz my dad needs my help, stupid," True said from John's other side.

"Enough with the stupid," John said. "And about you helping me on the ship--"

"What," True said in a dangerous voice. Devon winced.

"I want you to join one of the work groups instead."

True looked like she'd just been sentenced to death by suffocation in Grendler spit. "What? But--"

"Do you really wanna hang around the ship all day? With a bunch of old jumpers and mechs?"

"Yeah," she said stubbornly. "I know those guys. I don't know any of the colonist kids."

"Those guys on the ship are gonna clear out as soon as she's fixed. You should get some friends your own age."

True slapped her silverware on the table. "All the kids my own age are stupid!"

Uly frowned and opened his mouth. Devon shook her head at him. One fight at this table was about all any of them needed.

"Did I not just say enough with the stupid?"

"I'm not gonna do it!"

"That wasn't a request!"

"But Dad--"

"True!" he said sharply.

She wasn’t a complete fool. She shut up.

He continued evenly, "You can help me on the ship when your group comes around to it. But you’re going in one of the work groups, and that's final."

If looks could have killed, he would have been dust.

---

"Jesus," John muttered when breakfast was finally over. They'd left Uly and True in the gathering space, where school would be held six mornings a week. The older children would join their parents on the various work details in the afternoon. "Is it me, or is my kid ready to rumble twenty hours out of twenty-four these days?"

"Gets it from her father," Devon said cheerfully.

He shot her a look very similar to the one True had given him during breakfast.

She relented. "Look, no matter how it seems, she's not possessed. It’s just adolescence hitting."

He said, "Like a hand grenade," kissed her, and went off to load the ATV with his equipment.

Devon thought, At least around here, she can't rob a convenience store with a carrot stick, and grinned. Although she’d told the court otherwise when she was fourteen, she was still proud of that stunt.

Every time during the morning that she tried to call Dr. Vasquez and set up a meeting, he was busy. Several of the children had come down with coughs due to some allergen or other, and a lot of nervous parents had admitted their children to the hospital just in case. New Pacifica General was full to the brim and buzzing like a hive full of caffeinated bees.

Devon tried to be patient, knowing where Dr. Vasquez's priorities had to lie, but she finally went to the hospital, prepared to follow him around until he agreed to a meeting. He must have seen it in her face, because he said, "I’ll give you ten minutes. If I don't show up in my office at--" he checked his chrono "--eleven-fifteen, you have my permission to hunt me down like a dog."

"You joke, but don't think I won't," Devon said. "Where's Julia? I'd like her with us."

He said, "Why would you need Dr. Heller for this conversation?"

Devon blinked. There had been more than professional status insult in those words. "She can give you a better medical insight into what happened to Uly than I can."

"Well, if you must." He turned away.

Devon didn't much favor hanging around his cubicle for the next ten minutes like a bored intern, so she wandered into the little cluster of cubicles allotted to the psychotherapists. It was like another land completely. While the doctors made do with the work tables and shelf units the advancers had provided, the therapists had wasted no time in replacing them with chairs, rugs, baskets of toys, drawing pads, and other tools of their trade.

She found Rita Vasquez unpacking a basket of toys. "Oh, Devon," the psychologist said, looking up from a stuffed purple elephant. "Come on in."

"This is nice," Devon said.

Rita surveyed her domain. "Much better," she said. "Did you need to see me for something?"

Devon pulled up one of the chairs. "I just wanted to see how you and your team were settling in. I know the facilities aren’t exactly what we’d planned, but--"

Rita folded the plastic crate flat and set it on top of a stack of empties in the corner. "I understand completely. Things just didn’t go as planned all around."

Devon rolled her eyes. "Now there’s an understatement." She rubbed one temple, thinking ruefully of the complaints she’d been fielding all morning.

Rita settled herself in the other chair. "You know, Devon, you have nothing to ashamed of here. Considering your limitations, you’ve done a phenomenal job."

Devon almost choked on her surprise. It was the first time anybody outside of the advance team had told her that. She stared at her knees until the hot feeling behind her eyes subsided. "Thank you," she said, when that was managed. "It’s--it’s good to hear that. It wasn’t just me, you know. I had wonderful people on the advance team."

"You depend on them?"

"Without even thinking about it."

Rita sat back in her chair, her brows raised. "That's an interesting sentiment, from you. I seem to remember a number of discussions on your reluctance to surrender control."

Devon ducked her head. "Yes, well," she said. "Around here, unless you learn to trust others, you're just screwing yourself over."

"And that's another unique sentiment," Rita said. "The wording especially."

Devon laughed. "John's rubbing off on me. He can be a little--blunt."

"You've become close to him?"

Devon regarded her. It was usually hard to read Rita Vasquez. She had been a therapist for close to thirty years, and had perfected that all-accepting, non-judgmental demeanor. "Yes," she said slowly. "We had more than our fair share of clashes--still do--but I would trust him with my life. In fact, I have."

"And a great deal more than your life, it seems," Rita said.

Devon met her eyes. "Yes."

"How do you feel about that?"

"We're not in session, Rita," Devon said.

Rita smiled, looking down at her fingertips again. "Sorry. Habit. Speaking of which--do I have your permission to re-initiate sessions with Uly? I do have two years, and a number of traumatic events, to catch up on."

"You mean when I nearly died?"

"That too, but I also mean his restoration to health. Not all trauma is bad, you know, but it all produces conflicting and difficult feelings."

"And you’ll also find out what to expect for the other children."

"Every child is different, Devon," Rita said. She said it so often it should have sounded automatic, but after thirty years, each syllable still rang with conviction.

Once, as a gag gift, one of the other Syndrome mothers had started a sampler with that phrase on it. Anne Jones had been a throwback, enjoying all manner of old-fashioned arts and crafts. Her daughter, Robin, had died before she was halfway through, and the beautifully embroidered letters tapered off into a ghostly outline right around the word "is." But Rita had still had it framed and mounted on her wall with her diplomas and certificates.

Devon sat back. "I was going to ask what the Syndrome children think of G889, but I’ll rephrase. What trends are you and your team seeing in their reactions?"

Rita smiled a little at the irony in Devon’s voice. "One of the strongest, especially in the older children, is disappointment."

Devon sighed. "Yes, well, they’re hardly the only ones."

"Not in the facilities. In their own state of health."

"I forgot about that," Devon said after a moment. "They expected an instant cure, just by coming here, didn’t they?"

Rita nodded. "No matter how many times we explained it to them, G889 and New Pacifica loomed large in their conception as a place of magical and effortless health. They’d get off the ship and everything would change."

"How are they taking it?"

"Not well, as you might imagine."

Devon leaned forward. "Rita. Listen. The planet will heal them."

"In time," Rita allowed. "Most of them. But--"

"All of them," Devon insisted. "I’m not being rhetorical. It’s not magic, it’s definitely not free, but any parent with the courage to let them go will have a healthy child by the winter."

It was the first time she’d ever seen Rita Vasquez at an utter loss for words. The therapist stared at her as if wondering whether she had any spare straitjackets in her things. Finally, she said, "Devon, I’m not sure I understand."

Devon bit her lip, debating whether to tell Rita before the meeting with Miguel. Rita was, after all, the head of the therapists’ team. Before she could make that decision, though, the screaming started.

Devon bolted so fast her chair went flying. She raced down the rows of cubicles and burst into the ward, looking for the imminent threat to life and/or limb. All she saw was Uly, with . . .

With a group of Terrians, standing there in the middle of the hospital like seven-foot corpses with enormous staffs.

Mothers screamed, fathers shouted, children cowered under the covers. Devon had almost forgotten how strange and wild the Terrians looked on first view, but she remembered now, very well. "Everyone!" she shouted. "Everyone, please calm down! They're not going to hurt us!" She remembered what had worked so well a couple of days before and stuck her fingers in her mouth, letting out a piercing whistle. Even that didn't penetrate the chaos. She gave that up and kept shouting.

Finally, the ward fell silent, except for a few whimpers and the sound of fast, terrified breathing.

"Everyone," Devon said. "Please, it's all right. These are Terrians. They're one of the groups native to this planet."

"What do they want?" Darla Ketchum quavered. "What do they want from us?"

"I brought them to see you," Uly said. He was white to the lips, scared and confused. The Terrians stood around him, stiff, their eyes flickering over the nest of humans they'd walked into. More screams exploded when one dropped into a crouch, pressing his hand against the wooden floors in a futile effort to sink back into the ground.

"Please!" Devon called out. "Calm down, you're scaring them!"

When silence was again restored, Dr Vasquez turned on Uly. "Why would you do a thing like that?"

"Because they’re gonna help us!" Uly cried.

Devon started, "Uly--"

He raised his voice. "They helped me. They took me into the ground and they made me part Terrian and now I’m all better and they’re gonna do the same thing for every kid here!"

Appalled silence blanketed the hospital. Devon put a hand to her head.

Finally, Darla said in a faint, horrified voice, "Part . . . Terrian?"

Devon looked across the ward at Julia. The look on the doctor's face agreed with her; they'd lost their chance for anything resembling an orderly explanation of the Terrian healing process. All they could do right at this moment was damage control, and the first thing that entailed was-- "Uly," she said. "Please lead our guests outside. Apologize--"

"But--"

She kept talking, low and level. "Apologize for the fact that we weren't ready to meet them yet. Ask them if they're still willing to come back."

"But Mom--"

"Ulysses."

His stiff shoulders sagged. "Yes, ma'am."

"Thank you."

He turned to his friends and spoke in the soft, trilling Terrian language. Ben O’Connor said in a low, appalled voice, "He’s talking to those things--"

The Terrians, Uly in the middle, turned and started for the door. Their footsteps were heavy and clumsy on the wooden floorboards, and their staffs clunked with every step. Near the door, one paused and turned to look at Lynnie McNab. He took a step forward, his head tilted curiously.

Ryan stepped in between the Terrian and his sister's bed. "You touch my sister and I'll kill you," he snarled, his voice shuddering with fear.

The Terrian stepped back. Devon had no idea how much human language it or any Terrian understood, but Ryan's twisted face and balled fists didn't need language. Uly trilled something low, and the Terrian followed him out the door.

---

Uly sat with his knees hugged to his chest. His eyes burned, but he wasn’t gonna cry, because he was ten and a half years old and just because he’d messed everything up big-time, he wasn’t gonna cry.

After awhile, a shadow fell over him. He put his forehead down on his knees.

"Ulysses," his mom said. "Do you have an explanation for me?"

"I’m sorry," he said, the words muffled by the fabric of his pants.

"Apology accepted, but I asked for an explanation."

He picked his head up. He knew that voice. There was no way out of this one. "I thought it would be okay," he said, still unable to look up at his mom. "They’re my friends. I thought they’d understand."

"Uly, I asked you not to bring the Terrians around until I’d talked to the doctors and the parents."

"You were gonna talk to them today," he mumbled, knowing it wasn’t an adequate excuse.

"But I hadn’t yet. And what happened in there is exactly why I asked you to hold off."

He screwed up his face, choking on the knot in his throat.

After a moment of silence, she said, "I’m still waiting."

It burst out of him. "I’m so stinking tired of being the only one like me!"

"Honey, we’re all the only one like ourselves--"

"I’m not talking about--" he floundered for the proper word. "--individualality--"

"Individuality?"

He steamed on. "--or being yourself or whatever, I mean I’m the only one who can do this!" With that, he leaned over and thrust both his arms into the ground up to the elbow.

As always, it felt like he was shoving them into slightly thick water. He knew that this ground was hard enough to walk on, but behind that knowledge was the additional fact that if he wanted, he could swim through it like a seal. It was largely a matter of choice--his own--which it would be.

Just like him.

After a moment, he drew his hands out and set them in his lap. He didn’t want to look at his mom. It bugged her when he did Terrian stuff around her. Maybe because she couldn’t do it too--he didn’t know. But he’d always tried to hold off doing Terrian things when other people were around, at least obvious Terrian things.

She let out a long sigh and sat down in front of him. "Honey," she said carefully. "Uly. Look at me, please."

He lifted his eyes.

She brushed his cheek with her knuckles. "You are the only one like you. I knew that. I didn’t know that it was so hard on you, being that way."

He played with a stone he’d pulled up from the ground. It had a fossil in it--a squiggly snaky thing. He had a real good collection of fossil rocks now, and Julia was always saying that when she had time she was going to look at them and put them in her database.

"Knowing that now, I understand why you made the mistake that you did. What do I always say about mistakes?"

"You can come back from them," he said obediently, but he wondered if his mom had ever had to come back from really gigundo colossal mistakes. She always seemed like she knew what she was doing.

"Exactly. Right now it’s very important to be patient and not go too fast with the colonists. They need to get used to this place. Don’t you remember how scary it was, the first little while? Before we got used to it?"

"No," he said.

"Think back to the first months, sweetheart. None of us felt like we belonged here, or--"

"I did," he said. "I belonged here."

"Uly--"

"I never felt like I was supposed to be back there. I thought my friends felt the exact same. I thought they’d understand about the Terrians." He felt stupid now. He’d never been able to tell them anything about the Terrians, but they were s’posed to just know?

"Well, they didn’t."

"No kidding," he said bitterly.

She tapped his knee. "Don’t be snotty."

"Sorry."

She let out her breath. "We’re going to have to help them get used to the Terrians. Show them they’re not--well--harmful, and--"

He looked up at that. "They’re not coming back," he said.

"Who?" his mom said.

"The Terrians."

She sounded like he’d hit her in the stomach. "Ever?"

He shrugged helplessly. "They said obviously the parents weren’t ready. They said they’re not gonna steal any more seeds--" He shook his head, remembering that he was talking Human. "Any more kids. Like they did me."

"What are we supposed to do then?"

"They said the parents have to go to them. They have to take their kids and go to them." He remembered how scared everyone had been. Max had screamed, and Angie had cried, and Lynnie's mom had thrown herself over Lynnie like she was protecting her from an avalanche or something. His voice cracked. "Mom, what if they die before that?"

His mom’s arms came around him. "Shh," she breathed into his hair. "Don’t worry. We’ll--we’ll find some way to fix it. None of your friends are going to die, honey."

She always used to say that when he was younger, that he wasn’t going to die. He’d always known different, even though he said he believed her. Of course, she’d turned out right in the end. But now, curled up in her arms, Uly wasn’t sure if even his mom could make this better.

Alonzo had been out on the water all day, and all he wanted to do was sluice himself off and pass out. He wouldn't even particularly miss dinner, not if it resembled breakfast and lunch.

But Devon said, "Alonzo, I need you especially at this meeting."

Even over the flickery gear image, he could see the tension in her face. "What for?" he asked, working a hand through his hair. It crunched with salt and sand. He made a face. "Something happen while I was incommunicado?"

The gear didn't work especially well out on the water, and they'd all taken to leaving it behind and relying on hand and arm signals to communicate boat to boat. Most of the morning had been spent trying to teach their work group those signals, without a whole lot of success. They'd nearly wrecked one boat, and they’d lost a good portion of the afternoon’s catch when another had flipped over.

His hand knocked the headband of his gear off-kilter, and he pulled it back into place in time to hear, "--the Terrians into the hospital."

"Wait, I missed that. The Terrians came into the hospital?"

"Uly brought them."

"Uly? When was this?"

"Over the lunch break."

Alonzo moaned. If he'd been on another duty, he could have been around at lunch to help out, but everyone on fish duty had eaten on the beach, because it was too far to walk back.

"They're not happy," Devon continued.

"The Terrians or the colonists?"

"Either. Both. It doesn't look good. The Terrians are saying they're not going to come back, that the parents have to go to them now."

"What?"

"You didn't see it when they walked in," she told him. "It was pandemonium. People were terrified. The staff were hours getting the kids calmed down. They had to dose some of them."

"Why did Uly bring them in the first place? I thought we agreed to wait."

Devon looked away. "He was frustrated. He got tired of waiting. He went and got them on his own."

Alonzo kicked a tree, startling a passing colonist and sending a bird screeching into the sky. "Those talks took weeks! They said they'd--how can--" He took a deep breath. "Devon," he said. "I'm giving you fair warning. I'm gonna strangle your kid."

"Never mind that. Right now, we need some serious damage control. Julia and I tried explaining it today at the hospital, but they were all so upset that I don't think we got too far."

He took in a breath, then let it out, trying to think calmly. "Any chance the Terrians will come tonight?"

"I'm not so sure that would be a good idea. Look, the meeting's right after dinner. Just be ready to talk, okay?"

"Yeah, sure. Hey, Devon, if you're trying to get them into a good mood, that cooking might not be the best way to do it."

That got a smile from her for the first time. "I'll let you tell that to Cameron," she said, and signed off.

---

Over dinner, or what was passing as dinner tonight, Julia managed to add a few details to Devon's report of the events at the hospital. Every one made the picture a little darker. Alonzo put his head on the table. "It was supposed to be easy," he said to the table top. "We got it all worked out and it was supposed to be easy and painless and I swear to God I'm gonna tie Uly to a tree and let Grendlers dribble on him."

"Stop that, you'll get splinters in your lips," Julia said. "Devon wants us to talk to the parents now, before the meeting. Some one-on-one. Like she’s doing."

Alonzo sat up and looked where Julia was pointing. Devon stood in the middle of the room, talking earnestly to a clump of parents. He couldn't hear what she was saying, but just reading the body language of her audience, she wasn't having a whole lot of luck.

The sight made him feel guilty. Besides, if he walked around, he might actually find the woman he’d been seeking for the past day and a half. "All right, let’s go."

The attempt only made his mood worse. He kept hearing words like monster, creature, disgusting, and he felt like smacking them all. Humans weren't any fashion plates to the Terrians either, who thought they were soft-skinned and barbaric and lonely. They were pretty close to right.

Even the parents who'd been on fish duty with him, and therefore hadn't seen the Terrians, weren't terribly receptive to reason. They'd all talked to their kids, and to other parents, and, if anything, were more terrified of the exaggerated horrors that were relayed to them. Alonzo poured on the charm and got a few of them to listen--a minor victory at best, but he'd take what he could get.

Something was up with Jules, though. She was okay talking to the parents, if a little stiff, but the minute they got within ten feet of another doctor, she clammed up. It wasn't like her. When he asked her about it, she said, "Nothing, Alonzo."

He thought about pushing further, but shrugged and scanned the crowd again before settling on another pair of suspicious-looking parents.

It was lucky for Uly that the worst of Alonzo's ire had been worked off by the time he found the kid. Devon's son sat off on his own, with his head hanging and his feet hooked around the legs of his chair, looking about as miserable as a kid could look. Alonzo sat down across from him.

"You're mad at me too, I bet," Uly said, still staring at the table top.

Alonzo thought about lying, but he said, "Yeah."

Uly heaved a sigh. "Join the freakin' club," he said, sounding so much like Danz that Alonzo had to bite the inside of his cheek. "Even the Terrians are PO'd."

That caught Alonzo's attention. "What for?" he asked as Devon started the meeting.

Uly said under his mother's carefully calm speech, "Because I brought them before anybody was ready."

"Were they insulted?" As far as Alonzo knew, it took a lot to insult a Terrian, but having a whole building full of aliens start screaming like you were the most hideous thing since Frankenstein might just do it.

"I dunno. But they said they wouldn't steal seeds again. They really mean it about the parents."

"I guess we hammered that into their heads good." Parents and children was a concept that had taken forever to explain. Even by the time the Terrians had agreed not to take children without parental permission, they'd remained politely puzzled over the idea. Maybe because they didn't completely understand it, they were determined to honor that tradition.

Up on the stage, Devon had been interrupted three or four times already and was showing signs of losing her cool. "The Terrians are our neighbors, not monsters. One of our advance crew, has been in contact with them since virtually the beginning of our time here. Alonzo? Why don’t you--"

"What do you mean, in contact with?" someone said suspiciously.

"Maggie, we’re holding our questions until the end," Devon said.

Alonzo answered it anyway. "The Terrians communicate through dreams," he said. "For whatever reason, they picked me to dream with, and I'm sort of an expert on them by now."

"Those things get in your head?" said someone else.

"Darla," Devon said.

Alonzo said, "Look, the last thing they want to do is hurt anybody. They can't hurt anybody. It's just not in their--their nature, you know? The only time I ever heard of Terrians hurting humans, they got thrown out of their tribe for twenty years."

"So they are capable of harm," a mother said angrily.

"So are we, but do we go around hurting innocent kids?" Alonzo shot back. "The only thing they're gonna do is help."

"What they call helping," a doctor said. "Messing with DNA--doesn’t anyone remember the mid-twenty-first century?"

"Apples and oranges, Dr. Morton," Devon said. "You can’t compare the two. For one thing, Uly’s alive. And normal."

"Normal?" a dad shouted. "He’s part alien! How can you call that normal?"

Devon snapped, "My son is not a witch, a monster, a freak, a half-breed, or any of the other ugly words I’ve heard thrown around today. He’s completely himself and completely healthy--"

"But not completely human."

"No," Julia said, standing up, "but mostly. Ninety-five, maybe ninety-six percent."

The doctors all looked at her like she was a traitor, or scum. Weird.

Devon said, "He’s a normal little boy. He just has . . . some extra gifts, that’s all."

A father said, "Well, he can keep them. I'm not giving Hari to those creatures."

"You're not giving--" Devon started, and a squabble broke out.

Uly stood up and said, "'Scuse me." When nobody heard, he climbed on the table and screamed, "SCUSE ME!"

What it lacked in dignity, it made up for in efficiency. The meeting fell into startled silence. Devon said, "Uly?" in a wary voice.

Still standing on the table, Uly said, "I'm sorry I brought the Terrians to meet you before my mom got the chance to explain about them. I'm sorry I scared everybody. But they're not what you're saying. They're not nasty creatures. They're not gonna hurt your kids, they're gonna fix them."

"Thank you, honey," Devon said. "He's right--"

"I'm not done, Mom," Uly said sharply, and she looked at him as if wondering who he was and what he'd done with her easy-going son.

His voice wobbled when he continued, "I heard all the names you called me. They're mean and wrong. I'm not exactly like you guys anymore, but I'm healthy. All the meds and therapies and operations that those doctors gave me before, they didn't work. Going with the Terrians did. If you don't want your kids being a little different instead of sick and maybe dead, then I don't know why you came here and you should just go back to the stations." He took another breath, then seemed to lose all his steam. "Um," he mumbled. "I'm done now." He jumped off the table and sat down, very quickly.

For a moment, the meeting was as silent as the aftermath of a bomb. Alonzo exchanged glances with Julia, marveling at how thoroughly and efficiently Uly had managed to insult ninety percent of New Pacifica. Current wisdom held that Uly had been a test-tube baby, and Alonzo wondered if it was remotely possible that Devon Adair had managed to buy some Danziger sperm.

Devon said into the silence, "My son is right, even if he put it a little bluntly. We brought our children here because it was the best chance for their restoration to health. Now I'm telling you that the Terrians are, again, your children's best chance at full health. I know it feels like a risk, but as Syndrome parents, we’ve taken bigger ones before. Not just coming here, but operations, drug trials, therapies. None of them were guaranteed, and some did more harm than good. But you took the chance. If you had the courage for those, you have the courage for this."

She walked to a big, wooden-framed slate board that was hung up directly across from the front door and picked up one of the chunks of native chalk that sat in a box. Across the top of the board, she wrote "MOON CROSS" in square letters, and underlined it with a quick swipe of her chalk. She turned again.

"Some of you may have heard of Moon Cross already. It's a lunar event of great importance in the G889 year. I've picked that date for a few reasons. One, it's in the equivalent of an Earth month--thirty days from tonight." She wrote the number 30 next to the words and outlined it with a box. "That gives you plenty of time to think. Second, it's one of the times in the year that the Terrians are the most powerful, and therefore able to heal a great number of children at once. Third and finally, it's the beginning of winter, when the Terrians hibernate. Moon Cross is your child's last chance at a Terrian healing for three months. Some of your children may not have three months."

Like most everyone else, Alonzo looked at Brenda and Ryan McNab. Everyone knew that Lynnie was hanging on by a fingernail, that even thirty days might be optimistic. The boy curled his lip at them all. Brenda looked steadily at nothing.

Devon continued, "Now, I'm not going to force anyone into this choice. That's the last thing I want to do. The Terrians have told us repeatedly that they will not take a child without the permission of his or her parents. You need to make the decision yourself. Talk to me, talk to Julia, talk to Alonzo, talk to Uly. We have the most knowledge, in different ways, of this change and what it will mean. Beyond that, talk to the advance crew, who have all learned to live with the Terrians as neighbors. If you make the decision to allow the Terrians to heal your child--to restore them to the full health that you see in Uly right now, today--I want to write your child's name on this board so everyone can see." She held up the chunk of chalk, then dropped it back into the box and brushed the dust from her fingers. "We'll answer any questions you have now."

The questions didn't so much start as explode, and none of them sounded encouraging. Alonzo answered questions about dreaming--"Do you mean they can make you dream what they want?"--and what had happened the time Terrians had hurt humans. A quick glance from Devon told him to tone it down, and he tried to make it sound like an accident, emphasizing the way that the Terrians who’d killed Mary’s parents had been cast out from the tribe. As it was, even the toned-down version caused murmurs and angry head-shakes.

It went on so long that the questioners all started to run into each other like melting wax. Or maybe it was just that all the questions had started to repeat themselves. Cameron brought them cups of the kinda-coffee Bess had figured out how to make out of seeds. It tasted like boiled goat turds, but it sure as hell packed in the caffeine. Alonzo dribbled honey into his until it was drinkable. Devon knocked it back straight and kept going.

Alonzo looked down in the middle of his fifth explanation of Terrian dream communication and saw Danz making wind-it-up gestures at him. He frowned very slightly, and his friend pointed off to the right. Alonzo glanced over and realized that Devon, while she looked all relaxed and casual with one hand on the back of a chair, was holding on just a little too tight. "--and I think that's it for tonight," he finished up.

"One more question," Devon said, her voice so firm and clear it practically fooled Alonzo. "Yes, Trent."

"How do we know the Terrians won't just snatch our children? They say they won't, but--"

"They don't lie," Alonzo almost snarled. He’d had it way up to here with these xenophobes. "That's a human thing. I'm not just talking to them in those dreams, I'm thinking with them. I'd know if they were planning that. Which they won’t," he added.

Devon cut in, "Alonzo and Uly will maintain contact with them, and pass on any information they think we should know."

Alonzo kept his face blank to cover up the sudden sinking of his heart at her words. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to take on that burden. It wasn’t like he’d been doing anything different for the past two years. He’d love to maintain contact with the Terrians.

Trouble was, he hadn't had a Terrian dream in three weeks.

It's a lull, he told himself. You've had lulls before. The tribe’s not feeling too talkative right now, is all.

The meeting broke up reluctantly. Danz pretended that he’d called a halt because Uly and True were both half-asleep, and Devon pretended to believe him, and they understood each other perfectly.

Alonzo found Julia. "I’m about ready to pass out. Care to join me?"

Julia looked as if she might pass out, with or without him, right there on the floor. But she tucked her hair behind her ears and said, "I’ve got to get back to the hospital."

"What? You were there all day."

"I was there all morning," Julia corrected him. "I have a split shift today."

"Until when?"

"Midnight. I have to, Alonzo, I’m the doctor on duty. I’m already late."

"At least kiss me goodnight. Just once?" He puckered up and made smoochy noises.

It got her to laugh, finally, and she kissed him. "I’ll try not to wake you up when I come in."

He held on for a moment. "You can always wake me up, you know that."

She smiled at him, then pulled away and started working her way through the crowd. He watched her go, wishing he’d pulled her pins out while she was kissing him. He really hated it when she had her hair up like that. She disappeared out the door, and he sighed and rubbed a hand over his face, wondering if he would make it to his bed. He stretched, then joined the crowd jostling their way out.

He was so loopy that he stepped on several feet. Mumbling "Sorry, sorry," he finally managed to get out the door, where he promptly ran smack into someone, almost knocking them over. "Whoa! Sorry."

"I’m fine," the woman said.

He stared down at her. "You," he said. "I’ve been looking for you."

Rita Vasquez looked back up at him. "You’ve found me," she said. "Did you need to talk to me about something?"

"You know damn well I do," he said, and added deliberately, "señora."

"Well, then," she said. She started off on the path that led out of the square and behind the hospital.

Alonzo started after her. Suddenly, he felt wide awake.

Rita wished she’d thought to bring a lumalight, but if she went into the hospital to get one, she might lose her nerve. She kept going down the path, walking from shadowy patches to thin moonlight. His footsteps crunched on the dirt and twigs underfoot. If she’d been with anyone else, it might have been downright romantic.

But she was walking with Alonzo Solace.

All her life, he’d been a holo on the wall, a name on legal documents. His ghost had haunted family history--the one who was gone, and yet wasn’t. Now he was here, transformed from a larger-than-life figure into a very human man.

She wondered what to say.

He was the one to break the silence, eventually. "Who are you?" he asked, stopping in a smudge of shadow. "What do you want? How do you know Spanish? It’s been illegal on the stations since before you were born."

She was right. He didn’t know her. He had no idea who she was. "I was seven when they passed the Linguistic Standardization Act," she said. "Thank you for the compliment."

He brushed that aside, asking again, "How do you know Spanish?"

"Maybe I learned it in school." How petty of her, but she wanted to make him work for this. "Purely for the purposes of study. It is, as you pointed out, illegal to use in everyday surroundings."

He made a rude noise. "You don’t speak it like you learned it out of a program. You speak it like you learned it in el cuad."

"Which barrio?" she threw back.

"I don’t know. East Los, Phoenix, San Antonio--"

"Barrio Tucson, maybe?"

"Yeah," he said slowly. "Or Barrio Tucson."

She waited, arms crossed.

After a moment, he burst out, "Whatever it is you think I know, I don’t. Okay? So stop waiting for me to get it on my own, and just tell me."

Rita set her jaw. It was no use feeling disappointed. What had she expected? "Do you even know my name?"

"Rita Vasquez," he said promptly. "I asked."

"My full name."

"No, why would I?"

She put her hands on her hips and looked up at the sky, laughing mirthlessly. "He affected my entire life, why would he know my name?" she asked the half-moons, riding low in the sky.

"Look, don’t try to tell me--I’ve been on suppressors since I started sleepjumping, I’ve never missed--"

"Rita Mercedes Sepulveda Vasquez." She included her maiden name on purpose, knowing he’d seen it at least once. "That’s my name. That’s my full name."

Even in the silvery moonlight, he paled. "Rita Mercedes?"

"From my grandmothers. I was the first girl. You know how it’s done."

"Your nana Mercedes. Who was she?"

He was getting it now, she could see. "You tell me. I think you know."

He slid down the tree until he crouched on the ground, as if trying to shield himself from something. "Mercedes Angela Solace," he said in a raw voice. "She was the youngest. She had three brothers. When she was twelve, the oldest of them signed into the sleepjumpers’ training program. When she was twenty-three, he abandoned them forever."

Rita blinked. "Abandoned--?"

He lifted his head to look almost straight up at her. "You’re my great-niece."

She crouched down in front of him. "Yes." She wondered how old he was--not in real time, but how many years he’d been awake for.

"What do you want from me?" he demanded in a raw travesty of a voice.

"I don’t know," she said. "I always thought I would thank you, if I ever met you."

He tried to push away from her, forgetting that his back was braced against a tree, and fell over sideways. "You have nothing to thank me for. I abandoned you, too."

"I wasn’t even born," she said.

"If I’d been there I would have seen you when you were born." He scrambled to his feet.

"Tío," she cried.

"Don’t call me that," he said, and bolted for town.

---

Days until Moon Cross: 29

Julia pulled the hospital door closed behind her. "Well," she said. "That went well, didn’t it."

Devon crossed her arms over her chest. "Oh, were you there too?"

Julia said, "Devon--"

"I really could have used some help in there, you know." The medical staff had sat in front of her like waxwork dummies, with faces cast in permanently skeptical lines. She would have had better luck convincing the wall that the Terrians should heal the Syndrome children.

Julia shot her a sharp, defensive look. "I brought every scrap of data I had."

"Is there something in the Hippocratic Oath that says you can’t open your mouth to support your position?" Devon knew she was taking out her frustration on the younger woman, but she didn’t care. "I appreciate that it’s strange for you to be working with Miguel and his team right now, but--"

"Hey!" Julia flared to life for the first time in three days. "For as long as we’ve been here, you’ve never thrown that mistake in my face. God knows you had other things to accuse me of, but let’s just leave that record unblemished, shall we?"

Devon winced, remembering that the other woman was her friend. "I wasn’t even thinking about that." It was true; while Julia’s affair with Miguel had been more or less public knowledge within the Syndrome community, the memory had faded over the past two years as Devon got to know her. "I just meant, I know it’s an adjustment for you, working with other doctors after being on your own all this time. But I need your medical testimony to convince them."

"My testimony?" Julia’s voice dripped acid. "I’m the most junior member of the team. I’m barely qualified to be Vasquez’s intern."

Devon wondered why that sounded so familiar, then flushed. "Speaking of mistakes we’re not going to bring up," she said. "And that was over two years ago. Since then--"

"To them it was last week."

"So show them you’ve changed."

"I’m trying, but nothing happens overnight."

"A few things," Devon remarked dryly. Then she sighed and pushed her hand through her hair. "We have less than a month. We need to do something."

"Well, I don’t know what you’ll do, but I’m going to finish up the first half of my shift," Julia said, and went back into the hospital.

---

Devon’s day went more or less downhill from there. She dealt with more complaints, tried to talk to more unresponsive parents and medical staff, and even happened to be around when Ryan McNab had the bright idea to put the purple-gold native peaches into the cider machine. Unfortunately, it had been built for apples.

Like everyone else who’d been inside the blast radius, she took a shower. At least, that was the plan, but what screwed that up was a call just as she exited her room, clean clothes in hand.

Twenty minutes later, so far beyond the end of her rope that it had faded into the distance, she said, "Look, Jane, try to work this out with Marissa yourself. If that absolutely does not work, then find somebody to switch with. There are no single rooms. No, I will not find somebody for you. I have enough to do. Please handle this yourself." She hung up, then pulled her gear off and dropped it to the floor, giving brief thought to stomping on it.

"What happened to you?"

She gave John a baleful look. Her hair swung with the turn of her head, one sticky strand adhering to her cheek. "Peach pits jammed up the grinder. It was volcanic."

"What?" He gave her a quick up-and-down look, but the presence of all her limbs and the absence of spouting blood seemed to reassure him. That taken care of, he asked after the next most vital thing. "My machine?"

"Now a rather attractive abstract sculpture. We hosed off the juice, though." She tried to brush her hair out of her face and got her hand stuck. "Mostly."

He eyed her. "Who do I need to kill?"

"Nobody," she said, extricating her hand and wincing as a few strands came away with it. "It’s fixable. What happened to you?" He was head-to-toe grime and grease.

"Crawling around the ship," he said, rubbing his hands over his face. That only made it worse. "After twenty-four years, she’s gunky as hell, even with auto-maintenance."

Her gear went off. She looked down at it and said, "No." After a moment, it went to messaging and she picked it up, hooking it on her belt.

"Popularity wearing thin?" he asked her, pushing his own door open. He paused to roll his eyes at the tornado aftermath of True’s half of the room.

"Popularity makes it sound like I’m the head of the cheerleading squad," she muttered, leaning on the door jamb. "I feel more like the whipping boy." She hesitated, chewing on her lip. "Listen, um--question."

"Still about a month," he said, now head down in a crate.

"What?"

"The ship? It’s still going to take a month to fix."

"That’s good to know, but that’s not what I meant. Does Julia seem--strange to you lately?"

He slung a pair of pants over his shoulder. "Besides her reversion to Dr. Uptight?"

Devon let out her breath. "So you noticed too."

"I’m not blind," he said, straightening up with a shirt added to the pants. "Neither is anybody else around here. It’s ‘Lonz leaving, isn’t it? I told you--"

"I know what you told me. And I think that’s part of it."

"Part?"

"If it starts to interfere with her work, I’m going to have to do something."

"Interfere with her work?" He made a rude noise, nudging her out of the way so he could close his door behind them. "This is Julia, remember? Our Julia. She’s got doctoring right down in the DNA. Nothing interferes with her work. Anyway, what is this other part?"

"Private," she said sharply. "Honestly, you say women gossip--"

Before he could respond to that, the door leading outside opened, and Trent almost ran them both over before stopping short. "Devon! I was looking for you. Why didn’t you answer your gear?"

So that had been him. She said, "Look, Trent, can it wait?"

"I want to talk to you."

"Back off, Sadler," John said flatly.

Trent looked at him, obviously taking in every speck of grease. He turned back to Devon and said, "Alone."

"How about at dinner," she said. "Excuse me, we really need to--"

He didn’t budge. "Devon--"

"Look," she snapped, abandoning diplomacy, "I’ve had a very long day and I’m covered in drying fruit juice. If I don’t get a shower soon, I won’t be responsible for my actions. Is this an emergency that I have to address right now? Or will it wait?"

"Not an emergency but--"

"Then we’ll talk at dinner." She pushed past him.

---

With a groan of relief, John tossed his shirt on the shower stall’s bench. At the moment, peeling out of his greasy, dirty clothes was a pleasure right up there with kissing Devon. Or watching her chew out that Sadler. Which reminded him . . .

"Listen, I gotta know," he called over the wall. "What happened with you two?"

"The two of who?" In her stall, something hit the floor with a plop. "Me and my imaginary friend?" In the proximity of hot water, her mood had taken an obvious upswing.

"Sadler."

"Oh, him." She had to raise her voice over the sound of running water. "You see, we had a mad passionate affair. Uly is really his child, but we had to keep it from his scheming wife--"

"Adair," he said flatly. "C’mon now."

She dropped the silliness. "Honestly, there wasn’t anything."

The knob squeaked loudly as he turned on the water. "Does he know that? Cuz the looks he’s giving me, I could use in the garage to solder joints."

"We had a couple of dates," she said as he ducked into the lukewarming-up spray, "and--"

"Missed that last," he called out, scrubbing soap into his hair.

"I said, we had a couple of dates, but we decided not to pursue anything."

Okay, that was better, but not everything he wanted to hear. "Yeah? Why not?"

"It was a bad time for a relationship. It was right before we left. Things were complicated. We discussed it, and made a mutual agreement to table the issue until a more convenient time for both of us."

John’s brows shot up, and he grinned. "You tabled the issue," he echoed, bracing his arm against the wall and letting the water slide down his back, rinsing away the soap. "Was this in the board room? Did you have a mediator?"

"Are you going to be impossible about this?"

He scrubbed until the water sloshing into the gutter drain ran clear. "Adair, was it a romance or a quarterly meeting? Cuz it sounds an awful lot like the second."

"It wasn’t that cold-blooded. We were just being sensible. A relationship at that time would have been highly problematic."

He shut off the water and grabbed his towel. "Problematic like taking up with me in the middle of a cross-continental trek, six weeks after you nearly died? Not to mention the kids."

She threw a sponge over the wall. He caught it and threw it back. There was a splat. "Hey! Fine, you made your point."

He was sitting on the bench, working his feet into his beat-up boots, when she put her head around the curtain to his stall. "John, you’re not jealous, are you? Of Trent?"

"Hell, no," he said with perfect honesty. "I’m way more inconvenient than he is, and you’re still around. Means I’ve got something going for me."

She came all the way in and put her arms around his neck. "Maybe I’m just using you for sex."

He grabbed her around the waist and hauled her, laughing, onto his lap. "Yeah? Tell me more."

---

He wasn’t the only advancer who’d noticed Sadler’s dirty looks. Over poker that night, Baines asked him about it, and ears pricked up all around the table. He told them what Devon had told him, and most of them looked a little deflated that the story wasn’t more spectacular. But Magus said, "Gotta feel sorry for the guy."

John curled his lip and made his discards. "Sure," he said, taking the two cards Baines handed him. Hunh. Not much better. "I’m all broken up over it."

"No, really," Magus insisted. "He has a real case on Devon, you can tell. They were starting something, even if it was on hold, and then he gets here and finds out she’s gone on without him."

"Sleepjumper's gap," Alonzo said, speaking up for one of the first times all evening.

"What?" John forgot about his cards for a moment and looked up.

"Sleepjumper's gap. It's what happens when you get back from a run and everything's different from the way it was just a couple of days ago." Alonzo wagged his cards at John. "You did--what, a year and a half once? Tell me, wasn’t it weird when you got back to Chicago block?"

John considered that. "I missed my mom’s birthday. Twice. Had to get her two presents." He thought of Braxton, acting like they were still back on the stations and should hate all top-levelers, and frowned.

"It gets worse the longer you’re away," Alonzo said. "You come back and your baby sister's grown up, your dad's got grey hair, that hot chick used to live on the corner is married."

They all looked at Alonzo in fascination. He never talked about his station life this much, even obliquely. "What do you do for it?" Baines asked.

"The only thing us jumpers knew how to do was go out on another run. 'Course, we'd get back and it was even worse . . . your sister got married and has a kid, dad's dead, hot chick packed on about a hundred pounds. So you just stop going home, because it's not home anymore." His shoulders moved restlessly. "It's not really fixable."

"Well, they're not going anywhere," John commented. "So I guess we just put it on our list of deal-with and move on." He stirred up his pile of markers. "We gonna play poker or what?"

Days until Moon Cross: 16

With a deep sigh that was almost a groan, Julia shut down her datapad and put it away. It had been a long day.

More than that, it had a string of long days. It wasn’t just the split shifts, although those were bad enough. It was not having the time to work with the indigenous database, although True and Molly kept bringing her samples. It was facing parents who refused to see the Terrians as anything but alien monsters, and their cure as anything but evil. It was that they'd scanned every last person in town and not one of them had a compulsion chip in their brain, which put them back at square one as far as figuring out who had sabotaged the ship. It was not seeing Alonzo except in passing, and knowing that he was counting down the days until the ship was done and he could leave. It was--hell, it was everything.

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, watching the lightning flicker behind her lids for a moment before dropping her hands again. Oh, did she need sleep. One last thing and then she could go.

Julia gathered up the bag of fragile purple flowers that True had brought her after dinner. They'd been drying out for a week and now were ready for storage. Crushed and steeped, the petals made a highly effective nausea remedy, one that Bess had used almost daily when her morning sickness had gotten bad. With the amount of meds that most Syndrome children took, antiemitics were in high demand in the hospital, but so far nobody was willing to try grapeweed. Still, Julia stored it away, just in case, along with all the other indigenous remedies that she'd discovered in the past two years.

She opened the cabinet and found, not the familiar hodgepodge of boxes and jars, but a glittering row of perfectly identical plastic containers. She closed the cabinet and stepped back, looking around her. No . . . no, last one on the left . . . this was it. Her cabinet. Or what should be her cabinet.

She opened it again, staring at the station-manufactured pill bottles.

Someone walked by and Julia spun. "Nurse MacDonald."

The head nurse paused. From the looks of it, she was on her way out, too. "Yes, Dr. Heller?" The words were perfectly respectful. The voice gave the tiniest of sardonic twists to the word Doctor.

Julia's hand drifted up to fiddle with the caduceus pin she always wore on her lapel, a nervous habit that had come back. "I--ah--" Stop it. You're a doctor. She gestured to the open cabinet. "Do you know who restocked this cabinet?"

"I did," the head nurse said. She was a tall, solid woman, with a shock of grey hair, who ruled the nurses with an iron hand.

"You did," Julia said. "Okay. Can I ask what you did with the previous contents?"

"I disposed of them."

Julia almost dropped her grapeweed. "You threw them away?" Her voice rose sharply, and heads turned all up and down the ward.

MacDonald's pale eyes remained steady and expressionless. "Dr. Vasquez felt they didn't have any place here. They weren't sanitary. Especially the alien saliva."

Her Grendler spit? They'd thrown out her Grendler spit?

With an effort, Julia reined herself in. Losing her cool was not going to do her one bit of good, especially with MacDonald. "Why wasn't I notified?"

"Why would you need to be notified? Pharmaceutical stock isn't your job."

"They were my supplies."

"But you know regulations prohibit personal stockpiling. Even indigenous remedies." When Julia couldn't reply, MacDonald's eyes dropped to the bag she clutched. "What's that?"

Julia shoved it in her pocket. "Nothing. Decoration for my desk." She tipped up her chin, daring the head nurse to comment. MacDonald held her gaze for several seconds, then shrugged and turned away.

Julia looked at her cabinet, turned into a clone of all the other ones, all that hard work of gathering and preparation gone as if it had never happened, and wanted to cry.

---

Alonzo lay in bed, eyes firmly closed, trying to convince himself to sleep. The other half of the bed was empty--Julia was working late. Again.

He was just drifting off when footsteps sounded out in the corridor. The thin walls meant you could hear people walking up and down the halls all the time. But he knew these footsteps.

Julia eased the door open and closed it very softly behind her. About a minute of cloth rustlings later, she half-climbed, half-collapsed into bed next to him. After a moment, she began to snore, very softly.

He opened his eyes and turned over to look at her. She slept on her stomach, her head twisted awkwardly to one side. It looked like an invitation to a day-long crick in the neck tomorrow, but she was out for the count. He looked over at the laundry crate and saw that Neatnik Julia's pants and shirt lay on the floor next to it. She hadn't even taken the pins out of her hair.

He plucked them out himself, throwing them under the bed where she wouldn't be able to find them, and then nudged her shoulder until she turned onto her side. The shift in position silenced her snores, and she sighed, curling close to him.

He closed his eyes again. Now he could sleep.

---

Days until Moon Cross: 15

Not enough hours later, a sharp beep-beep-beep dragged him into consciousness. "Ugh," he groaned, opening his eyes to predawn grey. "God. Who's calling at this hour?"

He looked over and saw Julia's gear on her table, blinking brightly. He leaned over her and picked it up, intending to tell whoever it was to call the shank back, but the beeping wasn't the call function. It was the alarm.

"Mmm," she said, shifting. "Urgh. Sorry."

He silenced it. "Go back to sleep, honey. You really need it." When Julia needed an alarm to wake up on time, she was severely deprived.

"Can't," she slurred. "Early rounds." She dragged herself upright and sat on the edge of the bed, her head drooping, for several moments before getting to her feet. "Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you."

"You worked late last night," he said.

"I know," she yawned, and picked up her clothes to head to the showers.

When she came back, he had the light on and was pulling clean clothes out of his own crate. She stopped in the doorway, pushing her damp hair back from her face. "'Lonzo, I didn't mean for you to get up too."

"I'm awake anyway," he said shortly.

She sighed and looked on her table, in the dish where she usually dropped her hairpins. "God damn it, you hid my pins again."

"Look under the bed," he muttered.

She got down on her hands and knees. Her voice drifted up through the mattress. "I'm sorry my hairstyle offends you, but can you please stop doing that?"

"What's wrong with the way you usually look?" He had no clean socks. Where the hell were all his clean socks?

"That is the way I usually look."

Yes, and he hated it. "I mean before. Where in your job description does it say you have to jab your head full of pins all day?"

"It's about professionalism," she said, halfway under the bed, scrabbling around on the floor for hairpins.

Alonzo scowled at his crate of clothes. Was his turn or hers to do laundry? He couldn't even remember anymore. They'd traded off for months, but with her schedule now at the mercy of senior doctors, the pattern had broken down. "What do the kids care if you look like a beauty queen?"

"I care that I look like a competent doctor!"

"You are a competent doctor! You're a damn good one! Who are you proving it to?"

She flattened herself out to reach for a particularly elusive pin. "Quiet down! It's not even dawn."

"I know, and it was probably midnight when you came in last night. And the night before. And the night before that. This can't go on, Jules!"

She sat up to look at him. "I don't control the duty assignments. If you don't like it, don't sleep with me. I'll see you later." Retrieved pins clutched in one hand, brush in the other, she went out the door.

---

Normally, Devon got running-the-town business out of the way in the morning and went on work rotation in the afternoons. She knew most people thought she had it easy, holed up in her office out of the weather, but she’d spent the entire morning working with Morgan on overhauling the rotation schedule so they’d have enough food for the winter. The last thing she wanted was a repeat of their first winter, multiplied two-hundredfold.

When she showed the morning’s work to Mazatl and Denner, the two farmers looked at it, then each other, for several moments. Then they looked at her like New Pacifica Gothic.

"This it?" Denner asked finally.

"Pretty much. I had to split the difference between the farm, the fishery, and the gatherers. And we still need people in Bess’s shed."

They studied it a few more minutes. Every so often, Denner would point at something on the pad and say a word or two, like, "stooks," or "bagging." Devon waited, knowing her two most reticent advancers. They’d eventually give her their opinion.

Finally Mazatl shrugged. "We’ll work with it," he said, handing the pad back to her.

"Thanks," she said sourly.

He patted her shoulder, his silent gesture of support and appreciation. "Want to help with the stooks?"

She sighed and stowed the datapad. "Can’t wait."

She found herself next to Peter Benson, who’d shown signs recently of softening toward the idea of Moon Cross. His five-year-old’s health had been pretty compromised by the trip and she’d been using a chair for about a week.

But when Devon said, "So, Pete. Have you and Zack thought some more about--" the look he gave her made the rest of her sentence back up in her throat.

"We’re not going to do it," he said.

She considered screaming, but thought, Diplomacy, diplomacy. The whole expedition had been a hard sell, even to parents giving up hope. "Why not?" she said as calmly as possible.

"Elizabeth had a nightmare about those things."

Hell, they were back to things. Then Devon’s ears pricked up, belatedly. "Nightmare?" Were the Terrians trying to contact the Syndrome children directly?

"She dreamed they ate her. She woke up screaming."

Devon slumped. "Look. Pete. I know it’s hard--"

"I’m not making her do it," he threw over his shoulder as he stomped off to get more stooks.

---

When the afternoon's work ended, Devon walked with the crowd back to town. Most of the parents were avoiding her now, tired of explaining why they didn't want to send their children to the Terrians. Oh well, she thought with determined cheer. At least they weren't complaining.

Someone took her arm, and she looked up. "Oh. Hi, Trent."

"You look tired," he said. "Beautiful. But tired."

"Thanks, I think." Unobtrusively, she detached herself.

"Why do you join the rotations every day? It's too much work. You shouldn't have to do it."

John said almost the same thing. Why did it annoy her so much more, coming from Trent? "What'll I do, hide in my office? I'm a part of this town, too."

"It's menial labor."

Maybe because John never actually used the words menial labor, with that slight curl of lip, to refer to the work that kept New Pacifica running. "You bet," she said lightly, "which is why I can't shirk it."

"What would they say back home if they could hear you?"

"I don't really care what they'd say. Richmond sector is not home anymore, this is."

"I think you've been hanging around that drone too much."

She stopped in the middle of the path, people streaming around her and Trent. "I've warned you about using that word," she said. "Several times. John and his daughter are out of debt, and even if he weren't, that's on the stations. We're not on the stations anymore."

She held his gaze until he looked away. "No, we're not, are we?" He brushed at the dirt stains on his knees. From the looks of it, he'd been harvesting vegetables. "I'm going to change clothes before I go see Max." He walked off, toward the dorms.

Devon let out her breath. How was it possible she'd once considered him a friend? His attitude about the work, about the Terrians, about her relationship with John, and virtually everything else about New Pacifica was one of sneering condescension. Had he always been like that, or did G889 just bring it out in him?

Changing clothes sounded tempting, but she dropped by her office and got her datapad instead. Taking it into the gathering space, she found True in one of the booths, hip-to-hip with Molly Ketchum.

It made Devon smile. After about three days of circling around each other, the two girls had bonded like north-south magnets. It made her hope that integration of the two groups was possible for the adults.

The girls were deep in an intense, whispered conversation. "I mean it, True," Molly said as Devon came up.

"I can keep a secret, you know," True said.

"About what?"

Both girls jumped about a foot. "Devon!" True squeaked.

Devon looked down at the datapads in front of the girls. "Are you two doing each other's homework again?"

"Huh?"

Devon frowned. "Didn't Yale warn you about that?"

"We're not doing each other's homework," True said, so indignantly that Devon wondered if she'd been wrong.

Then Molly let out a sigh. "True," she said. "She caught us."

"What? But--"

"Come on," Molly said. "We better do our own homework."

True stared at her friend for a moment, then blinked. "Oh. Okay, okay," she said, and they switched datapads.

So that had been it.

"I don't see what the big deal is," True complained, scowling at her screenful of vocabulary. "I hate vocab and Molly knows the most words of anybody in New Pacifica. It's more efficient this way."

"It's not about efficiency, it's about learning," Devon said absently. Over Molly's shoulder, she could see the slateboard at the end of the room. The words "MOON CROSS" and the number 15 were still the only things written on it. Every morning, she came in here and changed the number, hoping that the next time she did so, there would be a name written under it. Just one. She'd take one.

But every morning, the board remained blank.

She swallowed the defeat, reminding herself that fifteen days was nearly two weeks, and just about anything could happen in two weeks.

True was still complaining. "Why do I need to learn new words anyway? I can talk just fine."

Devon turned away from the board. "True, honey, if nobody ever learned any new words, we would swiftly lose the splendor and the richness of the English language."

True stared at her, unimpressed. "Do you know what 'obviate' means?"

"You're supposed to be looking it up."

"She doesn't," True said to Molly, who looked down at her datapad to hide a smile.

Devon decided it was time for a subject change. "How is school these days?"

True looked away. "S'okay," she mumbled.

Uhoh. She knew that tone. She'd used that tone. "True--are they calling you names again?"

When the girl didn't answer, Devon looked across the table at Molly's face, and that told her everything she needed to know. "Who is it?"

True's chin jutted out, and for a moment, she looked very much like her dad. "I'm not a whiny baby, Devon."

Oh, God. Really, sometimes True was more like her father than was good for anybody. "Honey, it's not whining to--"

"We're handling it," True said firmly.

That sounded highly suspicious. "Handling it how?"

"We have a plan, Ms. Adair," Molly said calmly. "Don't worry about it."

She wondered if she should be bracing for further mayhem. On the other hand, it was sweet little Molly Ketchum. Just how much mayhem could be involved if Molly was in on it? "Okay," she said finally. "Okay. Don't say anything that would incriminate any of us. Just tell me something."

"Dev-on--" True started.

"No, different subject. Sort of. Uly. How is he doing right now?"

The girls traded long looks, then True said cautiously, "In school?"

"In school, in--well--anything." Devon sighed. "He won't talk to me or Yale, or even your dad, but I know he's down about something."

"Well, how should I know?" True said, bending over her vocab with considerably more vigor than she'd shown earlier. "We don't talk either."

"Couldn't you--"

"No," True almost snarled.

"Hey," Devon said. "Watch your tone."

"Sorry," True said, not sounding very sorry at all. "Me and Uly aren't talking, that's all. And I don't feel like trying, either," she added, anticipating the words that were gathering on Devon's tongue.

Molly spoke. "Ms. Adair, I don't mean to be rude or anything. But True and I really have to do our homework now."

Royally dismissed by an eleven-year-old, Devon didn't have much choice but to get to her feet. "Okay. But if you have any thoughts, or--"

"Yeah," True said, concentrating on her homework.

Feeling rejected, and also somewhat ridiculous, Devon found herself a spot in a booth on the other side of the room. When she glanced over, the girls had abandoned their homework and were whispering again.

Yale said, "At that rate, they'll be lucky to get any of it done."

Devon smiled at him, glad that someone was willing to be around her. "They'd switched again," she said.

He raised his eyes to the heavens. "When I assigned them as partners, I thought Molly would be a good influence on her."

Devon looked across the room again. "I think she is," she said thoughtfully. She looked back at Yale. "Did True tell you some kids are calling her a dumb drone again?"

"I have ears," he said. "They’ve been penalized."

"Was one of them, by chance, Max Sadler?"

"Once, but Uly got after him and I haven't heard it since."

"How about Ryan McNab?"

Yale’s brows lifted. "No," he said. "Not that he hasn’t called True a great many other things to her face, but he’s never used that against her."

"Well, that’s something. And it's not as if he's the first juvenile delinquent you've ever had to deal with."

He looked at her with half a smile quirking his mouth. "Did you hear about this morning?"

She looked at her old tutor suspiciously. "Am I going to like it?"

"You may. I caught Ryan trying to smoke grass."

She goggled. "Where did he get pot?"

"No, my dear," he corrected gently. "Not marijuana, grass. From the ground."

Five minutes later, her hysterical whoops died away. Yale looked at her quizzically. "Devon, it was funny, but not that funny."

"Sorry," she wheezed, wiping away a few tears that had leaked out. "I just--I needed that." She rubbed her stomach, which actually hurt. "Hoo! It’s been a rough day."

"Otherwise known as a day the sun rose in the east?"

"Mmmhm." She propped her chin in her hands. "Do you remember when I was about his age? I was a little--"

"Challenging?"

"That’s one way of putting it." She gave him a quick smile, remembering all times this man had bailed her out of jail, tended to her hangovers, and taken her to community service and court dates--none of which had been in his job description. No, Ryan McNab was definitely not the first wild, selfish, thoroughly screwed-up kid that Yale had ever had to deal with. "I was a pain in the ass, Yale."

He smiled at her, refusing to be baited.

"But you loved me, didn’t you? No matter what I did, I could never make you stop loving me."

"No," he said simply.

"I don’t know if I ever told you--but you’re the reason I believe in giving second chances. In having faith in people."

His face softened. "My dear. Thank you." He reached across the table with his human hand and took both of hers. "Thank you," he said again.

She held onto his hand. "I’m trying to have faith," she said. "I’m trying to give these people the chance to understand--to see--to write their child’s name on that board behind you. But it’s still empty."

"They will," he said. "Somebody will take that leap of faith, some one person. And then another. And another. You may not get two hundred and fifty names on that board by Moon Cross, but there will be names."

"You can’t promise me that, Yale."

"No. But I can believe it."

She stared at the empty board.

"Devon," he said, and she looked back at him. "I will admit that there were days when I really had to work at believing that this wild, incorrigible girl, who delighted in breaking every rule she met, would ever grow into a wonderful, generous woman. It seemed impossible. And yet--" he gave her hands a little shake. "Here you are."

She managed to smile, finally. "Yes," she said. "Here I am."

Days until Moon Cross: 14

At the shuffling footsteps, Rita looked up from her notes. "Ryan? I was beginning to get concerned." Also exasperated and annoyed, but her training ensured that none of it showed in her voice.

Ryan slouched against her office wall, fully aware he was half an hour late for a forty-five minute session. "I was doing something," he said.

"Oh?"

"Something none of your business."

He was trying to bait her. She didn't rise to it, but nodded and gestured toward the chair opposite her own. "Well, since you’re here now, we can get started."

He didn't take it. "Okay." He held up a hand and ticked off statements on his fingers. "I feel sad because my sister is dying. I feel frustrated because my mom is always on my case. I feel angry because my dad bailed on us. I also feel angry because we had to come all the way out here to the edge of nowhere for nothing." He spread his hands wide. "Well, that about does it. Very successful session. Bye-bye."

Rita got to her feet, shifting to block his exit. "Wait. Please. We're not done."

"I think we are."

"Well, I don't," she almost snarled. "So sit."

He sat, with a thud. But a satisfied little smile crossed his face.

She settled herself again. Calm, calm, calm. Don't give him what he wants again. "Do you feel that our sessions are--predictable, Ryan?"

"Predictable?" The sneer was back. "There’s practically a script. I could tell you everything you’re going to say before you say it. 'I’m sorry you feel that way, Ryan. And why is that, Ryan? Is there something else you would like to talk about, Ryan? I’m full of shit, Ryan.' Am I close?"

She rolled her stylus in between her fingers. "All except for the last part."

"You sure about that?"

"Very sure. You seem especially angry today. Did something happen?"

"You mean besides my mom dragging me away from the stations and all my friends to a dirt ball full of assholes, and it didn’t work anyway?" He looked contemptuously out the window. "No, nothing really."

Rita debated within herself, then decided to try it. The session couldn't be much worse than it already was. "The nurses tell me you visited the hospital this morning. To see your sister."

One shoulder jerked up and down. "Yeah, so? My mom’s always on my case to visit her."

"At three AM?"

"I couldn’t sleep. And she’s in a coma again, so it doesn’t matter to her."

"They said you started screaming at her."

"I was trying to wake her up."

"You certainly woke everyone else up."

"But not her. So what does it matter?" He checked his gear. "Oh look. Time’s up."

Before she could jump up again, he was gone.

Rita let out a long sigh and stared at the empty chair. After a moment, she reached for her datapad and started to write. A very unsatisfying session. I think--

"Dr. Rita."

Her head jerked up. "Yes, Ryan? Did you forget something?"

His face was taut. "You want some dirt, don’t you? Something to write down on your datapad and make hmmm noises at? Something real meaty?"

She set the pad aside. "I’m here to listen, Ryan. If you need to tell me something--"

"It’s good. It’s real good. It’s about Lynnie. That’s what you always wanna know about, right?"

"Your sister’s situation has always had an enormous effect on your life--"

"I wish she would die," he snarled. "I wish she would just die and get it over with."

Rita's mouth went dry. "Ryan. Why don’t you sit down. We can talk about this--"

"Don’t forget to write that down so you can tell my mom all about it."

---

After the miserable and frustrating session with Ryan--her last of a long day--Rita couldn’t stay in her cubicle. His last-minute admission, flung at her in order to provoke and shock, was a breakthrough of a sort, but not an exciting one. His sister was dying. He knew it, but acceptance didn’t come alongside knowledge. When she did die, what would happen to him?

Rita had spent her life counseling children like Ryan, who railed at God or fate or the universe, and she’d never been able to answer the one question they all asked.

Why?

Why am I so sick? I never did anything to anybody. Why did my brother die? He was just six years old. Why couldn’t we do anything? We gave our patient the best of medical science. Why did my mother kill herself? I still needed her, even if my sister died. Why am I so lacking that my husband turns to other women? I’ve done everything I could to keep him.

Sometimes Rita wished she hadn’t drifted away from the faith of her childhood, which just said, Because. It was absurdly comforting. God had a plan, and while it looked horrible from where you were, it must make sense from where He was. Just because.

But even when she was a child, God was an primitive, outmoded idea, fit only for earth-rezes and ignorant drones. People with so much power over their own world didn’t need God any longer.

She made for the databanks in one corner of the gathering space. The stacks of hard drives held station records, VR games, works of literature and poetry, all kinds of escapes. But it wasn’t to those that she turned. Instead, she opened the files on G889, pressing her thumb on each icon without bothering to read the whole list. She’d done this so often in the past week she knew exactly where each folder was.

Records of G889.

Campsites.

Month One.

Snapshots.

Here she paused, looking over her choices. Every day was a little different, but any day in that first month would do. Finally, she chose one at random, and a box popped up.

Please enter gear ID.

031281, she typed, and fitted the VR attachment into her gear’s eyepiece. There was a burst of fuzz as the data downloaded from the main banks, and then she stood at the edge of a cliff.

She jolted backward, then stood still, remembering that she was still in the gathering place in New Pacifica, not on a precipice two thousand miles from the sea.

The sky soared above her, the purest blue she’d ever seen. A few faint wisps of cloud hung high in the atmosphere, but other than that, there was nothing but emptiness. The sun’s rays poured down, and the ground bounced it back, so she was surrounded by blazing heat, pressing on every inch of her skin. She took in a breath, and could almost feel her mouth and throat crackle with dryness. The smell and taste of hot dust filled her head.

She took a few tentative steps, grit and pebbles crunching under her shoes. There was a faint rattle, and she looked down in time to see a sinuous body slither away across the hard-packed ground. From the shadows under a wide, flat rock, a lizard looked up at her for a moment with tiny, glittering eyes before it, too, darted away.

She put her hand down on the rock and pulled it away almost at once. Too hot to sit. If she hadn’t had shoes on, she would have burned the bottoms of her feet.

She wandered a few steps more, brushing up against a scrawny thornbush almost the same color as the baked ground. A long thorn left a thin, stinging line on her arm. She took another dust-laden breath, holding it until the tension in her neck and back had been baked away by the oven heat.

Several feet away, a tiny rodent zipped across the ground. A snake darted out of the shade and swallowed it within seconds, then disappeared. In this harsh, wild place, there were no feelings, no ambiguities, no shades of grey, no children with broken hearts. Just life and death, separated by the thinnest of lines.

"What are you doing?"

Rita jolted. The words boomed around her, echoing off the cliffs and the canyon like the voice of God. After a moment, she realized that it was only someone outside her VR. After another moment, she realized who it was.

"Alonzo? I’m just exploring."

"The desert?"

"Well--yes."

"Why?"

Because I needed to, she thought, and found herself saying it. "I needed to."

There was a silence, then a flare of blue light and Alonzo appeared next to her. "You needed to come here?"

"I’ve never been to the desert," she said. "Not a real one."

"This isn’t a real one, either. It’s VR."

"It’s still a better facsimile than the historical records from Earth." She should know. She’d spent hours in those grainy, jerky, static VRs once upon a time, trying to understand where she came from and failing.

Alonzo squinted at her. "Why didn’t you go to the mountains?" He jerked his chin at the shadowy humps on the horizon.

"I’ve been in most of the places you crossed through to get to New Pacifica." Rita looked around, shading her eyes from the blazing sun. "I just had to come here today."

"You keep saying that. You had to. You needed it." He put a hand in his pocket and found a pair of sunshades.

She tilted her head. "Was it really like this?"

He slid them over his eyes. The sun bounced off the flat, dark lenses. "Yeah, of course. We didn’t have time to make any of this up."

"Not this desert," she said. "The Sonoran. Was it like this?"

The shielding sunglasses turned in her direction for several silent moments. Rita held her breath.

Alonzo hadn’t sought her out since the night of the all-town meeting. She had made a few tentative overtures, which he allowed only so far as she didn’t acknowledge their relationship. The instant she referred to the family or to the history he’d been a part of, he shut down and walked away. The Sonoran Desert was a part of him, but maybe it was a part he could speak about comfortably. A step.

"What makes you think I know?" he said finally.

"You were born there," she said. "Not on the stations, not in the Barrio Tucson, but in the real Tucson. On Earth." She was pushing it, Rita knew. She was reminding him that he hadn’t always been a sleepjumper, that he’d once had roots that stretched deep into the hot, baked ground.

"I was born in the city," he said. "What was left of it. We didn’t live in the open desert."

She let out her breath. "Did you ever go there?"

He started walking, but it wasn’t the deliberate getaway stride she’d seen before. He wandered aimlessly, scuffing up puffs of dust that hung for a moment before a hot breeze swept them away.

"No," he said. "Well--I mean. My nana took me a couple of times. When I was little." He looked around. "But it wasn't like this."

Rita looked around too, realizing why she’d wanted to come here. The dried-out scrub, the tough little rodents and lizards and snakes--they all battled the scorching sun and each other for one more breath. It was the most ferociously alive place she’d ever been. "What was the Sonoran Desert like?"

His shoulders moved unevenly. "Dead."

She flinched.

He’d made his way to a patch of what looked like blossoms of tan-green ping-pong paddles with long, pink spines. "What are those?" she asked, to distract herself.

"These?" He glanced down as if surprised.

"Yes."

He shrugged. "We never gave them a name. They were all over, in this place. Just grew wild, anywhere they could take hold." He crouched down and reached between the spines to brush his finger along the wrinkled green skin. "Saved Danziger’s life once."

She clasped her hands behind her back. "I’ve seen records. There was a plant something like them in the Sonoran desert. They were called--prickly pear?"

"Yeah," he said. "I guess they used to grow everywhere. In the backyard, by the side of the road, up against your building. In some places in Tucson, you could still see the dead ones."

"They died out?"

He ran his finger up one of the spines, lightly tapping the wicked point with his fingertip as if daring it to pierce the skin. "Of course not," he said. "They had them on the stations. In museums and DNA banks."

"I meant in the desert. They didn’t grow wild anymore?"

"The ground was poisoned," he said. "The rain--what rain we got--was acid."

"Oh."

"My nana had one, in a pot," he said softly. "The soil was treated. She saved part of her weekly water ration for it. Didn’t need much, really, but she was old, and we didn’t get much. But she wanted to keep one alive. Just one."

"What happened to it?"

He looked at her. "We left it, when we skylifted. After she died. We had to. There was no room." He stood, and his sunshades slid down his nose, revealing his eyes for the first time. He didn’t bother to push them up. "Why did you come here?"

She looked around her, at the seeming emptiness that stretched out into a life-filled infinity. "Our family lived in the desert for generations, on both sides of the border. Maybe some part of me remembers this. Maybe some part of me needed to be here, even in VR." She let out a humorless laugh. "Or maybe I’m just being fanciful. Making things up."

"You’re not making anything up," he said.

She looked back at him. "Why do you say that?"

He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

She pushed. "Is that the way you felt, when you came here?"

His eyes darkened. Then, without answering, he reached up, touched the side of his head where his gear sat in real life, and disappeared.

Brenda dropped her voice so it hummed with suspense. "And so, on Halloween night, Janet went to the forest where she had first met Tam Lin. Hiding behind the well, she waited and watched for the elves’ procession, her heart in her mouth. When she saw Tam Lin, she leapt from her hiding place and pulled him from his horse."

When Lynnie had been smaller, she’d always jumped in at this point, squealing gleefully, "An’ the queen was mad, wasn’t she, Mama?" But now she lay silent, eyes focused but blue-veined lids drooping. She’d drifted out of her latest coma earlier that day, and Brenda had started telling her favorite story to distract her from her wooziness.

"The queen spun around in a fury. Wind whipped the trees and the horses screamed in terror."

There were little gasps from the rest of her audience. A few other Syndrome children had snuck over, in their chairs or sitting up in bed to listen. Darla was there too, with Angie in her lap. Everybody knew Lynnie’s mom told the best stories.

Brenda continued. "The wicked queen began to work her terrible magic. In Janet’s arms, her Tam Lin suddenly became--"

She always paused so her children could name horrible animals for Tam Lin to turn into. Ryan loved to say things like kangaroo and buffalo, things that had most definitely not been around in old Scotland. But Ryan wasn’t here. He was off somewhere, and Brenda didn’t have the energy to be angry with him for not letting her know his whereabouts.

From behind her, Angie said, "A bear?"

Brenda looked over her shoulder and nodded. "--a bear, huge and smelly, with terrible claws ripping at poor Janet. She wanted to let go, but she held on, for it was the only way to save him. Then he turned into a snake, wrapped around her and squeezing tight until she thought her ribs would break. She wanted to let go, but she held on, for it was the only way to save him."

As she recounted the various animals that poor enchanted Tam Lin was turned into by the furious queen, Brenda watched her daughter’s eyes go unfocused. She was falling asleep again. Brenda envied Janet. At least the creatures that Tam Lin had turned into were ones that could be fought, not like this insidious condition that was stealing her daughter away piece by piece.

"Then in her arms, he became a pillar of living fire, and she let out a cry of pain as her skin burned. She thought, I must hold on, I must hold on. But then she remembered what Tam Lin had told her. He had said ‘When I turn into a pillar of living fire, then you must let go and throw me into the well, lest we both be burned to ash. Then help me out and cover me with a green cloak, and I will at last be free.’ At once, she flung the fire into the water. A great gush of steam went up, and when she looked into the well, there was her own beloved Tam Lin once more. She helped him out of the well, dripping wet and not burned at all, and covered him with her green cloak. With one final scream of rage, the elf queen and all her court disappeared, and Tam Lin put his arms around her. ‘My Janet,’ he said, ‘you have freed me.’"

A smile flickered across Lynnie’s face just as her lashes settled on her pale cheeks. Brenda checked the machines. She wasn’t medically trained, but after so many years, she could tell by the brain and heart monitors that her daughter was asleep, not unconscious. She let out her breath, then remembered that she still had a little bit of the story to tell for the children still awake. "Janet took her Tam Lin home, and they were married. And the evil, greedy elf queen, her power broken by Janet’s love and determination, was nevermore seen in the land. The end."

If only it worked that way in real life.

Figuring that another story was unlikely, the children drifted away or laid back down, some giving dutiful thanks. Angie’s head drooped against her mother’s shoulder, and Darla rose. She paused and said in a low voice, "Bren?"

Brenda looked up, relieved at the excuse to look away from Lynnie’s too-thin fingers in hers. "What is it?"

"I’m going to put Angie down, but I need to talk to you. Don’t go anywhere, all right?"

"All right." Brenda watched her go, wondering what her friend needed to say.

When Angie was asleep, Darla motioned Brenda to follow her. Brenda gave her daughter's fingers a squeeze and followed her friend to one of the little waiting areas, enclosed in the moving walls. In the open-plan hospital, it offered a vague approximation of privacy.

Darla prowled around the plain wooden chairs, apparently unable to sit. Brenda was too tired to do otherwise. "What is it?" she asked, dropping her head back against the wall. "What's wrong?"

"We're leaving."

Brenda straightened up, suddenly wide awake. "What do you mean, leaving?"

"I mean, when that ship is fixed, Rob and the girls and I are going to be on it."

"What about Angie?"

Darla made two circuits of the waiting area before she answered, somewhat defensively, "She’s strong. She bounced so well from the cold sleep, she was walking an hour later. I don’t have any worries about the return trip."

"I mean the cure."

Darla let out a scornful noise. "There’s no cure here, Brenda. All this fresh air and natural setting that Devon talked about on the stations aren’t doing any good."

"You have to give it time," Brenda said, trying to convince herself as much as her friend. "It's only been two weeks."

"And in two more weeks, we’ll have lost our only chance of going home." Darla crossed her arms, gripping her elbows. "Devon Adair made all these promises and not one of them came true."

"She never promised it would be instantaneous."

"Isn't that what she's saying now? All we have to do is give them up to those monsters. I didn't sign up for this." She swept her hand out, indicating the hard wooden chairs, the unpainted walls, the squat buildings that made up New Pacifica. "By the time we get home, it’ll be fifty years since we left. They have to have found a cure by that time."

Brenda rose and went to her friend. "Dar, you knew this was a gamble. Give it a chance."

"I’ve given it a chance," Darla said. "We’re going back home."

"What about Molly? She loves it here. So does Angie."

"It's the novelty, that's all. They doesn't really belong here. None of us belong here." Her eyes drifted over the uneven grass just outside the window, now rippling gently in the wind, then rose to take in the endless expanse of sky. A deep shudder rocked her body. "I hate this place, Brenda." She looked away from the infinite space. "We have to go home."

---

Except for a small pool of light near the back, the garage was dark. Devon navigated carefully around patches of deeper darkness on her way back. She didn’t know if they were something she would bark her shins on or just tricks of light, but she didn’t feel like finding out the hard way.

"Hey," she said.

John gave a grunt, not looking up from the tiny meter in front of him on the bench. He wore magnifying goggles that made him look like a mad scientist, but Devon didn’t feel like laughing.

"You okay?" she asked.

"Fine. Why wouldn’t I be?"

She looked at the meter. He was calibrating it--one of the mindless, annoying tasks that he either saved until a slow day, or did when something else was bothering him. Since slow days were virtually unknown in New Pacifica, she said, "I heard you had to be at the hospital today."

"Dialysis machine was on the fritz," he said.

"Oh," she said.

"I hate that place," he muttered after a long silence.

"I know," she said.

Through another long silence, the only sounds were the tiny clicks and buzzes of the meter as he tested it, then went back in and made more adjustments.

"So you haven’t talked to Braxton?" she asked.

"No," he said shortly.

"What if you asked Alonzo--"

"No."

"Just a thought."

He tested and adjusted, tested and adjusted. It was like pulling teeth.

Suddenly, he slapped the tiny tool down. "Jesus, would it kill you to tell me I’m right on this? You don’t even have to believe it."

She let out her breath. He was going to talk. "Like all the times you’ve blindly supported me when you thought I was dead wrong?" she said.

"She’s a kid," he said through his teeth. "She can’t deal with this."

"You always wanted it to be her decision," Devon pointed out.

"When she grew up. When she could handle it. When she could understand."

"Who’s the one who told me my son understood more about my own death than I was giving him credit for?"

"That was different."

"It looks remarkably the same to me. Look, it took you close to eleven years to tell her the first thing about her mom. Is it going to take another eleven years for you to talk to her about this?"

He shoved the goggles up over his forehead. "What do you want me to say? ‘Guess what, baby. I’m sending someone back to the stations to pull the plug on your mom, so they can throw her away like a used Kleenex.’"

She reached out and grabbed his hand tightly. "You know it’s not like that. You know it."

Their gazes locked. After a moment, his eyes dropped. "No. It’s not like that."

She let go of him and continued, more quietly, "What if she finds out on her own, sometime? Are you prepared for that conversation?"

He closed his eyes. "She won’t find out. Not until I tell her."

"She has a mind. Give her credit for the ability to use it."

He propped his head in his hands, digging his fingers through his hair in frustration. Devon softened. She knew how hard the initial decision had been for him. But she’d always thought he was making a mistake, not bringing True into it. She said, "At least this way, you could go through it together."

He said flatly, "I’m not putting this on her. All right? I’m just not."

Devon looked at the set of his jaw, the look in his eyes, and mentally threw in the towel. "All right."

He looked at her suspiciously, as if waiting for further arguments. "That mean you agree with me now?"

"It means I disagree but I know when you’re dug in."

He made a "hunh," noise, second or third cousin to a laugh. "Dug in. Yep."

"You’re so frustrating," she said.

"Yeah, and you’re so reasonable yourself."

With the effort at teasing, the tension seeped away. "Dinner’s almost over," she said. She indicated the meter. "Are you done with that?"

He looked down at it, gave it one last test, and nodded. "It’ll do." He closed it up, put away his tools, and snapped off the light.

She said into the darkness, "Wasn’t it easier when all they needed from us was a clean diaper?"

This time the sound was at least a first cousin to a laugh. "Yeah, but these days we get a little more sleep.

---

Days Until Moon Cross: 13

Rita drew herself up, folding her hands at her waist. "Dr. Heller?"

The other woman turned, acknowledging her presence with a nod. "Dr. Vasquez."

They had an audience of nurses, parents, techs, and other doctors, all of whom were so blatantly disinterested they would probably be able to recite the conversation word for word.

"You're Hari Bakshi's primary physician. Do you think he's fit for a session with me? We were scheduled."

Julia referred to the files on her datapad. "He should be just fine, although if he shows any sign of strain, you'll have to let me know when you bring him back."

"Of course. Thank you." Rita set off for Hari's bed, congratulating herself. Perfectly professional, perfectly courteous. Perfectly not letting little things like adultery affect her work.

Behind her, a medtech let out a low whistle. "Frostbite."

Maybe a little too professional.

But damn it, how was she supposed to treat her husband's little side piece? Ex-side piece, she reminded herself. Miguel had given her up.

I love you, he’d said that night on the Virginia, less than three weeks ago. I'm sorry. Don't throw twenty-seven years of marriage into the recycler. We'll make it work. You're just so busy all the time. I get lonely. I'll never do it again.

She'd always thought she had a good marriage. Her husband was intelligent, compassionate, a good provider, encouraged her in her own life's work. She'd seen many women who had it much worse. But lately--just since coming to this planet--she'd started to feel as if something was missing, and not just because of her discovery of Miguel’s infidelity.

Rita rubbed her temples. Marriage was work, she reminded herself. You didn't get to sign the contract and then coast for the next ten or twenty or thirty years. A relationship took upkeep, especially when both members were under stress. Didn't she know that from countless sessions with worried Syndrome parents who had forgotten to be spouses?

On impulse, she detoured when she saw her husband speaking with a nurse. He glanced at her and held up a finger, then finished giving his directions. When he was done and the nurse had left to do his bidding, he turned to her and said, "Yes, dear?"

"What time do you anticipate signing off tonight?"

He glanced at his watch. "Barring any emergencies? Three hours, perhaps three and a half."

"I should be done by then. Would you like to take a walk?"

He gazed at her blankly. "A walk?"

"I thought perhaps to the beach."

"If you need to speak with me about something, I can take a break--"

"No. Just a walk. Spending time together. I'd like to spend some time with you, Miguel." She tried to remind him, without saying it out loud, that they were trying to repair their marriage.

He must have remembered that salient little fact as well. "Yes, of course. I can do that. This evening, then." He kissed her. "Excuse me, I need to check on Lena Guerrero."

"Yes, of course," she murmured, and watched him go before turning and heading toward Hari Bakshi's bed.

The little boy's parents were with him. His father was telling a grandiose story about his adventures on the water. "It was this big!" He held his arms out wide, indicating something closer to a full-grown dolphin than a standard fish.

Hari, knowing full well who had all the common sense in the family, said, "Mama, was it?"

Layla Bakshi laughed. "Your papa is telling tales again. It was little. Itsy." She pinched thumb and forefinger together to demonstrate.

"Your mama doesn't know what she's talking about," Rajiv countered, grinning at her. "It was a champion among fishes. But one day you'll catch one bigger."

Rita paused at the end of Hari's bed, smiling at the family. The parents looked up. "Good evening, Dr. Rita," Layla said.

"Good evening. I hate to interrupt story time," she said lightly. "But I have a date with this handsome young man."

Hari sat up hopefully. "Can we go outside, Dr. Rita?"

She had taken to conducting some sessions outdoors, both for the sake of privacy, hard to obtain in the crowded hospital, and also because the children asked her to. "Well," she said. "I'll let your parents decide."

Hari's big eyes turned to his parents. "Mama . . ."

Layla felt his forehead. "How are you doing? What did the doctor say?"

"Dr. Heller says he's quite fit this evening. We'll take a chair, of course." Which Hari would climb out of the minute he was out of the hospital, but the rules were the rules.

"Please?" Hari wheedled.

Layla and Rajiv exchanged a look, then Layla said, "You take care and tell Dr. Rita if you feel tired."

Hari cheered, and threw back his covers so his father could pick him up and carry him to one of the chairs that clustered near the doors. Once Rajiv settled him in, and Layla had fussed with his headpiece, Hari bounced. "Let's go."

His mother smiled at him. "We'll see you after dinner, darling."

As Rita wheeled Hari away, waiting until they were more private to activate her recorder, she glanced back. His parents stood just outside the doors, looking after them. Rajiv leaned down to say something in his wife's ear, and she touched his arm lightly, in comfort or reassurance, before they both turned toward the dorms.

Layla and Rajiv had gone through a rough patch in their marriage a year before, one so bad they'd thought seriously about dissolving their marriage contract early and taking the penalties. But they had worked it through, both for Hari's sake and because they truly still loved each other. It could be done, Rita thought. If they could do it, so could she.

Days until Moon Cross: 12

Alonzo knew it was Julia’s day off; she’d said so the night before. Then why couldn’t he find her?

As a last resort, he tried the hospital. If she really was working on her day off, she was either a bigger workaholic than even he’d ever dreamed, or--

Or she was avoiding him.

But her cubicle was empty, and nobody he asked had seen her. Alonzo sighed, unsure whether to be frustrated or relieved. Of course, this didn’t mean she wasn’t avoiding him; just that she hadn’t retreated here.

He took one last wander through the offices, glancing absently into the cubicles he passed on the off-chance that Julia was talking to another doctor or something. Most of them were empty; a few held doctors bent industriously over datapads. The last one on the end was Rita’s. She sat at her desk. No datapad sat in front of her, just her own folded hands. She stared at them as if she didn’t know what to do next.

Alonzo stopped, balanced between one step and the next. He knew that look, too well. Not on Rita, but on his own mama.

She and Papi had always paid bills at the kitchen table after he and the boys and Mercedes had gone to bed. Every month, there were six mouths to feed, six bodies to clothe, the rent on a three-bedroom unit to pay--even if Mercy’s room wasn’t much more than a glorified closet. But before any of that could be attended to, there were six enormous passage debts to chip away at.

More than once Alonzo had come into the kitchen to get a glass of water for Davy or Lito and found his parents staring at the pile of bills, the numbers that always added up red, with that look of blank despair. After going back to his room, he would lay in the darkness, promising himself that when he was grown up, he was going to do something so his parents never had to look like that again.

And he had, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you forgot.

He shifted his weight, arguing with himself. It’s none of your business. Walk away. He obeyed himself, striding off down the corridor. But his footsteps slowed halfway to the door.

She was family, which made it practically an obligation to butt in.

But he barely knew her.

But she was family. The first family there’d been for him for five or a hundred years.

He teetered in place, torn. Then he thought, She listens to everybody. Who listens to her?

With a deep sigh, closer to a groan, he turned around and went back. "Rita?"

She jolted and looked up. The bright mask slipped over her features in half an instant. "Alonzo. Hello. What can I do for you?"

"Nothing," he said, coming in and dropping into the chair she used for sessions. "What’s wrong?"

"I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"No estoy tonto. What is it?"

Her face crumpled, and she turned her head. "Go away."

"No," he said. Then, as if he were talking to six-year-old Mercedes with a skinned knee, he said, "What hurts, baby?"

She sniffed, once, hard. "It’s Miguel," she said, so low he could barely hear her.

Alonzo had already noticed they didn’t seem to have much to say to each other. "You have a fight or something?"

"He forgot," she said. "About last night."

"Was it your, uh, anniversary or something?"

"No, it was--I just wanted to take a walk. With my husband. I wanted to spend time with my husband. But he forgot."

"Okay," he said, trying to understand why this would bring on that terrible blank look. "So he forgot. He’s busy, right?" Everyone was busy, but the doctors were the busiest of everyone with the possible exception of Devon. He should know; he lived with one.

But Rita damn near pinned him to the wall with her glare. "Just because you both have dicks does not mean you get to be on his side."

"Whoa. Whoa." He held up his hands. "I didn’t say anything about either of our dicks. I’m on your side. I just don’t--why is this bad?"

"He forgot," she said again. "He said he got caught up, and he forgot, and he just went back to our rooms afterward. But I was--Where was Julia last night?"

"Huh?" It was a conversation of curveballs, and Alonzo was still two or three behind. "Why?"

"Was he was with her?" She didn’t even sound like she knew she was saying it aloud. "He said it was over, but this is exactly what happened last time. He forgot things and he got caught up and how dumb does he think I am?"

"Last time?" Alonzo’s voice rose. "What last time? What’s over? What does Julia have to do with your husband forgetting to take a walk with you?"

"What do you think?" Rita said bitterly.

And unfortunately, Alonzo had finally caught up.

---

The laundry basket pulled at Julia’s arms, a pleasant strain after a morning’s worth of heavy lifting in the sauna of the laundry room. She’d done laundry today because her schedule had stuck Alonzo with the chore for the past month.

She took her time over the folding, enjoying the clean smell of the clothes and the sun falling in through the window. She examined a seam, decided it would last another few wearings, and gave the shirt a businesslike shake before folding it. The cloth slid against her skin with the softness of thousands of wearings. She smoothed it down, tugging a button to make sure it didn’t need to be re-sewn. It didn’t.

What did it say, she thought ruefully, that the best half-hour she’d had in quite awhile was folding laundry by herself?

But there were no patients or parents here. No Miguel. No Alonzo. No Devon. Nobody wanted anything from her right at this moment. Even the clothes were content to go quietly in a pile, destined for her crate.

She had morning shift, she remembered. Six AM to ten, then again at night, 6 PM to ten. Ugh. The shit shift, True called it, imitating her dad. Julia had given up trying to stop her, and started calling it that too.

She concentrated on the long, free afternoon in front of her. Maybe Bess or Devon would have a drink with her after dinner. Since neither of them could drink alcohol yet--Devon because her liver was still too damaged from the viral infection the year before, Bess because of the baby--Julia knew she had the option of getting shit-faced if she wanted.

She thought, I’ll have to come up with some excuse not to be around Alonzo, and sighed again.

She concentrated on the socks.

The door opened. "Hi," she said, trying not to resent the loss of her solitude.

"Hey," Alonzo said. His voice sounded funny. His expression looked strange too--he studied her as if he’d never seen her before.

She looked at her pile of socks. Suddenly, there was a heavy feeling in her stomach. "Did you know," she said, trying to make her voice light, "that between the two of us, we have three pairs of matching socks? And my definition of matching is pretty loose right now."

He said, "Did you sleep with Miguel Vasquez?"

Her hands froze in the middle of folding the last pair of socks together. She took a breath, finished the action, and set them on her stack of clothes. "Not recently."

He let out his breath and sagged against the door jamb. "But . . . sometime not recently, you did," he said.

"Before we left the stations. It’s over." She picked up the stack of her own clothes and turned to deposit them in her crate.

"That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say about it? It’s over?"

Julia felt her shoulders hunch and straightened them. "I don’t know what else you want to hear about it."

"Why didn’t I hear about it?"

Anger started bubbling up in her stomach, a slow lava boil. "Why would I tell you?"

"Maybe it’s something I would want to hear. Something I should know."

She got to her feet, spinning to face him. "Oh, now you want to hear about something before you, Alonzo?"

His eyes narrowed. "What’s that supposed to mean?"

"I mean there’s only ever been one rule with us and that’s don’t ask, don’t tell!"

"When did I ever say that?"

"The past is gone and the future’s not here yet, so why worry about either of them?" she said. "Don’t you recognize that?" Without waiting for an answer, she went on. "You said it to me. Before our first winter. When I asked you something, in passing, about your childhood. You said it didn’t matter anymore. If your past doesn’t matter, why should mine?"

"Because he’s here!" Alonzo shouted back. "He’s here, now, today, and you didn’t think I’d want to know?"

"Rita’s here, too!"

He went white and still. "What do you know about Rita?"

"Nothing," she said bitterly. "I don’t know anything, because you haven’t bothered to tell me."

"H-how do you know there’s anything to tell?"

"How dumb do you think I am? It’s obvious to everyone that she’s special to you."

He opened his mouth. Closed it again. He looked down at the floor, shoved his hands in his pockets, and finally said, "I can’t--about her. I can’t talk about it."

She thought, I don’t care if you loved her, I don’t care if losing her was the worst thing that ever happened to you, if you would only tell me. If you’d only share that little piece of yourself.

But he stayed silent, still staring at the beat-up toes of his boots.

She took in a breath, held it, and when she let it out she knew what she was going to do.

"You’re right," she said.

He looked up, amazed and maybe a little afraid. "I am?"

"Maybe now is all we have, and nothing else does matter. But--" She stopped, her breath shuddering in and out of her as if it would break her ribs. "I can’t do this anymore."

He didn’t waste any time pretending not to know what she meant. "No--wait--"

"I think," she said with brutal gentleness, "that right now is the time to just--end this." She knelt down, picked up her crate of clothing, and set it on the bed. Then she picked up a few things from the bedside table--her gear, a badly carved duck that Uly had made, a string bracelet from Bess’s shed, and other scraps and pieces--and put them on top of her pants and shirts. Then she snapped the lid shut and hoisted it in her arms.

He still stood by the door, where he’d been throughout the argument. Now he moved to intercept her. "Jules, it’s only two more weeks. Don’t do it like this--"

"Like what?" she asked him. "What’s the difference? That I’m leaving instead of you?"

His hands fell away from the front of the box. "Please--" he said.

"No," she said, and pushed past him, through the still-open door, with her whole life in her hands.

---

Julia didn’t know how she got from her own front door to Devon’s office, but the next thing she knew, she found herself staring at a fat knothole.

Even through the door, she could hear the exasperation in Devon’s voice. "Bess, I know this is frustrating for you, but it’s hardly--"

"Frustrating? All my green wool’s gone and disappeared for the third time in the past coupla weeks."

"Don’t you have plenty more, in other colors?"

After a moment, Julia realized that in order for the door to open, she had to knock. She put the box down to do so.

Bess’s voice got louder, as if she were moving toward the door. "Of course I do, but it is the principle of the--" The door opened and Bess stopped dead, mid-ramble. "Julia?"

"Hi," Julia said.

Bess’s eyes fell to the box at Julia’s feet. Then they lifted to her face again. "Oh," she said, then, "oh."

"What is it?" Devon said, getting up and coming around her desk.

"My god, Devon, are you blind?" Bess said. She reached out and put her arm around Julia’s shoulders. "Honey, c’mere. C’mere."

Julia almost tripped over the box, obeying, but it didn’t register. She said numbly, as Bess led her to a chair, "I left. I couldn’t anymore and I left."

Devon said, "I’ll call Marcia and Danielle," and put her gear on.

Julia said, "He found out about Miguel and he got angry and he didn’t have any right."

"’Course not," Bess said, but she mouthed to Devon, Miguel?!

Devon mouthed back, Later, and said into the gear, "It’s Julia. She’s left Alonzo. Mhm. Bring the cider."

This roused Julia, slightly. "You’re not supposed to have alcohol," she scolded. "Either of you. Doctor’s orders."

Devon folded her eyepiece back for a moment in between calls and said, "Sweetie, we know. It’s for you."

"Oh," Julia said. Then she put her head down on her knees and sobbed.