While she continues to laugh, I glance over at Drom, my smile fading. She’s sitting quietly on the side of the boat, her face tilted upward with the same unabashed expectancy of so many Nibiran children on the docks. I nudge her with one foot, and she lets out an annoyed grunt without looking at me.

“He’ll be here soon,” I say. “Staring won’t make it happen any sooner.”

“I’m not a fucking idiot,” she grumbles back. Still, her eyes never leave the sky, even for a second.

I give up on trying to distract her. Truthfully, I think what I want most is to distract myself. If it weren’t disrespectful to Scorpia, I would have sanded down the edges of my feelings with alcohol before coming here. Right now, my anxiety is raw and sharp. Even with Shey seemingly calling in favors with her mother on our account, we’ve seen nothing of Pol since that initial message, and the only news we’ve received is that he’s alive, awake, and “steadily improving.” I’m not surprised, though. We’ve heard Gaia has been in chaos in preparation for the big migration, and I’m sure one ill off-worlder wasn’t anyone’s priority other than ours.

Still, as much as logic tells me that must be the reason behind the lack of news, I can’t help but worry that Leonis did something to him as one last, cruel twist of the knife. For the sake of peace, my siblings and I all agreed to keep our mouths shut about Leonis’s final attempted betrayal of the Nibirans, which is why the deal went through in the first place… but I know she must be furious with us.

Not wanting to worry my siblings, I haven’t told anyone of this concern—except once, in a message to Shey, when I grew particularly desperate. Her curt reply assured me that her mother would never do such a thing, and Apollo would be returned to us safely.

Shey has been wrong before. But maybe I shouldn’t be so focused on that, regardless. Maybe I should be more worried that even if Pol comes back to us safe and sound and boisterous as always, that he’ll never forgive me for what I did before he was infected.

Drom gasps. Even distracted, I know what that gasp must mean, and turn my eyes skyward.

The conversation in the boat, the whispers drifting over the water, the music on the docks—all of it falls silent at once as the Gaian ship enters the atmosphere.