I remembered Valerie Black as thin and brittle, with a sharp tongue, eyes piercing as a hawk’s and just as unblinking. Grace watched her grandmother avidly, and I’d realised then that if we ever did meet her, Valerie would be far more interested in Grace than she would be in me. Not surprising—I’m not related by blood—but the thought stung, just the same.

I was five when my parents adopted me. One more Sev orphan out of many. I was born the same day Naomi and Grace touched back down to Earth. Sometimes, I wonder if that’s why they adopted me out of all the others out there.

My parents never made me feel inferior, but I was always diminished next to their and Grace’s fame. Grace became an astronaut. Naomi always tried to shield her elder daughter from the fame that was stamped on her since birth, but Grace was always hungry for it. Her life has been star-touched in more ways than one. She floated above the rest of us. Above me. For a time, I hated her, but she was also impossible to hate.

The fight between my mother and Grace brewed for years before it finally came to a head. Grace wanted to go visit her grandmother in person. Naomi had said no, even though she couldn’t actually stop her since Grace was a fully grown woman by that point. They’d had a fight to end all fights, from what I heard from my father. He, like me, is often stuck playing peacemaker between them. He, like me, often fails.

When Grace decided to visit Valerie anyway, Naomi cut off communication. They haven’t spoken since.

Naomi stopped her story that morning she touched down in Cape Canaveral, but as I’ve been writing this book, I’ve investigated what happened after. She saw so much change in the world that we now take for granted. She testified against Valerie only a few days after landing, calmly reporting events on the Atalanta as if they’d all happened to someone else. She hadn’t bothered hiding Valerie’s scratches with make-up. During the breaks, she snuck off to breastfeed Grace.

My mother had watched the world change around her, knowing that she had been a catalyst for it all. Earth took what steps it could to mitigate the damage done. These days, we take wind and solar and leaving fossil fuels in the ground for granted. It never became the Atalanta 5’s rosy idea of a perfect world, though. Change is slow. Utopias are lies.