Dr. Calvin Fender, renowned scientist, Nobel Prize winner, recent widower, and single father, settled into the pew next to his son. “Strange, isn’t it? We can travel to Neptune with the snap of a finger. We can mend broken bones almost overnight. We can unlock the very secrets of the universe itself. But we can’t seem to think of the right thing to say at a funeral.”

“I can’t cry,” Leo admitted.

This time it was his dad who shrugged. “It’s not a requirement.”

“But don’t you think I should? People will think I’m not sad.”

His father shook his head. “I don’t think anyone believes that. Besides, we all experience grief differently. Half of these people aren’t even crying about your mother. They are crying about someone else they’ve lost. Or someone they are afraid to lose. Do you feel like you need to cry?”

“I don’t know,” Leo said, making shapes with his fingers, interlacing them, remembering a rhyming game she showed him once, a long time ago. Here is the church. Here is the steeple. “I don’t want her to think I don’t miss her.”

His dad reached out and took both of Leo’s hands in one of his own. “Well, I know. Believe me. I miss her just as much as you do. And you know. And that’s really all that matters, right?”

Leo nodded, though he still wasn’t so sure.

They sat for a minute more in silence, just the two of them sitting in the front row, listening to the steady drum of rain on the roof.

“I want to go home,” Leo said.

“I know you do. This will be over soon. I promise.”

Leo leaned into his father, eyes falling upon her picture again, staring across the giant fissure gouged deep into the earth like an open wound that would never heal.

“Hey, Leo.”

His brother’s voice caused Leo to sit up. He turned but couldn’t spot Gareth in the crowd.

“Leo? You with us?”

He scanned the faces before him, all of them suddenly alien and unfamiliar.

“Earth to Leo?”

A finger snap.

Leo Fender shook his head and focused on the man staring back at him, the memory quickly receding. This wasn’t his dad or his brother. It was a haggard face with a ragged beard and a sharp, hooked nose, so different from his father’s knobby one. Scars arced above the eyebrow, along the chin.

This was the face of a pirate.

The man’s hair was cropped short enough to reveal a left ear half-missing, the curved remainder an angry pink whirl of newly scabbed flesh. Leo had watched that ear get blown off by an energy bolt. Fired from the rifle of an Aykarian soldier, no less.

Because that’s what you do to pirates. You shoot them. You arrest them. You hang them for treason. At least that’s what Leo had always thought. But he’d been forced to rethink a lot of things lately. Especially when the Aykari started shooting at him too.