She didn’t know how long Filip had been standing behind her. The girl to her left nodded to Filip and fled. The boy took the empty seat. Wisps of stubble stretched along the line of his jaw, black against the golden brown of his skin. He turned to look at her, and his eyes took a moment to find her, like he was drunk. “That was the man you left us for, si no?”

Cyn grunted like he’d been hit. Naomi didn’t know why. The question was so wrong it was actually funny.

“Not how it played,” she said. “But yes. I ship with him.”

“He’s handsome,” Filip said. She wondered whose voice he was echoing. It didn’t sound like Marco. “Wanted to say, about your being here? Wanted to say.”

But then he didn’t go on to actually finish the thought. She wondered whether she saw regret in his eyes, or if she was imagining it because she wanted it to be there. She didn’t know what to say, how to answer. It felt like there were many versions of her – the captive, the collaborator, the mother reunited, the mother who went away – and all of them spoke differently. She didn’t know which was her real self. If any of them.

Probably, it was all.

“Not the way I’d have chosen,” she said, stepping through the words like they were sharp. “But that’s true of a lot of things, yeah?”

Filip nodded, looked down. For a moment she thought he’d move away, and didn’t know whether she wanted him to stay or go.

“It’s me up there now, you know,” Filip said. “On the feed? That’s me.”

The reporter was older than Filip, broader across the face and shoulders. For a moment, she tried to see a resemblance between them, and then like walking into a freezer, she understood.

“Your work,” she said.

“Gave it to me as a present,” Filip said. “The stealth coating on the rocks? I led the team that retrieved it, me. Without me, none of this.”

He was boasting. It was in the corner of his eyes and the tightness of his lips how badly he wanted her to be impressed. To approve. Something like rage shifted in her gut. On the screen, the reporter was listing relief organizations and religious groups. People who were trying to organize help for the refugees. As if anyone on the planet didn’t need refuge now.

“Did that to me too,” she said. Filip’s expression asked the question. “Your father. He put blood on my hands too. Made me complicit in killing people. Thought it would make me easier to control, I guess.”