He was here. He was home.

The man processing the arriving travelers wore a thick mustache, white with a tinge of red. His eyes were bloodshot and his expression glum.

“Business or pleasure?”

“Neither one,” Alex drawled, “I’m here to see the ex-wife.”

The man gave a quick smile. “That going to be a business meeting, or pleasure?”

“Let’s call it not-business,” Alex said.

The processor stroked the screen of his terminal, nodded toward the camera. As the system confirmed that he was who he claimed to be, Alex wondered why he’d said that. He hadn’t said that Tali was a shrew, he hadn’t insulted her, but he’d leaned on the assumption for a quick joke. He felt like she deserved better from him. Probably she did.

“’Joy your stay,” the processing man said, and Alex was free to enter the world he’d left.

His cousin Min stood in the waiting area. She was ten years younger than him, the last vestiges of youth falling from her and the first comfortable heft of middle age creeping in. Her smile belonged to a little girl he’d known once.

“Hey there, podner,” she said, the Mariner drawl probably half a degree thicker than it normally was. “What brings you round these parts?”

“More sentiment than sense,” Alex said, opening his arms. They embraced for a moment.

“You got any luggage?” Min asked.

“Traveling light.”

“Fair enough. I’ve got a cart down at the front.”

Alex hoisted an eyebrow. “You didn’t need to do that.”

“They’re cheaper than they used to be. The kids aren’t back from lower U for another four hours. You got anything you want to do before we’ve got them underfoot?”

“The only two things I’ve been looking forward to were seeing people and a bowl of Hassan’s noodles.”

The look of embarrassment passed over Min’s face and vanished again in an eyeblink. “There’s a great noodle shop over on the south face. Garlic sauce that’ll knock you sideways. But Hassan packed it in about four years ago.”

“Ah. No, it’s all right. The thing about Hassan’s wasn’t that they were good.”

“Well, now that’s truth.”

“It’s just that they were his.”

The cart was a common electric, wider and tougher than the ones they used on stations. The tires were clear polymer that wouldn’t streak the floors of the corridors. Alex slid into the passenger’s seat, Min taking the controls. They talked about small, domestic things – who in the family was getting married, who was getting divorced, who was moving and where. A surprising number of Min’s siblings were on ships headed for the Ring, and though she didn’t say it outright, he had the sense that she was more interested in hearing about what he’d seen on the other side of it than in him.

They passed down a long access tunnel and then across one of the linking bridges to Bunker Hill. It was the neighborhood where Alex had grown up. His father’s ashes were in the crypt at the synagogue, his mother’s had been scattered over the Ophir Chasmata. The first girl he’d ever kissed had lived in rooms two corridors down from the place Min’s family was in now. His best friend growing up had been an ethnic Chinese boy named Johnny Zhou who’d lived with an older brother and sister on the other side of the canyon.