I expected to see an Aunare person sitting in my living room, but I was wrong. The man sitting in the metal folding chair I’d painstakingly painted my favorite rich blue-green shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be relaxing, his feet on our crates-and-plywood coffee table like he was chatting with an old friend. Not just because it was late and he was a stranger. But because he was SpaceTech.

I stepped inside the apartment, closing the door softly behind me. My mother was sitting on the worn-in couch, leaning toward the man, and the look in her eyes said she was hopeful. Excited. Happy. But he was SpaceTech. His blond hair cut painfully close to his head and his rod-straight posture as he sat up, dropping his feet from the plywood, and watched me were a dead giveaway. SpaceTech guys all had the same look. Like it was beaten into them when they joined the corrupt company. But there was something different about him.

He wasn’t wearing the navy-and-silver dress uniform of an officer or even a navy-and-gray one of a low-level SpaceTech grunt—instead just a plain white T-shirt and jeans with a little rip in one knee—but I knew what he was. Except he wasn’t arresting me. And he wasn’t disgusted, hateful, violent like other humans when faced with a halfer.

“It’s you,” he said, and if I wasn’t mistaken, there was more than a touch of awe in his voice.

His gaze traveled over every inch of me as if he were making sure I was here, real, and unharmed. He might as well have been touching me for all the weight it carried. And the worst thing—as he grinned, something in me softened.

This was so iced. I couldn’t actually be attracted to a SpaceTech officer. Sure he wasn’t much older than me—maybe a year or two at most—but he was SpaceTech. They were the worst.

His light blue eyes sparkled as he slowly stood. “You’re here.”

“Yeah.” I let the bag slip from my fingers, thudding onto the floor. I needed my hands free in case I had to fight. “But you really don’t have to cry about it.”

“Maité,” Mom said, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the guy in our living room.

That might have been out of line, but he was making me uncomfortable. Who was he? What was his story? And why was he happy to see us?

“Maité.” Mom’s voice was firmer. Her eyes were glassy, her hands clasped at her chest, and her face screamed that every hope and dream that she’d had for the last twelve years were coming true. We were saved.

But I wasn’t that naïve. “Where’s my father?”