I listened to Bhattacharya’s words, to the tone of his voice, searching for any waver of fear, but there was none. As far as I knew, he had not been back to space since the House of Wisdom massacre. He had never spoken publicly about the attack; his aunt had shielded him from the demands of the public and press. The official line was that he did not remember—but he had been twelve, not an infant. I was only a year older than him, and I remembered those terrifying days so vividly they could never be cleaved from my memory. The Zeffir-1 outbreak on the ship had come only two days after my father was sent away from House of Wisdom in disgrace. He had not even arrived home yet; SPEC had been questioning him about the data he was accused of stealing. I remembered it all clearly: the twins asking when Daddy was coming back, strangers charging into the house the night he died, the solemn announcement that the Zeffir-1 vaccine would be distributed globally. My mother yelling at SPEC investigators. Nadra and Anwar crying when we left for the desert. They had been only five and didn’t know what was happening. But I had been thirteen, and I understood everything. I could still hear the tiredness in my mother’s voice when she said, There’s nowhere else for us to go. They’ll never leave us alone.

Bhattacharya had been old enough to bear witness. His decade-long silence had to be a lie.

“Hey,” a man said. “Hey, isn’t that—”

I looked up, a prickle of fear shivering over my skin. The unfinished question had come from one of the loud young men in the middle row. Brown hair, olive skin, lanky and tall. The one who had been clumsily flirting with Panya.

In my ear Malachi said, “Oh, shit.”

Boudicca’s voice was much calmer. “Relax. They were going to notice eventually. Distract them. We have time.”

“Should I make the announcement? Give them an excuse?” Malachi asked. I could easily imagine the expression on his face: frantic and strained, his brown eyes wide with worry beneath his curly dark hair. Malachi was copilot because we needed his skills in the cockpit, but I also knew that it was better to keep him hidden, where his inability to veil his worry would not give us away.

But it was too late now. As Boudicca had said, they were going to notice eventually.

“What is that?” the young man asked, and his words fell into a natural lull in the surrounding conversation. Everybody heard him. My heart began to thump faster.

“It’s a station,” his friend said, leaning over for a better view through the window. “Providence, maybe?”