My heart stuttered—I made a small sound of surprise—and I was reaching for the screen without thinking. That was not Adam’s voice. Malachi caught my hand before I could do anything to disrupt the transmission, and for one irrational second I hated him for it, for pulling me away from them.

Anwar appeared first. In the months since I had last seen them, the twins had passed their fifteenth birthday. Anwar had grown even taller, and his black hair was too long, drifting around his face in unruly curls. His boyish limbs were even thinner than they had been. He smiled, but it was a wary, muted smile. He raised a hand in awkward greeting.

“Hey, Zahra,” said my brother, his voice so much more like a man’s than I recalled. He glanced to the side, a question plain on his face, as though he was awaiting instruction for what to say. There was no reason for him to be on the bridge. The children were meant to be safe in the passenger cabins.

A second later Nadra came into view. With her was Adam. He had his arm hooked around her skinny shoulders. He was smiling. Nadra was not. He pushed her to stand behind Orvar; she hunched her shoulders and let herself be steered.

“Zahra, tell us the good news!” Adam said. “We’ve been waiting far too long.”

His voice was bright, his tone cheerful, but there was a manic light in his eyes. I did not like the way Nadra was leaning away from him. I did not like the way she glanced at the comm, then looked away quickly, as though she could not bear to see me. I ached to reach across space and hug her, to pull her away from Adam and tease her into smiling. We could not make a home together aboard House of Wisdom, but anywhere, anywhere would be better than being apart.

I reached for Malachi’s hand and tried to draw comfort from his warmth. I looked straight into the camera. “I don’t have good news for you, Adam. Everything I have to tell you is bad.”

Adam’s eyes narrowed. Nadra flinched as he dug his fingers into her shoulder.

He said, “We are depending on you, Zahra. Tell me what has happened.”

“You can’t come here,” I said. “House of Wisdom is too dangerous. We can’t make it safe. Henke is dead, and we have no protection against the virus. One of the hostages is infected, she got infected through a scrape, not from the air. All it took was the slightest contact. The people here didn’t just get sick—it’s so much worse than that. It wasn’t an outbreak, Adam. It was a massacre.”