“For my father. I told you. To prove he wasn’t a killer. And for the twins. I thought they could have a better life here. Life in the deserts isn’t easy, and it’s even harder to find a way out. Coming here, following Adam, that was our way.”

Finally he turned from the screen to meet my eyes. “But you weren’t born there. Your parents were Councils citizens.”

I swallowed; my throat was dry and sore. “Do you know my mother was a doctor? She was a wonderful doctor. All she ever wanted to do was help people, to make them well. She hated that the Councils would refuse citizenship to people who needed help. She hated that just being unlucky enough to be born in a poisoned wasteland could be a death sentence, if your family didn’t get moved through the application process fast enough. She hated that people are always being told to just get in line, follow the rules, wait your turn, as though that would make their children well and bring their loved ones back. She saw how cruel that was. Helping people is all she ever did.”

And that was what she had done, even after we went to the desert. The homestead was a quicksand trap for the lost and ailing. The children always needed their scrapes bandaged and their bruises kissed. The work never ceased. And every night, every single night, while the rest of us looked upward and dreamed, my mother soothed the ill, tended the wounded, comforted the dying. I had not understood it before, how rooted she was on the ground, but I remembered how sad her smile had been when those who had been to space and yearned to return told their stories, embellishing what the darkness had to offer, spinning its dangers into beauty. My mother never shared her own stories. She only worked while Dag was telling eager young daredevils about his slingshot around Venus, while Orvar was remembering the first time he had sailed so far that Earth was nothing but a speck in the distance, while Boudicca was speaking quietly about the exhilaration of racing above Mars, so close to the surface there was an ever-present danger of clipping a mountaintop.

The rewards, Boudicca had said, outweigh the dangers, in the end.

I had an idea.

•   •   •

When we returned to the bridge, I asked, “Do you know about the crash of the Breton?”

“The one that crashed on Mars?” Jas returned to the navigation console and pulled himself into one of the chairs. He tapped the radio on again to hear what Orbital Control was saying. “I remember learning about it in school. Why?”