I’m sorry, she had said. I’ll finish it. I had assumed we would both die aboard House of Wisdom, Zahra with her guilt and I with mine. I had never been able to explain how it felt to be an empty shell of memory where a son ought to be, and how many times I had returned to House of Wisdom in my dreams, in my fears, in my nightmares. I had never been able to tell anybody how often I wished my mother had never sent me away at the end. Ten years I had been a ghost among the living. I didn’t know how to be anything else.

I reached up to touch Baqir’s face then, to brush his hair back from his forehead and feel the warmth as he leaned into my hand, but the motion made something pull in my side, and I gasped in pain.

“Okay, stop,” Baqir said, sitting back. “You’re hurt. Just—just rest.”

“I’m not hurt. You sound like my aunt.”

“I don’t sound anything like your aunt and you know it.”

“No. You don’t.” I settled for running my hand down his arm, grasping his hand again, feeling a small thrill when he didn’t pull away. “What are they going to do to the survivors from Homestead? Not the kids. The adults.”

“Who the fuck knows?” he said. “Turns out one of them is a Councils citizen, and she’s sort of taken the lead in speaking for them. Probably because she’s the only one anybody would listen to. You can ignore a bunch of desert-rat criminals, but you can’t ignore a nice Councils grandmother who also happens to be a former professor of political science. If anything’s been decided, they aren’t saying.”

“That doesn’t seem good enough,” I said, “just waiting for the Councils to decide.”

Not for Zahra, who had only ever wanted a safe place to live. For her brother and sister. For the memory of their parents, whom the Councils had treated so cruelly. For the pilot who had tried to rescue the doomed crew of the Breton. For the young SPEC agent with the brown eyes and curly hair who had been sent on a mission doomed for failure.

Baqir did that awkward one-shouldered shrug again. “I doubt anybody’s bothered to ask them what they want. Or need. Or even why they were there in the first place. The Councils don’t tend to like the answers, so they don’t ask.”

The bitterness in his voice had probably always been there, I thought, but I had always tried not to hear it.

“That’s what Ariana wanted me to do, you know,” he said. “For the project she was going to premiere at the Second Council. She was interviewing a bunch of people about—well, everything, people living all over the world and off it, but she wanted to talk to me about moving from the deserts to the Councils. I told her I’d think about it. It seemed like such a massive pain in the ass when she asked, and I didn’t want my parents to see and think . . .” He smiled sadly. “Xiomara’s going to try to get the project shown anyway, even unfinished. I think I might help her.”