Seven hours.” My aunt’s voice, normally as polished as a gleaming blade, was ragged. “That’s how long you were adrift.”

I didn’t remember all of it, but I remembered enough that I did not want to close my eyes, however exhausted I was by the effort of keeping them open. I remembered waking aboard Pangong in a quarantine tent with white-suited figures leaning over me, and waking again, still in quarantine, when a shuttle landed in Armstrong City, but the rest of the past few days were a blur of bright lights and looming doctors’ faces. When I slept, I dreamed of fire and darkness.

The quarantine tent and biohazard suits were gone. The doctors were satisfied the parasite had not come with me. I wished I could find the same certainty. Reason told me that the parasite would have asserted itself by now, but every itch on my skin, every phantom sensation, felt to me like a silver worm slithering through my limbs.

Aunt Padmavati went on, “You weren’t fitted into the evacuation suit quite right. That explains the bruising. Do you remember that?”

“No, but I didn’t—” I said, tried to say, but a dry cough overtook the words.

She lifted a straw to my lips. “You didn’t . . . ?”

The water was lukewarm. I gulped it greedily. “I didn’t put myself into the suit. I wasn’t awake. Zahra sedated me.”

My aunt’s eyes widened slightly. Too late I realized what I had revealed. I wanted to grab the words from the air and cram them back into my mouth, like a child hiding a cookie he should not have eaten.

But she had been sitting by my bedside when I awoke, every single time, even when the doctors and nurses were bustling through the room, and I was not going to lie to her. She seemed to me even smaller and more birdlike now. Her shoulders were thin, her graying hair escaping in wisps from the braid that wound over her shoulder. Every motion was deliberate in the way of somebody used to Earth’s gravity now moving about on the Moon. She had never looked less like my mother.

“Jas?” my aunt said softly.

She touched my hand. Her skin was papery and dry but warm. I had forgotten what a warm touch felt like; it might have been the brand of a red-hot iron. I jerked my hand away, and my aunt withdrew hers. Her lips were pursed, her brow creased. I did not recognize this stranger who wore my aunt’s face, a woman soft with concern where stern and unbending Councilor Padmavati Bhattacharya ought to have been, and I hated that she was not a stranger at all. She was who she had always been, now stripped of the armor she’d constructed over a lifetime.

“Baqir,” I said. “Xiomara. Did they—are they—”