I turned my head away, too late to hide my tears. To my right, tall windows looked over Armstrong City. There was no sunlight on the domes; Armstrong was somewhere in the middle of its long lunar night, as well as its artificially defined local night. Wispy clouds drifted over the city, twisting around the buildings and winding along rails and pathways. It was as close as Armstrong ever came to experiencing real weather, that fleeting formation and dissipation of moisture exhaled from the city’s carefully maintained parks and farms. The buildings were mostly white, tinged with a silver gleam that faded into gray, with broad windows like flat blank eyes.

Zahra’s message ended. My aunt moved in her chair but said nothing.

“How many people survived?” I asked.

“Eighty-three,” she said.

Eighty-three out of three hundred. Eighty-three people who had believed they were leaving a life of hardship and misery for a gleaming home in the stars, for safety and comfort, for a dream of peace. They had so despaired of what Earth had to offer, having crashed so many times against walls they could not breach, they had followed a criminal narcissist on a hopeless voyage into space, and fewer than one-third of them had survived.

“Zahra had a brother and a sister,” I said. “Twins. Teenagers.”

“They survived. We’re trying to locate their family. Their closest relation is a cousin, I believe. A researcher in one of the outer planets stations. None of the children will be punished for their part in what happened.”

Some in the Councils would have suggested it. I knew that much without asking. There were always those who viewed the children of refugees and separatists not as victims but as pawns in a game in which the winners had been chosen long ago. I thought about the anger in Baqir’s voice when he spoke about how his entire family had been denied citizenship because of the medicine his grandmother stole.

“And the others?” I asked. “The ones who aren’t children?”

“That remains to be determined.”

In the distance a train whipped along curving rails, darting between unseen stations. There was no color. No sound penetrated the walls and closed doors of the hospital room. Everything about the atmosphere and environment of Armstrong City was controlled, measured, balanced. There was a joke on Earth that a person could not cough on the Moon without triggering the city’s viral filtration system. It was a marvel of environmental engineering.

All I could see was how delicate it was. How very easy it would be to destroy.

Don’t let them make you lie, Malachi had said.

Already they were trying to erase him and all he had endured. Already they were doing exactly what he and Zahra had feared. I didn’t even know if Malachi was his real name. If he had family, they would never know about the sacrifice he had made.