“And what happens if the Councils cover it up?” I asked. “They’re going to search the wreck for everything they can. If any part of the parasite survives, and they aren’t warned, it will happen again. There will be another massacre. They’ll find somebody else to blame. And it might happen here in Armstrong, or down on Earth. We might not be able to stop it.”

Her lips were a thin, worried line, but she did not deny it.

“I knew what I was doing,” I said again. “We have to tell them. Release the data to the public. Let everyone know what happened and why.”

“The Councils will never agree to that, but we—”

“So don’t ask them! You’ve done it before! I know you weren’t supposed to give me any of the ship’s data when I was all of fourteen years old, but you did it anyway. You can—”

“Jaswinder,” my aunt said calmly, the corners of her lips rising. “Please don’t interrupt me. I was saying the Councils will never agree to that, but we don’t have to ask their permission.”

“Oh.” I slumped back into my pillow. “No. We don’t.”

“I won’t be able to shield you as I did before,” my aunt said. “You’re not a child anymore. You’ll have to testify before the Councils. You’ll be asked to tell your story over and over again. They won’t allow you silence, not this time.”

“I know,” I said. “I don’t want to be silent this time.”

“If it is what you want . . .”

“It is.”

My aunt hesitated for just a second, then she nodded and stood up. “Very well. I will take care of it. But for now, you are going to rest.” She leaned over to kiss my forehead. “I love you, Jas. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

Only when she was gone did I think that was, perhaps, the first time she had said the words aloud—or perhaps the first time I had been able to hear them.

I wiped the tears from my eyes and watched the news for a while longer with the sound turned down low, but the dizzying blur of images and faces became overwhelming. They kept showing Zahra’s picture: as she had been in her false SPEC identification, and as she had been as a child in a Councils school in Presidio Bay. So happy in the latter, so grim in the former. Ten years, a government’s cowardly lies, the mesmerizing control of a narcissistic criminal, that’s all it had taken to transform a smiling teenage girl into a notorious terrorist. And now she was gone. The damage could not be undone.