When I had begun speaking again, months after the attack, I told everybody who asked that I did not remember anything. I had blocked the trauma from my mind. It was all a blur, a nightmare haze. I did not remember. Not the spread of the virus, not the cascade of deaths, not leaving House of Wisdom, not drifting in space aboard my mother’s ship. I told them I did not remember Dr. Lago and the outrage that gripped the onboard scientists when he was caught hiding data from UC33-X. I told them I did not know how my father had died. They suspected I was lying, but eventually SPEC Intelligence investigators decided that the testimony of a child who could barely speak wasn’t likely to provide the answers they wanted.

It was easy to find the surveillance recording of the moment my mother sent me away. I remembered the location precisely: Level 12, Section D. Experimental Propulsion. The workshop where she built her small ships had once been as familiar to me as my own bedroom, but in the recording it looked as alien to me as another planet. There was already a corpse in the workshop, a woman named Linna, a fuel scientist and one of my mother’s friends. My mother and I came through the door, floating, not walking; House of Wisdom had been in orbit for nearly a month. She pulled me along behind her. My pajamas were damp with my own blood, spilled from my nose, by then sticky and cooling to a ruddy crust, and my mother’s blood from the wounds she had sustained protecting me. I had never forgotten how it itched when it flaked from my hands. How it tasted flowing over my lips.

In my aunt’s kitchen I stood, walked to the sink, and threw up my dinner. I rinsed my mouth. I returned to the recording.

My mother put me into the first of her experimental ships, the one she had named Tiger. There was no audio to accompany the visual record, but I knew I had begged her to come with me. Our hands had smeared blood throughout the craft’s small airlock, the cockpit, over the controls and pilot’s seat, turning my mother’s great engineering achievement into a crime scene. My mother had promised to follow, but she had things to do first. I had been crying when she sealed me inside, alone.

My mother returned to the launch console outside the dock. She gave the launch command. The air vented and the bay doors opened. The docking clamps maneuvered Tiger beyond the hull, beyond the reach of the surveillance cameras, and I was gone.

Because I was not properly logged out of the ship’s roster, the medical system interpreted that separation as a system error, a curious blip that left me neither dead nor alive in the ship’s eyes.