My pulse quickened as I looked over the crowd. These were our charges, now separating themselves from the others, carefree and unhurried as they moved toward the shuttle loading door. A scuffle broke out when one young woman accidentally kneed a man in the face. The man spluttered in protest and swiped at her, snagging her foot and spinning her away, which sent her barreling into her friends. The woman yelped and kicked awkwardly, caught the man on his jaw. The force of her kick—more accident than intent—shoved him backward into another young man, who caught him around the middle and easily stopped his momentum.

The second man let go of his friend. He turned. My breath caught. I saw him only in profile, but I recognized him instantly.

I had studied his face in photographs so many times I could see him when I closed my eyes. Black hair, brown skin. Eyes so dark they were nearly black. Angular cheekbones, even when he had been a child, more pronounced now. A recording of him roughhousing and laughing with his mother in her workshop had been played countless times on news reports in the months after the House of Wisdom incident. My own mother, ashen with shock and grief, her arms wrapped around the twins while they slept, had watched with tears in her eyes, murmuring, That poor little boy, I can’t believe it, that poor little boy. The other women at the homestead sat with her sometimes, not understanding the depth of her despair. We were at the time newly extracted from the persecution of the Councils and the shadow of my father’s supposed crimes, but only Adam knew who we were and what we had left behind. Everybody who joined the family took Adam’s name, so my mother ceased to be Mariah Dove and became Mariah Light, for brightness and warmth, for the strength of the desert sun, for the fiery blaze of stars.

The boy on the news reports had never looked sad to me. He had never cried. Not even at his parents’ funerals, where he had sat wrapped in a dark blue blanket in a wheelchair, his aunt rigid and silent beside him, a phalanx of security guards encircling them as empty caskets were fed into a meaningless ceremonial fire. The cameras had remained fixed on his face. He had not shed a single tear.