Xiomara stared at Baqir without saying a word. I knew the shock she was feeling. She didn’t know him well. During their brief acquaintance, she had only ever seen the mask he wore to hide his anger, the one that was so stunningly effective few ever saw beyond it. He wore it when anybody mentioned what a drain North American refugees were on Councils resources, needing so much support, so much education, so much training, so much special care before they could become citizens who could offer meaningful contributions to the global society. He wore it when self-important professors muttered about the danger of letting an unassimilated separatist boy into a Councils school and spoke to him slowly, warily, as though they were afraid he might turn into a snarling animal without warning. When students in our secondary school accused Baqir of starting every fight, when teachers had taken me aside and told me gently that I was doing myself no favors by letting Baqir copy my schoolwork—and never believed me that the reverse was always true, as Baqir was both smarter than me and harder working, and I was the one who would lash out at the least provocation. When the Leung Fellowship administrators interviewed him three times more than they’d interviewed me, and when I asked him what they’d wanted to talk about, he had only given me a crooked smile and told me not to worry, he’d make the cut, because they needed a refugee scholar to make their program look well-rounded. Through it all Baqir perfected that carefully bland mask, the face of somebody who was not angry, was not bothered, was not hurt, was not any of the things I knew him to be when he was unguarded.

Xiomara could not imagine any life on Earth so terrible that even an abandoned slaughterhouse in space was better. She had never had to imagine it—nor had I, for all the horrors in my past. In moments when Baqir’s mask dropped away and the anger shone through as bright and terrible as any supernova, I kept quiet. I let him rage. There was nothing I could say. I could not imagine the traumas of his childhood any more than he could imagine mine— or had been able to, before we came to House of Wisdom. He no doubt had a much better idea of what filled my nightmares now.

But of the three of us, only Baqir knew what was driving our captors, because his life had once been no different from theirs.

“And just so we’re clear,” Baqir said, the calm returning with eerie alacrity, “I agree that that man is probably a fucking monster. And the people who brought us here are murderers. But I don’t think they’re lying about wanting a safe home, far from Earth. And nobody outside the Councils has any other way of getting into space.”