The General huffs and turns away, but I can tell she’s curious. ‘What division were you?’ she asks at last.

‘Thirty-fourth Security, the Pangolins.’

‘Security,’ the General scoffs. ‘Should’ve known.’

‘We had a very important job, ma’am, escorting all those necessities to the front, stopping the FL from hijacking such fine, top-class, Prosper-made goods…’

I listen, eyes half-closed against the sunset. All of us fought different wars. Falco’s seemed full of opportunity and near misses and daring deals. But – I know – these stories of hers are a kind of armour, a coating of words around pain to make it safe, to stop it bleeding into the everyday.

Finally, after hours, I must have slept, for I wake to find the wagon slowing in the emptiness beneath a brilliant, star-strewn sky.

Falco cuts the engine, the G’hals stop their mares. My ears ring in the sudden silence. There’s no wind, no voices; the sands are dead still, the stars throbbing strangely through the terraform. For a moment, in that haze of waking, I imagine I am back on Ty-Hala, that my best friend Adán and I have snuck out of the dormitory onto the flat roof of the Children’s Domicile to lie and look at the stars.

In those days, the central planets were nothing to us but lights in the sky. We would pick them out and recite what we knew, gleaned from bulletins and the occasional advertisement. The faint shimmering blue light was Prosper, Adán would say, where no one touched the ground or knew anyone else’s name. I would reply by pointing to the darkness and telling him of far-distant Brovos at the very edge of the known system, where strange fungi covered the ground and there were twenty animals to every person and the cows were bred as big as elephants. We would thrill each other with talk of seedy, bustling Jericho, where whole cities existed between warehouse walls, even the distant whispers of the border moons, promising land and freedom.

Lying there, we felt we were special, star-born, one of the first generations conceived and raised away from Earth, and all those worlds were waiting for us to make our marks upon them.

Well, I had achieved that.

I look down. The General sleeps, curled in a tight ball. Dust has settled on her face, in the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes that should not be there. Which planet or moon did she come from? Does she even know? Gently, I slip the coat from my shoulders and cover her with it.

‘She looks so small, don’t she?’ Pegeen whispers, as I climb down. ‘Like a real kid.’

I try to smile. A real kid. Were any of us real, anymore?