Benny and I escaped Kystrom together in his uncle’s ship. After we’d broken through the atmosphere and into the smoother ride of outer space, after it had become clear that we’d escaped what no one else had survived, I’d said, “Do you know what the last thing I said to her was?”

Benny hadn’t even turned. “You and your sister were always fighting, and everyone knew it. I don’t care what dumb thing you said to her.”

“That’s not true,” I’d said. It had felt unreal, sitting in Benny’s uncle’s spaceship in the middle of outer space, and behind me everything I’d had was ash. “We were best friends.”

“My family’s dead too, Sean.” Benny was getting angry, worked up in a way that was familiar to me now, but had been alien to me then. “You’re not the only one who’s alone. Where the hell am I going to go now? My whole family was on Kystrom! Where the hell am I supposed to go?” he shouted suddenly, and the volume of his shout filled the tiny spaceship, ringing like the inside of a bell.

“You’re not alone!” I shouted, matching volume for volume, trying to drown out that terrible, terrible shout. “I’m here.”

“So fucking what? You’re not my brother. And being on the same ship doesn’t make us friends.”

I had a stroke of brilliance then, or a stroke of self-preservation at least. Hard to tell for me where the two diverge. Just like the imp of the perverse is strongest at the edge of a cliff, my brain is sharpest when I’m on the verge of an end.

I’d lost my family. There was no replacing that kind of love, or that kind of trust. But two people can trust each other even if they don’t like each other. My years with Benny have proved that, over and over.

“Let’s make a deal,” I’d said to Benny, back then, years ago on his dead uncle’s ship, fleeing a massacre. “Let’s promise, no matter what, to always have each other’s backs. To always protect each other and help each other and always put the other first.”

He’d wiped the ash off his skin, exposing the swollen redness around his eyes. He’d been just as alone as me. He’d wanted some companionship and some security as badly as I had.

So he’d agreed. And so we’d kept our deal, ever since.

Now, eight years after we’d made our promise, Benny faced me down in Quint’s office and told me that we were going to die.

I spoke without thinking, forgetting that Quint was right there, listening to our every word. “We can hack the implant,” I said. “So it won’t detonate.”

“The implant will detonate if any attempt is made to remove it without the unlock key,” Quint said. “The unlock key is twenty-nine digits, and only my boss knows it.”

Benny gazed at me, contained and furious, over his crossed arms. Benny and I could have parted ways at any point during these past eight years. We’d had enough opportunities. We could’ve even gone back to Kystrom: only Itaka was destroyed; the rest of the planet was left intact once it submitted to Minister rule. But how could we live under the rule of the monsters who had killed our friends; how could we return to a place that was not quite the same as the home we remembered? We were homeless, family-less, stateless; wherever we went, we’d only had each other. So we hadn’t left one another, even after all these years.