Over a year, she’d said. She’d been alone on this ship for over a year. I’d only been separated from Benny for, what, two days? The image of the last time I’d seen him, facing me across the hall, expression closed and grim, seared its way across my mind.

What was it One had said? You’re alone in this. Well, I wasn’t alone right now; I had Lantern-Eyes across from me.

“How many people were on your team, Tamara?” I asked.

Her fork paused, stirring through the water. “Twelve,” Tamara said at last.

I had lost far more people than twelve when Kystrom had fallen. I’d lost mother and father and sister, friends, neighbors, classmates, people I’d seen on television or heard on the radio or read about on a screen. And when those people were gone I lost the things that existed between them, knowledge or secrets shared, memories, gratitudes, resentments. I had lost a whole world, except for Benny.

But twelve people, on a ship as isolated and terrible as this, were a world of their own just as completely as Kystrom had been. I said, “What were their names?”

“I don’t remember.”

It was my turn to falter, dropping my fork back into my half-full bowl. “What do you mean you don’t remember?”

“I mean I forgot.”

“How can you forget something like that?”

“It’s been twenty months,” Lantern-Eyes said, in a voice as unbreakable as the rest of her, and she tilted her bowl back to drink the water out of it and leave it spotlessly clean.

A few hours after Benny and I left Kystrom behind, I sat down in the back of his stolen ship and brought out the knife he’d used to fight his way through. He was up front, flying the ship. A few years older than me, he’d already gotten his flight license. At the time that had mattered to me.

I’d taken the knife and washed it, then pulled out the lighter I’d borrowed from my father that morning without permission, and held the fire to the blade until it was hot and gleaming. Then I sat down and tried my best to remember the liturgy of grief. Like most over-familiar things, it existed in the subconscious; deeply ingrained, but difficult to consciously recall. The less I thought, the more clearly it came. Alone in the back of the ship, I’d murmured all the words I could remember, and then made my offering to the God Who Had Shed His Blood For Us.

The first cut, near the tip of my pinky finger, had been for Brigid. It hadn’t hurt, even though it had bled, so I’d cut it again a little deeper, afraid it wouldn’t scar. I’d somehow felt like the God of Blood wouldn’t accept mine if I didn’t do it properly. The second cut was for my father, the third for my mother. After that I froze, because there were many more people I had lost, too many to pick out one immediately from the crowd.