“This is incredible,” I breathed. I wondered if there were any species here that were extinct in the Sisters now, or if species had evolved here that never existed anywhere in the Sisters or on the far-distant mythical Earth.

Lieutenant Gupta’s mouth tipped, crooked. She patted my arm with one hand.

“Because there’s food here, this place is full of creatures,” she said, the almost-smile gone like it never had been. “It’s the fastest way to the other side of the ship, but we have to be very quiet.”

There had been a pattern to this place once, I realized as I followed Lantern-Eyes through the wavering wheat, around the copse of gnarled fruit trees. Once upon a time, a thousand years ago, this place had been laid out in a grid. The traces of it could be seen in the blurred edges between types of brush and tree, like the echoes of Ameng grammar in modern Sister.

But it was nothing more than echoes. The fields grew choked and thick, rotting in places, stripped bare of edible parts in others, torn apart by indifferent hands, untended by the farmers that had first planted it. The trees were gnarled and thick with age, and the dead trees had rotted where they stood once they became too large for their root systems to be supported by the fragile farmland. The old dead wood was held up in place by the arms of its children.

The place was weirdly silent, no birdsong. Once I heard a hum like bees and Lieutenant Gupta went tense, throwing me to the ground and crouching beside me, shadows from the wheat wavering across her face.

The humming receded, and yet Lantern-Eyes held me down still, her lips moving in some silent count. At some signal I didn’t know, she moved again, weaving her way through the wheat on stick-skinny legs like an antelope.

In spite of the atmosphere of danger, the farmlands had a certain beauty. I paused to turn my face up towards the warmth of the simulated sun and saw that the sky had cracks running through. When I lowered my head and looked over the fields, I saw two children in the woods.

It was impossible, but there they were. Two children crouching in the loam, side-by-side. They looked to be only about seven or eight, children, kneeling beneath the looming specter of a rotting tree and digging through the soil. They had their backs to me, so they had not seen me standing amidst the tangled wheat.

Brigid, I thought, painful and irrational, and then with a memory so sudden and complete it was painful, Brigid and Liza, because both little girls had light hair. Even dirtied and tangled, the two of them had pale hair. The two heads bent together as if in conspiracy, digging through the dirt; I could see it on Kystrom, a memory I’d thought I’d lost, Brigid and Liza in the backyard digging through the mud with a space beside them for me to join—