“Why let the goldilocks ships go on sailing through space at all?” she asked. “Surely that’s dangerous.”

“The records were lost,” Shall said. “Things on Earth got much worse before they got better, and whole swaths of data were destroyed.”

“Yes,” Lantern said. “We had no real data. We looked along likely paths, to likely systems, and found nothing, or found ships that had failed long ago. But there were so many, sent in so many directions. We simply hoped for the best. Our hopes were not realized.”

“You didn’t have to kill anyone,” Callie said. “What you did, it’s monstrous. You could have just talked to us, told us there was a big existential threat, let us know that certain systems were off limits.”

The Liar made a strange wheezing sound that Elena decided must be laughter. “Oh yes. That always works. Humans never go places they’re forbidden to go. And as I said: the closest thing to a culture my people have now is making up stories. Humans wouldn’t have believed us anyway.”

Callie was silent for a long moment. “Fair,” she said. “But I still think killing fifty thousand people was indefensible.”