Drake and Janice had one head, with two faces. Drake’s face was on the left side, and Janice’s on the right, though Janice only had one eye, and they had only one nose between them, centered equidistant between their faces, on the front of the head. It had been Drake’s, to start with. They had no visible ears at all, and no hair. Elena could clearly see where the flesh and bone had been grafted, with Drake’s dark skin meeting Janice’s pale flesh on the scalp. Their body was mostly hidden in a modified environment suit, but in addition to the bifurcated left arm they had a more conventional right arm, half light-skinned and half dark, with six fingers and two thumbs. If they had legs at all, Elena couldn’t see them. She leaned forward slightly, taking them in. “You’d think the Liars would have focused more on radial or bilateral symmetry, given their own forms,” she murmured, then blinked. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

Drake grinned, a twisted sideways sort of smile, but recognizable. They each had a mouth of their own, and Drake had improbably straight and beautiful teeth. “No, that’s good, you’re fine.”

“Usually people just say ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’” Janice said. “Or else they throw up. Critiquing the butcher’s technique? That makes for a nice change. You’re all right.”

“Janice usually hates everyone,” Drake said. “You should be flattered. Want to hear how it happened?”

“Only if you’d like to share.”

“Sure, sorrow shared is sorrow halved. Of course, everything Drake and I have has to be halved anyway.” Janice rolled her one eye. “Drake and I were pilot and navigator on a small exploration ship, working for a mining company.”

“Also a tourism company,” Drake said. “It was weird. Diversification.”

“The job was supposed to be light duty, easy all the time. We’d been military surveyors once upon a time, so we were used to doing exploration with people shooting at us. Poking around the far corners of a colony system, with no expectation of hostilities, seemed like a cushy job. And, mostly, it was. We were on a small ship, crew of five, working out of the Trappist colony.”

Callie drifted up and sat in the other chair. “That’s one of the twenty-nine bridgeheads, near a star out in Aquarius–”

“The Trappist-1 exoplanets,” Elena said. “They were one of the goldilocks ship destinations. One of the more promising ones, too, with at least three potential habitable planets.”

“Two of them turned out to be,” Janice said. “The other one was too geologically unstable. I have to say, those planets… it’s a shit neighborhood. That dwarf star is so dim, it’s like being in twilight all the time. Half the colonists have big old sun lamps mimicking full-spectrum light and the other half are doing body modification to turn themselves into night-dwelling morlock types.”