“That’s … inappropriate.” What I mean is grotesque, obscene, cruel. But I don’t think Tai would take kindly to my bashing Dior, her future “employer” when she drops out of high school after this year. She’s their “fresh Viloki face,” and she won’t let anyone forget it. Even though all it means is that they miss cashing in on Mama.

“It’s an honor!” She plucks the phone from my hand and points at the message. “Guests of honor!”

“Has deciding to drop out of high school killed off your last two brain cells?” I ask, before I can stop myself.

“We have to go,” she whispers back, ignoring me. “We have to. It’s our heritage, and our country, and we belong there.”

I’ve never heard a worse canned speech, but I still can’t tear my eyes away from hers.

“I called Teddy—”

I pull back. She already called our beloved uncle Teddy, our father and Marion’s little brother, tech billionaire and world traveler. Mama was close with him, too, ever since she saved his life in Palm Springs when he was young. He was chatting obliviously on his satellite phone, developing the product that led to his first million, and Mama crept up behind him, hooking the rattlesnake at his feet around a bent branch and flinging it into the desert. That first product, Pocket Girlfriend, is used by a massive number of men and women on Viloxin and abroad—it’s essentially a sophisticated Tamagotchi. A girlfriend you can keep in your pocket, I guess. He dedicated it to Mama.

But now his company has more products and takes up twenty-five hours a day, as he likes to say. He has far less time for two orphaned misfits. “He said he’d get Stökéwood and the Limatra apartment set up for us.”

I try not to feel the sting of being left out of this phone call, and consider her glassy, pleading eyes again. “Why do I feel like you need something from me?”

She licks her lips like a cat, and I realize: She needs me to clear the trip with Aunt Marion. My closest confidant. Tai calls us “two peas in a puke-green knitted pod.” Aunt Marion saw how destructive the media attention in Viloxin was after Mama disappeared. She’s let us spend only a handful of weeks in our birth country in the past decade.

Viloxin is a fourteen-hundred-square-mile lush volcanic rock the size of Long Island, vaguely shaped like a heart. Its people, my mother’s people, fiercely love their own. When Mama, Tai, and I walked around Limatra—the largest (and only) city on the heart’s bay, crafted from black basalt and sole-worn cobblestones—people would stop and kiss her hand and cheeks, stroke our black hair, run out from shops and homes to feed us chestnut-flavored sweets.

They paled and shook in front of our father, praising him in low tones.