CHAPTER ONE

Captain Ignatius Faber’s eyes were full of halos, and each scratch in the Philoctetes’ viewscreens caught the light, bleeding across his retina like stars. His vision had weakened since the artificial gravity failed two years before, though he had followed Company protocol for extended micro-G exposure, stubbornly chewing through hundreds of tablets in their foil packages. The tablets were twenty years out of date by the time he found them, but he was a Company Man, and the guidelines were clear.

Far below him, Gliz passed from the shadow of GLZ7E, its parent gas giant, and was again bathed in the glorious day of GLZ7, the system’s golden star. Ignatius rarely missed the daily miracle, as dawn illuminated steppe and mine. A hundred kilometers across, the open pit followed a rich, shallow seam of rare earth metals, surrounded by tailings that sank into marshlands. The planet and the mine were indifferently called “Gliz” because the alpha-numeric designation was awkward for daily use, and the place had not yet been given a real name. The singular human settlement below him was just called Town, his only fellow creatures within ten parsecs.

They were mostly old men and women, much older than Company miners ought to be, bodies worn by six five-year contracts served consecutively. Gliz’s high gravity destroying their joints, while thirty years of Company scrip collected in Earthbound accounts. Some of them exchanged it—at a significant loss—for civil cash, and bought real estate at home, beaches and hillsides they’d never visit, though they saw them in long-awaited photographs taken by husbands and wives they were no longer really married to, and grown children who could not remember their touch.

Ignatius alone could not identify the tiny smudge of human endeavor, but on clear nights, when he used the Philoctetes’ surviving sensors and squinted at the viewscreen, he could locate individual dwellings. Though he glanced over the whole human population, a particular roof always drew his eye, on the edge of Town, facing away from the mine and surrounded by five fields, walled in by salvage from the dump, where hundreds of miners and factors had left their detritus to rot in the soil. That was the house where Charis and Sim and Aurelius lived. Charis and her five fields were Gliz’s best hope to eat something other than out-of-date protein biscuits. He had never set foot in the gardens, but he had watched their growth from orbit, had nightly listened to her ambitions and disappointments as she single-handedly led Gliz’s agricultural revolution.

Only Charis would be there this morning. Aurelius was out in the newest field, preparing it for apple saplings, and Sim had left Town a few days before, walking steadily and undetectably through that huge emptiness, toward the foothills she had been mapping for years. Charis would get anxious soon, he guessed, and he would do his best to find the spark of Sim’s campfire and report back that she was safe.

“She’s fine,” Ignatius told Charis the last time Sim left for the hills. “She’s your daughter, tough as boots. Just like the other kids.”

“But they aren’t. Not like they think they are. She doesn’t even have a raincoat. She’s got that poncho she made out of strapping—” Charis stopped for a long moment, then said, “It’s awful. I just wish she had a sleeping bag.”

“I’ll look for her,” he said. “And she’ll be fine. Promise. She always is.”

He didn’t tell her that the Philoctetes’ sensors were failing, as his vision was. She was a doctor, though, so she knew about the effects of microgravity on the human eye, even if they didn’t talk about it.

---

When Ignatius was twenty-one, his family spent most of their collective savings to acquire his commission as a junior officer of the Company of Adventurers. He had been lucky, appointed to a new ship, the Philoctetes, designed for exploration beyond the edge of the Company’s territory. He’d been twenty-two when the Philoctetes departed Earth, and twenty-three when they arrived at Gliz. They had reprovisioned the mine, delivered twenty miners and their equipment.

They were preparing to take on those servants at the end of their contract, then travel beyond the edge of cultivation, when they received a communiqué: the Company of Adventurers had allied with Earth in a war against the Martian Company, its colonies, and subsidiaries. Hold position. The Philoctetes was too precious to risk passage through what was now unfriendly territory.

For the next twenty-eight years, the fleets chased each other through the dark: flecks and flames and the sudden, violent deaths of off-world campaigns. Ceasefires had failed, and the War had seemed permanent until last year’s armistice. After that, an interminable peace conference between the companies, mediated by civil diplomats. He had watched it from the far edge of civilized space, followed the talk and champagne, glorious blue of Company dress uniforms against the red Martian tunics and the dull khaki of Earth; the parties, the summer excursions to mountains and beaches; the speeches and interminable debates.

Since then, the Company’s communiqués had been brief: remain in position, negotiations are underway. But today, after dawn broke over Gliz, Ignatius received a message that changed his strange, suspended life: Negotiations concluded. He was past fifty now, and perhaps his first voyage was nearing its end.

---

This is the new world, as far as Ignatius can tell.

Two months ago, on a day that hadn’t seemed remarkable, Gliz had ceased being an Adventurer’s outpost and become this new thing: a Dominion of the Company of the New Stars, held by a board shared between Martian and Adventurer members, and supervised by civil representatives of Earth and various colonies. According to the communiqué, this corporate marriage would ensure lasting peace, cosigned by Earth and the other solar colonies.

For years, distant strangers had drawn maps that tinted Gliz first blue then red while it remained utterly itself, and nothing disturbed the sky, except the Philoctetes. Many lightyears away, people had sat around huge, glossy tables negotiating the peace, while millions stood down, tumbling in orbit around lonely moons and teeming stations, waiting for news. For Mars, this station. For Earth, this system. For the Company of the New Stars? All the rest.

Now the Colossus, under the command of young Captain Alexander Salmerón, would arrive in six weeks. He would deliver a new, expanded engineering team with their habitats and collect the Company’s surviving faithful for their long-promised voyage home. And—more importantly, in the chaos of the last decades—he would try those deserters who had abandoned their duties on the Philoctetes. The list of faithful included Ignatius, the chief Factor of the mine, Persephone, thirty-nine aging miners who remained of the original fifty, and the half-dozen Martians who were now servants of the New Stars. The list did not include deserters, nor those subcontractors who had been abandoned by their companies. Captain Salmerón proposed a brief local court martial for the Philoctetes deserters who lived on Gliz, then removal for hard labor at the Company’s pleasure. There was no mention of the stateless (and contractless) children who had been born on Gliz since the war began after Company-mandated birth control began to fail.

Good Lord, Salmerón couldn’t be more than twenty-eight, which meant he hadn’t yet been born when the Philoctetes was outfitted. His whole life had unfolded while Ignatius orbited Gliz.

Persephone would finally depart, leaving behind her two-room home of dirty concrete. She’d spent decades counting the outgoing shipments that hadn’t departed in ships that hadn’t arrived, Factor of a small, dusty computer and a view of the pit. Now Persephone would need to find her blue dress coat for the handover ceremony and comb her hair and make the long voyage home to a world that had changed absolutely, and she, a ghost.

---

The Colossus would arrive in six weeks. In six weeks, he would have fresh food and substrate for the derelict printers. In six weeks, he could arrange a sleeping bag for Sim and a shovel for Aurelius; he could get painkillers and antibiotics for the old people on the surface; vitamins for the children. Tenders to carry it all down. No. Dream larger than that. A new razor. Chocolate. Beer. Oh god, he could exchange Company scrip for civil cash and buy a condo in Paris, and he could swim in the ocean, he could, he could—

—Something crunched in his chest, and his heartbeat pulsed, his eyes and ears, blinding him further. He’d throw up. He’d laugh. Around him, the Philoctetes droned, that irritating metallic buzz he’d learned to ignore. Now he could mend the ducts. No. He would slip through the airlock and leave the failing ship behind forever. The New Stars would fund painful therapies to correct the damage done by isolation and microgravity. He would walk in a crowd of strangers, and he’d never be alone again.

He’d visit the apple trees with Charis. Was he crying? What was the exchange rate for Company scrip? It might have risen with the merger. He’d write to his lawyer. His sister would have already seen the news weeks ago, and he’d hear from her soon, maybe a day behind the communiqué. Old friends would send their congratulations because he had held the line—he had held—as his contract required in the long list of duties and rights. But still, these were tears blinding him, with no gravity to draw them down his cheeks, so the bridge of the Philoctetes seemed underwater, becoming an ancient, earthly shipwreck. When he wiped away his un-falling tears, they clung to his cheeks and his hands, and for a long time, nothing would make them stop.

---

Settle his uniform. Dry his face. His first duty was to call Persephone. She answered, but the way she stared down and to the left meant she was probably playing solitaire. Behind her hung a faded Company flag.

“Persephone?” he said. “Persephone? Can you—”

She looked up sharply, “—What?”

“Did you get the Encyclical?” That was what they called big directives.

“What? No. I’m slammed right now, Ignatius.”

“You should have it by now. You’re the senior ranking Company servant.”

“No. They’ve changed the guidelines—ships over shacks. At least—was there a memorandum? Senior ranking Company officer in the Dominion is—Commodore someone or other of the Bellerophon, last I checked. But locally that’s you.”

“But listen, Persephone. Negotiations are concluded.”

“Concluded,” she said. “Concluded.”

Persephone often told him that she could have pursued a civil career on Earth, but the money was far better out here, and she’d made the familiar gamble. Often, she talked about the day she decided, telling him that by now she could have had some emeritus desk job with easy afternoons spent enjoying the great-grandchildren. They’d all be grown now. You learned not to ask about them.

“Perhaps we should tell Peele,” Ignatius prompted, but Persephone remained silent. Peele represented Town’s Martians: five old men and seven women surviving of the twenty-three who had arrived on the DSX23-B six months after the declaration, the ship too damaged to limp home. “Persephone, listen. We should talk to Peele.”

“Oh, Peele,” Persephone said. “What’ll he do? Capture my office in a last stand for the Martians? He’ll find out when they tell him. Not our circus.”

Technically, Persephone and Ignatius had been at war with Peele for decades, though the negotiations of the last year had suspended direct combat. By necessity, the Martians had integrated with the other stragglers—civil, Adventurer—that formed Town. Besides, Martian scrip stopped arriving in their accounts shortly after they reached Gliz, with a message indicating that, since they were now prisoners of war, they could no longer be paid by the Martian Company (review 375.45.4 of your contract). Peele still flew a tiny flag from the roof of his hut, but when his swollen, old-man’s belly outgrew his uniform, he attached its tattered ribbons to another shirt, leaving his red coat to make clothes for Gliz’s children.

“What about the kids?” Ignatius asked.

“I registered the ones born under contract. If they filed the forms.”

“But the deserters’ kids. How many are there now?”

Persephone shrugged, then said, “I lost count. Talk to Charis. She’s probably already got a plan.”

“Deserters aren’t—”

“—when they tell me what to do, I’ll do it.”

“You could join us—”

“—I really don’t have time, Ignatius.” Her eyes skated away from the camera, and then she was gone.

He forwarded the Encyclical to Charis, then called. She answered from the orchard, her voice breezy, “We’re a full seven degrees up across the same day a decade ago, but we really need a word for these dual weather cycles. Ambivernus? Intervernus? Some of the blossoms are definitely pollinated, too. But don’t tell Aurelius I’m reviewing his work.”

Then she must have seen the file. He expected tears. Hers would fall as tears should, though faster than they would on Earth. As soon as she saw the title, she began to laugh.

He was surprised at his own disapproval. “Charis! It isn’t funny!”

“I’m just—Ignatius—it’s so fucking stupid. Thirty years for a merger?”

“But the kids,” he said.

One more chuckle and then silence, until she said, “I still don’t know what to do.”

“Six weeks until Salmerón arrives. And there’s precedent. Isn’t there? Gliz can’t be the only place where this has happened. Persephone should be able to find out what’s happened elsewhere?”

“Will she, though. We’ll have to figure something out.”

“They won’t let you stay, even if they don’t arrest you for desertion. It’s all New Stars, now. The mine. Your house. The shipping containers. The launchpad.” Her eyes flicked down the text, and he knew she was already planning.

“I do actually know that, Ignatius,” she said without glancing up from the text. He wasn’t sure she did, though, that there were dozens of extra-contractual and unsigned children on Gliz, belonging to no Company, and recognized by no civil government. No place on Earth that would allow them, no Company contracted to take care of them. Even those with parents were—legally—orphans.

“They’ll be moving onto the graphite deposits now, I suppose.”

Probably they were, but that didn’t matter just now. “He’s coming here for you, Charis, and everyone else who deserted the Philoctetes.”

Her face was so still he thought the connection between them had failed, but then she nodded.

---

A hundred years before the War, the first engineering team had arrived on the empty steppe and printed an ugly cluster of buildings that they now called Town: the Factor’s house; several connected bunkhouses with a kitchen and infirmary, extensive warehouses, and landing pads. Nearer the mine, there was a smelter and the machine shops, abandoned because the mine’s fuel had been spent decades before. One gravel track ran from the landing site to the dump; another ran from the mine to the village. Around them, desire paths cut corners, leaped ditches, and collected at a kind of square in the middle of things, where a century of footsteps had exposed purplish gravel. Beyond the original, Company-built houses stood the shacks assembled from salvage to accommodate Gliz’s growing population, both the original exiles trapped at the edge of known space and the children born in the decades of their exile.

The first time Ignatius descended, he was a very young man, and the War had not yet reached them. On the surface, GLZG’s high gravity dragged painfully at every bone in his body. He and a little crowd of the Philoctetes crew—all eager for fresh air and an open sky—followed Captain Bastian’s slow walk from the landing pad to the Factor’s house. There was nothing but the steppe, the mine, the ugly Company prefabs grown uglier after a century of neglect.

“Two years in a tin box and you forget what it’s like,” Simram said, breathing heavily, slower than the others.

“You love the Philoctetes!” Charis said, falling back to join him, Ignatius drifting alongside.

“I do, but one can love horses and not want to spend one’s life in a stable. That light, my dear. A sky as high as one can dream! I had heard it was an ugly, empty place.”

“It reminds me of the country north of Yellowknife,” Charis said. “The way it is in spring.”

“Where’s Yellowknife?” Ignatius asked and tripped on the rough, purple stone. Despite what Simram said, he’d decided it was an ugly, empty place.

Charis didn’t seem to hear him. She asked Simram, “Why haven’t they given it a name?”

Simram had spent his life under contract as an engineer, and he answered from a wealth of experience on many tiny outports. “No one stays longer than five years. Perhaps seven, if there are delays. In a century, the seam will be stripped, and all this will be abandoned. I find it hard to believe that a single child will grow up here. You need children born and people buried to make a place home. And the dead are all shipped back to Earth. It’s in their contracts. Why name a place that’s no one’s home?”

Charis shook her head. “It still deserves a name.”

GLZ7E drifted above them, much larger than the distant, yellow sun. Outside the Factor’s residence, Ignatius pulled out his monocular and examined the storm patterns of the upper atmosphere. He wondered what kind of gods you’d find under that sky. But perhaps five years wasn’t enough to find a god.

Persephone met them at the door. “You’re late,” she said.

“We are, yes,” Captain Bastian said, smiling.

“They get angry when they’ve been kept waiting this long. It’s another job to keep them calm, and I haven’t had an assistant for years now. We’re going to run out of liquor—”

“—such a challenge,” Captain Bastian agreed. “So many delays, but we’ll be on our way shortly.”

“They’re all brutes, and Gliz makes them worse. I was supposed to be away from here three months ago. I’ll miss my granddaughter’s twenty-first.”

And that was the last day of peace they’d known in nearly thirty years. They found out when they returned to the Philoctetes that evening, though it had already been done and dusted for weeks by the time news reached them: Titan’s brushfire war over a dubiously legal ocean station escalated, dragging in both companies, their subsidiaries, and the two civil governments of Earth and Mars, as well as half a dozen other colonies.

That evening, he and Charis stared dully at the screen in the junior officer’s mess, watching the news roll out. Ignatius told himself that this was no different than any of the other delays he’d experienced since his departure, and wars could end as quickly as they began. The six-day war, he remembered. The nine-hour war. But such reminders could not dispel anyone’s gloom because who knew what had already happened at home, what disasters had befallen people they loved. Like everyone in the Company, he had friends and family serving far away, on worlds he knew only by number in the Philoctetes’ star charts. Every Company ship could have fallen to the other party, and he wouldn’t know for weeks. It could have happened when he’d stared into the Philoctetes’ screens, searching the stars for their destination. The last, tenuous link with Earth flickered, then failed, the last neutral ship blinking into the dark between stars.

---

There are questions that preoccupy everyone left behind on Gliz, though they do not bear thinking about for too long, lest you become Persephone and disappear into your anger and silence. What if the delays following that first ceasefire had been shorter? What if the War had ended at Jove? What if it had just been one year or two? Just a decade? Ignatius was haunted, yes, but wary of indulging those thoughts, having lost years to imagining the other lives he might have lived.

He regretted signing on with the Company for a very junior commission on the Philoctetes, which had cost his family so much. He regretted his exile. But there’s one thing he regrets more than the others: Charis.

Charis had departed Earth as the Philoctetes’ junior medical officer, second to Doctor Nahanee. Then, Doctor Nahanee won the lottery for a seat on the emergency shuttle that escaped in the first month of their tenure over Gliz. They had become lovers shortly after that, after a year of circling one another in the junior officers’ mess. Ignatius remembered an afternoon in her tiny cabin, lying together as she flicked through images of Gliz on her tablet. The steppe. The slag heaps.

“Why bother? We’ll be out soon enough.”

Charis continued her contemplation: the strip mine; the smelter; a huge purple horizon over which rose the silvery gas giant.

“Do you think so?”

He snorted at her naiveté. “It’s far too expensive to carry on for much longer. It’ll take months for trade routes to spin up again as it is. The mines on C90q have been delayed again. The markets will collapse, and they’ll negotiate. They always do.” Charis said nothing, so he continued. “There hasn’t been open combat since Titan. It’s winding down already.”

“Maybe. But if it isn’t, I wonder if I wouldn’t rather wait on the surface.”

Ignatius sat up sharply. “You can’t possibly be serious. You’ll be stuck down there for months after we ship, waiting for a court-martial.”

“Maybe.”

“Hard labor somewhere irradiated.”

Charis said nothing.

“Well, I’m not going with you. I don’t believe in marriage. I told you that.”

“You’ve said that a few times. It’s good I’m not interested in marrying you, or we might have a problem.”

“You just want to play homesteading—don’t be stupid.”

“There are the crews of the Chicago and the Thames. Twice as many people as there were three months ago. They need a doctor.”

“They have a doctor.”

“They have a medic. They need a doctor.”

“The lanes are going to open up again, and we’ll be back on Earth skiing and drinking champagne.”

That was Ignatius’ little fantasy, the dreamiest, most expensive thing he could imagine: champagne and skiing. Charis had told him about her family’s place in the Rocky Mountains, traveling by helicopter through the cold to this beacon of warmth above the tree line, where you could drop a full kilometer on a snowboard, then call a drone to haul you back up to the top. Neither of them particularly liked champagne, and Ignatius had never been skiing, but it meant the kind of firesides he had seen in films. It meant the scent of winter and breakneck acceleration downhill and Charis naked in the sunshine of a window high in the mountains.

“Maybe,” she said again and flicked through other images: tailing ponds; slag heaps; a tiny human observing vast and hungry machinery.

“Well, you’d do that. You’re rich. You can throw away your career for a bunch of contractors.” The words kept coming out of his mouth, all the irritation and frustration of the previous months, trapped shipboard, waiting, imagining sunshine and cold air. “It’s their job. It’s in their contracts. But I suppose your family will clean up whatever mess you make. Not like some of us.”

Later, he would accept that he had been afraid, but that day—the last with her—he only knew this blistering resentment of Charis, who was beautiful and rich and brave. Who could casually desert a commission that had cost so much that Ignatius feared he would never repay the debt to his family.

---

Charis was the first of the Philoctetes crew to desert. He had been on communications duty the day Captain Bastian sent the letter of desertion and regretted it in the long years since. After Charis, he regretted Ahmad and Llewellyn and Dixie, who left for the surface next. Had he not sent those letters, their families could have taken their pensions when they died, their scrip turned over to their next of kin. Two years after the declaration, the blockade at XH7b had locked the War into an unwinnable stalemate. Captain Bastian died. The last of his old crewmates left for the surface, until only he and Simram remained on the Philoctetes. He wrote and signed and sent each letter of desertion because he was a Company Man. He held the line.

When the War finally ended, he had spent more of his life above Gliz than anywhere else and had risen from sublieutenant to captain. In these years of exile, he had heard of his sister’s marriage and the arrival of her four children, their various victories and calamities, their weddings, and the birth of grandchildren. His youngest nephew was born and enlisted, never knowing Ignatius, though he had purchased the boy’s commission with Company scrip and celebrated his appointment as a junior officer on the Hydra. Ignatius wept for the boy he’d never known when news came that Martian fire had breached the Hydra’s hull, and what was left of Steven and his shipmates still orbited that distant world forever.

---

Even after all the others left, Ignatius and Simram stayed with the Philoctetes. In the twenty-five years they spent together, Simram taught Ignatius what he could about the ship and its management. “You aren’t a talented engineer,” he said, “but you’ll do in a pinch. And what is this if not a pinch? The pinchiest of pinches.”

Ignatius took the compliment.

“I suppose it’ll just be you, one day,” Simram said when he fell ill the last time. “Have you thought of what you’ll do?”

“The work will be much the same,” he said.

Simram, always wiser than Ignatius, hadn’t corrected him.

Simram died before the armistice. He’d been an old man when they left Earth and remained with the Philoctetes while the enlisted crew and even the Company secretary settled on the planet below, accepting their exile. During a brief ceasefire in the tenth year of the War, the Halicarnassus had passed the system. Ignatius and Charis had arranged a lottery for twelve spots, and Ignatius had offered Simram a guaranteed place, but he declined. The Philoctetes needed him more than ever, he said. And, of course, the Halicarnassus never reached Earth. The Martian armada destroyed it two months after it departed Gliz.

“I would have liked to have been buried in Charis’ orchard,” Simram said near the end. “Under those little trees she’s always fussing over. It would be good to know I’m contributing to the children’s future. And I’d be near my namesake and give her guidance from beyond the grave. I would enjoy haunting her.”

“We could send you down in the lifeboat,” Ignatius said and made a move toward the hatch. “Right now.”

“Oh dear no. You must save those for a really dire moment. It may yet come. And this is a far more appropriate destiny for an engineer.”

CHAPTER TWO

On the Philoctetes, Captain Ignatius Faber wrestled alone with the Company’s encyclical. Far, far below him, on the surface of Gliz, Sim woke in her foothills camp, lying on the tarp her mother, Charis, had scavenged for her in the dump. In four days from Town, Sim had covered more than 120 kilometers with the slow, heavy gait of a body not evolved for Gliz’s high gravity.

She’d been walking this route for more than a decade, since she was fifteen. Each trek took her a little farther, until she reached the foothills and began mapping Gliz in earnest, using glitchy surveyor’s scanners she found in the storage sheds. Sometimes when she walked, she imagined the future, when other people might join her, her nearly invisible trail worn to a path, then a road from Town to the mountains, gardens around it expanding into farms, clustering near other villages, in the wake of the cairns she built and the water holes she bored. She was proud of her solo expeditions, inspired by the stories Charis had told her about space exploration: Amani on Mars five hundred years ago, and the early civil explorers, shot out through the asteroids and the inner planets in fragile, antique crafts. She might travel on foot, but she was part of the same clan: Amani and Li and l’Esperance were her celestial models, illuminating her path from Town to the mountains, and beyond them to something else she could not yet name, for which she searched. Or perhaps it was someone else. Like the creatures that accompanied her sometimes, who crept up to her camp at night and left their footprints in the creek bed.

---

Back in Town, Sim’s various jobs were boring, which was why she spent so much time exploring the foothills. She cleaned her mother’s clinic. She worked for her younger brother, Aurelius, in the gardens and orchard. She taught the younger children what she knew of Gliz: geography, biology, and history, showing them the early surveys, her own maps, and drawings of plants and animals. There were no flowers on Gliz save the ones they brought from Earth, but there were the tiny, jeweled carapaces of bugs, if you crouched and waited quietly for them to creep across the stones. The kids liked hearing about bugs.

Last week, she had been explaining the seasons, whose cycles were far longer than a human year, and maybe even a human life, when Auntie Clara’s boy asked, “Is it like this back on Earth?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never been to Earth.”

“But you’re a grown-up!” Peele’s granddaughter said, scandalized.

“Mom’s from São Paulo,” Aunty Clara’s boy explained. “Have you been to São Paulo? She says there are mountains and a city. And she says you can get chocolate all the time. And chocolate is the best thing ever.”

“I’ve never had chocolate.”

Peele’s granddaughter piped up again, “Mom says the War will be over really soon, and we’ll go back to Earth, and we’ll go to a real school, and when we go to Earth, she says we’ll go swimming!” Others added: the ponies on Earth run free; there is candy that looks like sunrises and sunsets and tastes a hundred times better than the sweetened protein biscuits they kept for special occasions or the apples Charis had coaxed out of the orchard.

“But you can swim on Gliz,” Sim said. “There’s a whole ocean to swim in, past the mountains.”

“Dad says the apples are bigger than his fist!” Around them, oohs and ahhs of shock. Apples so large were impossible, like the iced cupcakes or popcorn you saw in movies.

“You know, there’s a lake in the mountains near here that’s deeper than anything on Earth. Deeper than Baikal. And I’m going to find it. And maybe someday you’ll help me.” Said like a lure, a treat.

But why, Peele’s granddaughter seemed to say with her squished and doubtful expression, would she hunt for mountain lakes when she’d be home on Earth soon, where there were wonders and glories unimaginable? Sim recognized the look and knew she’d never get the class back, so she gave up and dismissed them. When she left a few minutes later, the kids were playing Earth, which meant pretending to ride a pony and naming all the beautiful and delicious things they would have when they got “home.”

As the oldest child of Gliz, Sim had seen the game many times and played it often. Next year on Earth, an eight year old might say, I’ll swim in my grandma’s pool. Next year on Earth, we’ll go to a mall so big we can’t see the end of it. Whatever a mall was.

But you couldn’t play forever. When you got old enough, you began to grasp just how far away Earth was, and how long the War had been going on. You were twelve, and you’d fall silent about the ponies and jungle gyms, looking up at the pale blue-green sky, beginning to see that no matter what grown-ups said about the War ending, you were already home, maybe forever. By the time you were thirteen, you had to figure out what you’d do with yourself, or you’d end up like Persephone, looking up at the stars, waiting for one of those lights to descend and take you home. Not this one, maybe, but the one after that. Next year, on Earth, she said, and wait.

Charis wasn’t like that, of course, but as a child, Sim hadn’t appreciated her mother’s realism. “Mom says at home I would have a pony,” some little girl would shout, then, “Dad says I’m a princess on Earth.”

That day, Sim left the game, frustrated, and went looking for her mother in the clinic, where she was taking inventory, her face cramped and tight-jawed as she surveyed the empty shelves.

“On Earth am I a princess?” Sim asked.

“No,” Charis said. “Put this box on the second shelf and hand me the next one.”

“Oh,” Sim said. “Okay.” And held the box. “Would I have a pony on Earth?”

“No. And if you’re going to ask questions, you have to help.”

She helped. That evening, they sat outside together after Aurelius had gone to bed. Charis pointed to a faded light on the low horizon and said, “That’s where I came from. I think. In the dark on the other side of that light.”

“Do you miss it?” Sim asked, thinking of the kids playing Earth: its teeming cities, its vast sugar plantations, and libraries. The Eiffel Tower. An immodest variety of food and entertainment.

“Yes. But if I hadn’t come all that way, I wouldn’t have you or Aurelius.”

“Is Aurelius really worth not having swimming pools and hot cocoa? Is he worth a whole planet?”

“He’s worth two, you little monster!”

Then they’d cuddled together and made-up names for the constellations. “The house. The little kid,” Sim said. “The waterfall. The mountain,” Charis answered.

---

By the time she was fifteen, Sim understood those conversations better and had replaced games of Earth with more important enterprises, like walking from Town to the foothills, recording what she found there in drawings and glitchy maps. She was no princess: She was the first daughter of Gliz, shorter than she would have been on Earth, with higher blood pressure than Charis liked. She was stooped and heavily muscled, unsuited to shopping malls and swimming pools. Suited best to walk slowly into the wild, following Amani and Li and l’Esperance.

---

In addition to mapping the tiny area around Town and observing the planet’s plants and animals, Sim kept the human history of Gliz. She wrote some of it down and sent copies to Philoctetes, but the tablets in Town are failing, and there’s no paper for hard copies, so she kept it safe in her memory, too.

This is how Gliz came to be.

In the first eighteen months of the War, the Chicago, the Thames, the Tilikum, and the DSX23-B collected around Gliz. The Chicago and the Thames were elderly private freighters contracted to the Earth’s navy, abandoned by its contracting Company on the day of the declaration. No orders. No pay. No rescue. The DSX was a small Martian Company exploratory vessel, assigned to illegally survey Adventurer territory, and now limping home. It was, technically, a fair target, but a certain gentlemanliness in the Philoctetes’ character forbade them from opening fire on an obviously damaged ship they outgunned. Sim’s and Aurelius’ father had been DSX. So was Peele. The Tilikum had arrived last, a civil exploration vessel, studying star formation.

The DSX donated its tenders to ferry the crews of all three ships to the surface, where they’d wait out the War. Those two tenders still lay—derelict but useful—outside Town, having been stripped for parts. Sim and all the other children had learned to read in the storage bay of one of those tenders.

When Sim was old enough to understand the nature of her existence on Gliz, she began to ask questions of the other grown-ups: Persephone, Peele, Gord, who worked in the clinic. She pieced together the terrifying and chaotic truth of an interstellar war.

Once Charis found her crying at bedtime and coaxed it out of her. “The War, Mommy. Is Peele going to kill us?”

“Who’s been talking about the War? Did Peele say something?” Sim shrugged. It had been Peele, but she wasn’t going to tattle. “Honey, if the Company falls, it won’t matter much out here.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the only thing anyone wants is the mine. Someone very far away will make a decision about it, and we won’t know until they tell us. If the Martians win, Peele might take over Persephone’s house. But nothing else would change.”

“He doesn’t have any ammunition left. He used to practice at the dump, on the old packing cases.”

A crack in Charis’ motherly calm. She said only, “Peele is not a serious man. But.” And here, she relaxed again. “It would only mean a different-colored flag, and we’d all go about our business. Besides, you and Aurelius are half Martian and half Company, so you should be fine no matter who wins.”

There were richer worlds closer to Earth, Charis told her, where the War was really happening. Worlds with waterfalls that dropped a thousand meters into pale green oceans. Worlds with ten moons and a sky full of doves. Companies had more worlds than they had servants.

Sim considered doves. She only knew the white linnet, a tiny, birdlike creature entered into no taxonomy, with no name but that given by a homesick miner a hundred years ago. An accidental name, earned because that miner had looked up and heard a faint, sweet piping, then saw the tiny creature flit from branch to branch in the scrub. White linnet, he had called it, a homesick name.

When Sim was thirteen, she asked her mother if the bugs on Gliz had any other name, like linnet or orca or scarab, which she read about in books. Mom stopped what she was doing—that was unusual for a woman who never stopped working—and said, “No one’s named them.” Here she sat down at their table in the kitchen full of dried herbs and protein rations, three precious apples from her young orchard. “None of it has a name, not really.”

“It’s Gliz,” Sim told her.

“That’s just a nickname. It’s never had a proper name. It’s a temporary place, until they’ve dug up all the rare earths and the graphite on the other side, then no one will ever come back.”

“But the Company of Adventurers,” Sim began, “is dedicated to the exploration of new worlds, as well as freeing resources from the silent wastes of space.”

“That’s definitely what the charter says,” Charis said grimly, then went about her work.

“Captain Faber says it, too.”

“Yes, Saint Ignatius believes it. He who dwells bodily in heaven and intercedes on our behalf.”

“He hates it when you call him that,” Sim said.

“Oh, I know, darling.”

Sim could hardly remember her father. He was very large in her mind, and his hands around her rib cage were like iron when he lifted her up toward the sky, and she laughed and laughed, and then he’d hang her upside down, and she’d laugh even more. When she was twelve, she asked Charis, tentative because it was hard to talk about Dad, did he lift me up a lot?

“That was his big parenting move for you. When you got upset, he’d lift you up as high as he could. If you were really upset, he’d turn you upside down. It worked, too. Not so much for Aurelius, but he was just a baby when your dad died.”

CHAPTER THREE

As Gliz’s first historian and explorer, Sim collected stories from her many aunts and uncles, then set them down. There was one she knew well but didn’t understand, so she often turned it over in her mind.

The Battle of Gliz—as it was locally known—took place in the first year of the War, when the Martian Company retook some system Sim couldn’t name. News reached them weeks after the tiny victory. The Martians celebrated with what remained of their liquor, singing songs in the muddy square, until one of them pissed on Persephone’s doorstep. An equally drunk gang from the Company found him midstream and spewed threats, but the Martian Company man only zipped up and laughed.

Doorstop piss was just the opening sally. Later that night, someone tore the Company flag from the pole outside Persephone’s house. Persephone said she slept through it, but Charis told Sim she was probably too frightened to open her eyes. Who could blame her.

Peele told Sim the air itself was angry that night, with a storm brewing over the mountains, maddening the blood. Charis said everyone had been tired and scared for months, and it just boiled over because Martian liquor means nightmarish hangovers. Persephone said they were all a lot of assholes who deserved what they got. When, at fifteen, Sim asked them for their accounts, none of them was sure of the order of events.

The Battle was already underway when someone found Charis in the clinic. She arrived on the square. Persephone was already there watching two young men batter one another, while the Martian Company servants shouted slogans that meant less and less with each repetition. Rise Up Mars and Defy the Tyrant’s Yoke. That sort of thing.

Charis tried to get between them. Peele pulled her back.

“Let them,” he said. “If you stop them, they’ll only go harder when you’re not watching.”

“They’ll kill each other—”

“—Maybe. Could be a good lesson to the others.”

“Go home, Doc,” someone said from the darkness on the edge of the lighted square. Others took up the command. Go home. Go home.

“We can’t afford to kill each other,” Charis said, but maybe not loud enough to be heard.

Charis told Sim, I knew he was right, but I still hated it. She made herself watch; it lasted another five or six minutes. One of them fell to his knees, then his hands, and dribbled blood onto Gliz’s purplish soil. The other one got him in the side of the head with a knee. He didn’t get back up.

Peele finally loosened his grip. Charis knelt beside the boy. He was still breathing. Beside her, one of the miners started in on how Gliz was Company land, and the Martian had violated—

“It’s not anything,” Charis said, loud now, grinding the words out of her clenched teeth as she examined the boy. “It’s a lump of rock, and we’re forty lightyears from anyone who cares. The Company doesn’t give a fuck about you. Neither does Mars.”

That time, she was loud enough to hear. A Martian medic and two of the Chicago’s crew helped Charis get the boy back to the clinic.

“It was our first date,” Charis said of the Martian medic. Six months later, she was pregnant with Sim.

The boy lived another two days. Charis sat up with him, listening to every word he muttered, wondering who he was asking for: a mother, a girlfriend, a husband. She, sleepless, scrolling through her old textbooks for treatments that didn’t require medicine or computer-guided microsurgery. Trepanning, she considered, bleeding. Later, she would heal others with those ancient tools. But that night, she was new to Gliz and the kind of medicine it demanded. The boy lapsed into silence, with a slow, rattling breath she would soon learn to recognize.

The victor died a day later. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he had not realized that an intergalactic war would require him to murder another kid with his bare hands. They were buried in the same plot, not for any sentimental reason, but because Gliz’s topsoil was stony, and there was much other work to do. Charis did not yet know it, but in a year, she would build scrap metal walls around the grave, and it would become the human heart of an apple orchard, with Earth’s alien trees rooted in their bodies.

The Battle of Gliz cost the Martian Company and the Company of Adventurers each one servant. Their deaths purchased no territory beyond the six-foot space of their shared grave. They’d been teenagers when they signed on to their respective companies for twenty-year indentures, and then here they were, consigned to Gliz. Nineteen is a bad age to find oneself trapped on a tiny moon, with no end to exile or one’s labor.

---

After the ships collected, the strangers met, and the Battle of Gliz resolved in a necessary truce, the facts of the Company War leaked out from home in a series of unofficial messages. It would not be over by Christmas, neither this nor next. That was when most of the Philoctetes’ crew deserted.

Meanwhile, beneath the surface, those two young men changed into something new, neither quite Gliz nor quite Earth. By the time Sim was old enough to understand, her own father was dead and buried beside the Glorious Fallen of the Battle of Gliz, and she could pick a small, red apple from the tree rooted in her father’s body.

“What kind of apple is it called?” she asked when she was seven, the first year the tree bore fruit, and she looked in wonder at its warm, red skin, a color you never saw on Gliz, which was purple and gray and dusty green.

“I don’t know,” Charis told her. “It comes from a Red Prince apple back on Earth, but that will be something new. Do you want to name it?”

Sim thought of her father, a huge and hazy memory that blotted out the sun, a silhouette named Adam, who picked her up and made her laugh. Examining the little fruit, which exactly fit her hand, she said, “Adam’s Apples.”

Charis laughed, then cried, then squeezed Sim in a hard, tight hug and choked I love yous into her hair.

---

Charis had been responsible for so many firsts on Gliz: the first pregnancy and the first widow, the first garden, walled in with sheeting she’d found in the dump. The first house built from scrap torn out of the DSX’s tender because they were spilling out of the old bunkhouses and fights broke out over beds. Peele told Sim the story, laughing, how Charis had woken up on the floor of the mess hall, walked straight over to the tender, and started taking it apart. Peele had tried to stop her, but she was six months pregnant, and Sim’s father, Adam, had got between them, then there were a dozen of them pulling the tender’s interior to pieces with screwdrivers and sledgehammers and fashioning those parts into the houses and streets they now called Town.

---

Sim returned to Town one evening a week later. Charis said, “I need to talk to you,” before she could open the door.

After more than a week under the sky, home was cramped and stuffy. There were pink-petalled geraniums on the windowsill, descended from plants Gliz’s first Factor had brought out a century before. She’d been a gardener, the story went, though no one could remember her name. She was the one who’d brought the Scotch broom and the Himalayan blackberries, the dandelions and poppies. All those bright, jarring flowers that grew in the corners of buildings and between the paths and gravel roads.

“Why do you still have those?” Sim asked.

Charis looked around confusedly until she saw that Sim meant the geraniums. “I like them,” she said, and touched one lurid flower.

“There are these tiny gray-green vines that grow in the rock faces of the foothills. They turn purplish when they’re out in the sun. I could bring you some to cover the garden walls.”

Charis stared at her.

“I just don’t get geraniums,” Sim said, like that would explain something. “I think I’ll sleep outside tonight.”

“Sure. Okay. Sim, you have to listen. The War’s over. And we need to talk about what’s going to happen now.”

Sim caught a sweet, resinous draft from the door. A relief after the house, which smelled so much of people. She sat down and asked, “But what does that mean?”

“As of last month, sometime, we are under new management.”

“Oh. Okay.” She tried to understand what Charis was saying. “Who won?”

“It’s a merger. Adventurers and Martians are now the Company of the New Stars.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Charis relaxed. “Yeah, that’s what I said.”

“Is this—good?”

“Well. Your mother’s a deserter, and you’re a squatter. So I don’t know.” Iron in her voice, rare and sharp. Sim had heard it when Madeleine got lost at the edge of the mine and none of the older kids could remember when they’d last seen her. When Peele had stolen apples to make a bitterly alcoholic cider. When Eric broke Shin’s jaw during that fight at a bonfire party the year before. “Things are going to change, love. In ways you can’t imagine.”

Condescending. “But you can?” she asked.

“Yes, actually. I have literally been places you can’t imagine.”

Maybe. But Charis had never been to the foothills and felt the presence of something, of Gliz, nearby and just out of sight. “Do you have a plan?” Sim asked.

“I do. It’s going to be tough. But I do have a plan.”

“Are you going to tell me what it is?”

“No.”

They were both staring at the table between them. Once, Charis had sewn up Zayne’s shoulder on this table, after he’d fallen down the edge of a slag heap. Sim had witnessed some of it from the doorway: Zayne’s father bracing his shoulders and neck while Charis picked gravel from the wound with a pair of tweezers. He’d passed out when she stitched it, but it had healed cleanly. Five years later, they had lost their virginities together, beside a campfire just outside of Town, he fifteen to her seventeen.

“Okay, I guess,” Sim said and stood up from the table. The look on Charis’ face kept her from saying more.

That night, Sim slept outside, staring up at the dark that was now, somehow, alive with change. Inside, Charis left the light on: a wasteful luxury she reserved for childbirth and other emergencies. That meant she was up working, Sim supposed. Around them, Town settled into silence. Sim knew every single person on Gliz by name. But Gliz as she knew it would be over soon, and everything she had found in the foothills would come to nothing or collapse into the ever-widening mine, until the Company’s machines had stripped the whole planet down to rock.

CHAPTER FOUR

The day before the Colossus arrived, Ignatius dug his dress uniform out of a vacuum pack. The blouse had fit him well once, but after two years of microgravity, his spine had elongated, and it was far too short, exposing a few centimeters of his remaining good undershirt, which he wore backward to hide a large hole from the front view. The trousers were even worse.

He received Captain Alexander Salmerón and company at the Philoctetes’ only functional airlock. It was difficult to keep himself properly at attention, and he drifted toward the ceiling while he played the boatswain’s call to mark their arrival. In person, the captain was even handsomer than he’d appeared on screen, blue-eyed and blessed with abundantly curly black hair and tanned skin, as though he had just come in from a day on the water.

Ignatius finished the call, coughed twice, then spoke to another living human in person for the first time since Simram’s death. “Captain Salmerón,” he began, his voice catching on his very dry tongue, “Welcome to the Philoctetes.”

“Captain Faber, thank you.”

“Well,” Ignatius said as the speech he’d rehearsed fled his mind. “Well. Well. Hold the line.”

Salmerón’s eyes flicked past Ignatius’ shoulder to the darkened corridor, then down to Ignatius’ boots, which he’d mended with electrical tape that morning, requisitioned from some wiring in the junior officers’ quarters. Ignatius remembered the boots he’d ordered before he left, which were still in their box in his bedroom closet in his parents’ house. He should have given them to Sarah’s boy when he received his commission on the Hydra. Why hadn’t he?

“Captain Faber. Where’s—” Salmerón looked past him through the hatch.

Ignatius started, then turned to follow his eyes and realized what he was looking for. “Oh. There’s just me,” he said. “Everyone else is gone. It’s just me now.”

Salmerón nodded, as though he had known, “Their names will be lauded when we count the dead.” Ignatius couldn’t place it but thought the line came from the Company’s funeral ceremony. You were supposed to recite it over a dead crewmate, but he had forgotten it when Simram died.

“Captain Faber? Are we waiting for something?”

“Right. Yes,” Ignatius said. “Come along.”

He led the officers to the bridge, bouncing gently along the ceiling. In the low remaining lights, Ignatius explained the Philoctetes’ peculiarities. He was proud of what he had done, given that he was not a clever engineer, with his only education from Simram and the operating manuals. He was enthusiastically describing his solutions to such-and-such a problem when Salmerón asked, “Would you like to board the Colossus? You’ll find it quite comfortable. The air circulation is excellent, and Doctor Cook has prepared the low-gravity bunk we mentioned in our last communications.”

“Oh. I suppose. But perhaps not yet? There are still a few things to do.”

“We’ll have the decommissioning ceremony this week, then scuttle her into GLZ7. First, though, we must dispatch the deserters.”

Charis. Charis.

“Oh,” Ignatius hesitated. His own shipmates, and he had written the letters because he was a Company Man, and it was his duty. He lied, “I’m not sure. I haven’t kept an eye on the deserters. You’ll want to talk to Persephone—”

“Civil or Company?”

“Factor.

“Of course,” Salmerón said, conciliatory. “We’ll collect them on descent. Then a quick trial. An hour or two.”

“There are others to consider, not Company—the survivors of the Thames, the Tilikum, the Chicago.”

“The Chicago? I don’t remember anything about a Chicago.” He reached for a tablet held by one of his silent attendants.

“The vessel was contracted to Earth before the hostilities. There are children and grandchildren, too, from the Chicago’s crew as well as the others. More than forty now.”

“More than forty children!” Salmerón said, scandalized, then giggled. “I suppose there’s nothing else to do on GLZ7G? Well, if it were a civil craft, that’s for Earth to resolve.”

“The Company dissolved, I understand. The survivors of the Chicago have no recourse. They haven’t even been paid.”

“So many unreliable companies. But as Servants of the New Stars, we are not here to make up for the shortcomings of other organizations. They might sign on, if they like. And I’ve heard the Company is offering a generous discount on passage to Earth. Ten percent, last I heard.”

Ignatius groped for words a young man like Salmerón would understand, “But what will the children do?”

“The Company will sign them on with a simplified application—no exams or certifications required. Of course, it will be at a reduced salary, given they have no training.”

“Sim de Crèvecoeur surveyed—”

“—I’m sure they’re all very clever,” Salmerón said. “Can they write their names? So many illiterates at the edge of the Dominion. I imagine most of them will sign, and if they don’t, the Company isn’t in the habit of supporting those unwilling to work. I suppose they could wait for a civil ship, but since they’re neither Earth nor Martian, it would be a long wait. So they sign on and leave, or they refuse and stay here as squatters, without the benefit of legal status.” Salmerón said with a pompous kind of finality. “Mr. Douglass will contact the Factor for a census and generate the contracts.”

Ignatius tried again, a new tactic. “Do you know anything about her family? Charis’ grandfather is Aurelius de Crèvecoeur.”

“Hold the line—that’s been our motto for three hundred years. Half the Company’s servants would have liked to give up and settle somewhere quiet, but they didn’t abandon their oaths.”

“Her son is even named after the old man. He takes an interest in his namesake’s education and opportunities, even out here. I think Charis was his favorite.”

Salmerón twitched, “We’ll try her tomorrow. And then we can move on to more interesting things.”

Salmerón did move on, easily and at length. He talked about acquaintances on exploration vessels already dispatched for the new stars. Ignatius’ treatment, and his eventual return to Earth. He told stories about his War, the final action of FH67l, where he had been at the armistice. How the Colossus and a Martian vessel had both stood down, the two of them so close he could have signaled with a flashlight. How strange it had been, the two ships observing one another in silence, waiting for peace or the reinstatement of hostilities. Anything would have been better than the waiting. How they’d watch the Martian ship collide with an orbital mine and blow up six weeks into the armistice, leaving the Colossus alone. The irony made him laugh. But Salmerón had forgotten: there was the defender’s medal for those who had served out the whole War. They even had the specialized substrate—dusted with real platinum—and could print it shipboard. Ignatius would have it in his hands tomorrow.

Then it was time to go, and he insisted Ignatius join them on the far pleasanter Colossus. Ignatius declined. Salmerón pressed once more before he conceded and left with his attendants.

Ignatius messaged Charis, using an old channel he hoped the Colossus wouldn’t monitor. They’ll be trying you as a deserter tomorrow. Perhaps she received it or perhaps not. She didn’t answer.

---

He should have gotten through to the young man. Reminded him that rules changed this far from Earth. But Salmerón must already know that. He’d known at FH67L, when the Colossus and the Martian ship circled one another, in a kind of union that could only exist in the cold. Salmerón had known it when the Martians struck one of the Company’s orbital mines and disintegrated. Anyone who crewed a ship had felt the cold pressing against the thin hull and had turned inward, to the little group at hand, to whom one owed one’s duty, no matter what the Company mandated. It was why there were ghostships where whole crews abandoned their mission together. And why they might build this fragile peace on a rock so far from home it seemed like a different universe. One changed when one spent these long years held tight to the surface by unearthly gravity or floating freely above an alien world.

---

Persephone received the new contract from Douglass on the Colossus with orders to distribute it to interested parties, including those awkward, unauthorized children. Charis read it, pausing only to highlight something or make a note and punctuate the shack’s silence with outraged snorts. Sim and Aurelius were familiar with the sound of her vitriol; they left her alone. Outside, the new orchard was still just a wonky five-sided field from which most of the rocks had been removed, but Aurelius was ready to start amending the soil.

“Looks good,” Sim said.

He shrugged and got to work. Privately, Sim wondered if there was any point, especially after Aurelius led her to last year’s privy—now compost—and they began hauling its contents to the new field. After two silent trips, she couldn’t restrain her questions.

“Do you want to go back to Earth?”

Aurelius lowered his shovel and squinted. “We can’t go back if we’ve never been there.”

She made a face like, don’t be so goddamn pedantic.

He answered her look: “Yeah. I don’t know.”

“If you don’t know, why are we shoveling out the privy?”

“It’s all properly broken down. You can’t even smell it anymore.” But then he looked up at the sky and down at the shovel. It was one of the very old ones left behind by the first survey mission, predating even the mine. Aurelius, having taken over Gliz’s agricultural revolution, had the luxury of a real shovel. Like the kids who worked for him, Sim used a shovel they’d hammered out of sheet metal from the dump.

“If Gliz isn’t the middle of nowhere anymore, maybe we could get more shovels,” Aurelius said.

Sim relaxed at that. “Or tents. I’d like some tents. How many shovels do we need?”

“As many as we can get,” he said and went back to work.

---

That night, after Sim had washed away some of the mud in pond water, she and Charis went for a walk. They stopped where they always did, outside of Town, searching the sky for the Philoctetes.

“This is your choice, as far as I can see,” Charis said as they watched the speck. “You can sign on with the Company and leave for Earth—and after you’ve served the first ten years, you could buy out your contract. Or, you can stay on Gliz, and we claim squatter’s rights back on Earth. That’s all we’ve got.”

“If I sign on, can I come back?”

“Maybe. Eventually.”

“I don’t want—”

“—Don’t answer so quickly.”

“Mom—”

“—What’s keeping you here, Sim?” Sim turned to face the foothills and felt the whole planet unrolling around her, which included the presence of the others she sensed, whoever they were. When Mom spoke again, it seemed to be to herself. “There’s so much on Earth. There are schools and strangers and museums. You could have a life there, a really nice life. And ten years isn’t that long.”

Ten years ago, she had been in love with Zayne. Ten years ago, she’d started her slow walks toward the foothills. “I don’t know,” she said.

“It’s going to be a fight. They own everything. Gliz will be flooded with strangers who hold the Company line. They won’t make it easy.”

“But it won’t just be me.”

“People need time to think.”

“Peele?”

Charis laughed. “He’s a loyal servant of the New Stars now.”

“So I bet Lisa will go, too, and Jeff.”

“They’re not wrong to leave.”

“I didn’t say that?”

“You could challenge the surveyor’s exam and probably skip the first two rungs on the ladder. And you have the money for a commission if you want it. You’ve already gone farther than most human beings. But you could go farther than that, now. And if you hate it—it’s only ten years.”

Vast crowds of humanity. Restaurants and strangers and mountains and perfume and grandparents and great-grandparents. After that, the deep black of space beyond the edge of cultivation, as the Company called it, into worlds unknown. In a few weeks, the universe had grown unimaginably huge.

“I could get a tent, probably.”

“Or you could get a tent. But is that all you want?”

“And a sleeping bag. And if we have to leave Town to hide from a bunch of Company assholes, maybe I’ll finally get you out to the foothills,” Sim added, suddenly hopeful. “And there’s at least one river you can properly swim in.”

“Okay,” Charis said. “The foothills.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The last night Charis, Aurelius, and Sim were together, they sat around the wobbly table in their shack and drank a bitter tea that Aurelius had grown from the ragged mint plants in the Factor’s garden. The ritual was so familiar, it was hard to believe that Gliz, as they had known it, was about to end.

Mom said, “Okay. Salmerón of the Colossus has orders to try the Philoctetes deserters tomorrow.”

Aurelius spoke first, “There are what, eleven Philoctetes crew?”

“Can we hide them?” Sim asked.

“Probably not. Or not all of them. Not yet. So they’re going to arrest me.” Charis pushed the tablet toward them. “This is the appeal. My lawyers drafted it months ago. You’ll hand it over to Salmerón once I’m arrested, and the lawyers will submit it to the Company when they receive word that I’m in custody. My contract includes the right to a trial at home and to representation, which I won’t get out here.”

“What is that going to do about—”

“—Delay. Draw attention to Gliz. There are unsigned and extra-contractual children in a lot of places. Maybe if enough people know about you, we can hope for some kind of civil intervention. Colony status, maybe.”

Aurelius shifted in his chair, his hands in fists on the table.

“Jesus Christ, Mom, why do you trust them? Why do you think you’re going to survive the arrest in the first place?”

“Of course I don’t trust them. But what else are we going to do? We stay calm, and we do what we can with what we have.”

Aurelius left, closing the door silently behind him.

---

At dawn the day the Colossus crew was to arrive, the elderly survivors of the Thames, the DSX, the Tilikum, and the Chicago gathered near the landing pads, their silence vibrating with hope: something will descend, please, let something descend. Sometimes the little kids joined the old people on their way to or from playgrounds among the slag heaps, but they never stayed long. Around midmorning, a star flared in the blue-green sky, and the old people squinted at it until they had to look away. Sim was digging in the new orchard with Aurelius, but she looked up to watch that light resolve into a white capsule trailing fire, the air beneath it rippling with invisible heat as it settled on the landing pad, blowing dust into everyone’s eyes. That was when Sim and the other children of Gliz joined the crowd, their arms crossed and their faces grim.

Later, when the heat died and the noise stilled, some invisible signal dragged Persephone to her feet, her uniform hanging loosely from her bony shoulders. (She’d held onto that uniform long after all the others had been worn to rags and those rags stitched back into clothes. She’d kept the Company flag, too, limp and whole in her office. Charis hated that flag. “Do you know how many diapers we could make out of it?” she said to Sim at each new birth.)

The first strangers Sim had ever seen arrived in fire like gods in an old story. First, the marines in olive, conspicuously armed, then four officers in blue, with brilliantly polished boots and elaborate sidearms, then the tall, slender man who must be Salmerón. These beautiful aliens moved awkwardly, so light they might snap. An officer stumbled, then three of the marines hit the ground and struggled up again.

“Captain Salmerón!” Persephone shouted, her voice cracking. “You have Gliz.”

Captain Salmerón bowed. Misty—just sixteen—shoved in beside Sim, craned her neck and squeaked, “He’s handsome! I’m so relieved he’s handsome.” Then added, “That marine isn’t bad, either. The girls are so pretty, though.”

Sim stared at the blue moiré coat one of the lieutenants wore and wondered at her iridescence. Her hair shimmered from purple to blue, like those tiny, brilliant creatures that lived in the foothills, the ones Sim often watched creep across the rocks. How fascinating. Misty couldn’t tear her eyes away, and why should she, when all around her were stooped, exhausted men, and boys she’d known her whole life, with their missing teeth and their scars, and every one of them wearing clothes that had been worn by the dead. And now a heavenly body descended, and he wasn’t just iridescent, he was properly handsome. Like, movie handsome. Misty and all the other girls should be careful, nevertheless Sim expected a baby boom in nine-and-a-half months.

But after her initial delight, Misty seemed to wilt. She was wearing this skirt she’d patched together out of fabric she’d begged from every family in Town because she’d wanted something full enough to twirl when she danced. She’d worked vines and flowers around the hem, in threads also harvested from those old clothes. Faced with elegant strangers whose boots had never touched mud, Misty stepped back, gathering her skirt into one hand, hiding its precious stitches from those alien eyes.

Persephone led them to the Factor’s house, the crowd following and Sim squeezing Misty’s hand, like it could help her sudden, terrible self-consciousness. Some of the little kids fell silent in wonder, and others pestered the marines with questions, even when grown-ups tried to yank them back. My mom is from Singapore, are you from Singapore? Do you know my grandma? She lives on Earth. Do you have chocolate? Do you have a pony? Old men said that styles had certainly changed. It was all orange velveteen when they were young. At the back, one of the elderly miners—blind—shouted about Earth as he had left it. The softness of the grass there. The beauty of the girls.

When they reached Persephone’s house, Salmerón wouldn’t go in, just stood outside and said something Sim couldn’t hear. Then he raised his voice—you had to, with Persephone—and apparently repeated himself, “Captain Faber’s records were deplorable.”

Sim crept closer as Persephone hesitated and said, “I’m not sure myself, Captain Salmerón.”

“Your duty as chief Factor is to keep track of these things. Some of that crowd must be Philoctetes.”

“Well. There’s the Thames, the DSX, the Chicago, I think. Oh, and—” Here Persephone paused and turned to Peele, “that civil crew studying stars.”

“Right.” Peele seemed to think. “The Tilikum.”

“Was it the Tilikum? I think Laurence was on it. Where’s Laurence?”

“Of course not!” Peele said, “He came in on the Chicago right after the DSX. Did you want to talk to Laurence, Captain Salmerón—”

“—Thank you both,” Salmerón said. “Where is Charis de Crèvecoeur? Junior medical officer on the Philoctetes. Deserter.”

“Oh. Yes,” Persephone said, then turned to the crowd, searching until she met Sim’s eyes. “Sim? Where’s your mother?”

“I think she’s in the orchard,” Sim said. Persephone didn’t seem to understand, so she shouted, “Orchard!” She wasn’t, but for a desperate moment, Sim couldn’t help but lie and keep her hidden a little longer, even if that wasn’t the plan. Moira hustled her father, Gethin, away from the crowd. He’d been a kid on the Philoctetes, a junior technician. Last night, when Charis sent out the instruction to hide, he’d said, plaintively, “I just want to see them one time.”

Salmerón gave someone a look, and a dozen marines filtered through the crowd, their guns easy on their hips. Children saw the game and ran about, searching, until one shrill voice sounded, “I saw Charis!” and led a marine to the clinic, where Charis stood in the doorway, drying her hands.

“Well,” she said, her voice raised to carry, “I suppose I’ve got a trial.”

Sim had observed this before: How Charis could expand to meet a confrontation, suddenly taller, emphatic. It reminded Sim of the time Mom found her with Zayne out behind the sheds near the smelter, the way she’d told Zayne to pull up his pants and go home. Zayne’s mom had been on the Philoctetes.

Salmerón said something to the corporal beside him. Marines surrounded Charis, pulling her roughly toward the square, Sim wondering why it took four of them to manage a stooped, gray-haired woman. One stumbled, dragging Charis to her knees. Now the crowd murmured dissent. Persephone saying, “There’s no need for that, there’s no need.”

But the marines ignored even that charge, continued staggering to the square. Then Salmerón tripped and fell heavily to the ground, struggled to his feet with mud on his uniform. Someone giggled. Someone asked, “You alright, Charis?”

“Fine, fine,” she shouted. “Nothing to worry about.”

One young woman paced the crowd’s edge, and Sim was distracted by her fragile, perfect skin and the curl of dark hair on her forehead beneath her dull green helmet. She’d have been born on distant and glorious Earth, where the ponies and the rollercoasters were.

But then the Earthling tripped, like Gliz itself was pulling her down into the simmering chaos of the crowd. Someone laughed like it was slapstick, but Sim looked from marine to marine and could only think of those hands, dozens of them, each slung across a gun, the fingers resting easily on triggers, and she knew every single safety was off.

The young woman struggled to her knees, hard-faced, shouting, “Who was that? Who the fuck did that?” Other marines helped her up, scanning the crowd for the culprit. So easy for them to squeeze a trigger, and there’s Gliz gone forever, all of them laid out because a stranger panicked in high gravity. That was when Sim understood Charis’ unnatural compliance, the way she kept her hands open, her gaze on the ground.

In front of Persephone’s house. Salmerón made his proclamation, the words came to him easily, and Sim wondered how many times he’d recited them, on how many worlds and stations, since the War ended: “The Company of the New Stars will forgive the speed with which we undertake this trial, but the crime is clear to all present: Doctor Charis de Crèvecoeur, you forswore your oath to the Company, to your comrades, and to the Philoctetes. You will pay the price of the deserter. Hard labor at the Company’s pleasure.”

Outraged murmurs. Peele shushing the crowd, like he could stop it. Someone nearby Sim said, “It’s been hard labor for the last thirty years.”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Charis said. “There’s nothing here to worry about.” But the crowd pressed tighter around Sim, drifting into a circle enclosing the marines and Salmerón. Don’t surround them. Don’t get too close, please, don’t, because in a second one of them would shoulder into a marine with an easy finger on that trigger.

“Back,” Salmerón shouted, but the crowd only thickened until he raised his sidearm and fired half a dozen rounds overhead. Sim dropped to the ground and dragged Misty with her. Some little kids started crying.

The reaction seemed to please Salmerón. He shouted, “Where is the crew of the Philoctetes?”

“I don’t believe there’s anyone anymore,” Persephone said and struggled to her feet. “Charis, are there any?”

“They’re all dead,” Charis said, and she seemed about to say more when the marine to her right shoved her.

Marcus was near Sim in the crowd. He’d been a mechanic on the Philoctetes, seventeen when he left Earth, Mom had told her, and he’d stuck it out as long as he could, honoring his contract until there was no one left but Simram and Ignatius, and they sent him down to the surface in the last tender, with as much gear as they could spare.

“Don’t,” Sim said to him. “You aren’t even supposed to be here. Can we get the kids away?” Because now fire repeated overhead, this time from the marines. Sim dropped to her knees, then her hands.

That was when Peele said, “Listen, I remember now. Charis is right. They’re all dead. A weak bunch, the Philoctetes crew.”

Captain Salmerón briefly searched the crowd. He turned to Persephone, accusing. “You told me there were at least a dozen survivors of the Philoctetes.”

Persephone started. “Oh, did I? I must have meant the Chicago. There are at least a dozen. Aren’t there, Peele?”

“Eleven, since poor Khadijah.”

“But see, Captain, there’s no one,” Persephone said, plaintively. “Peele’s right. They’re all dead. All of them, except Charis.”

None of the Colossus gang was listening. Salmerón gave inaudible orders, and two young officers led the marines to the old bunkhouse that bordered the square. Then Salmerón walked clumsily toward the pads, accompanied by marines who dragged Charis along the rough ground.

“But you still need to sign—” Persephone said.

Salmerón did not look back. Two officers and a marine trailed behind, their steps heavy and stumbling. He fell twice more on his way to the tender. And then it launched, and Charis was gone.

---

For years after Charis left, Sim would revisit their final conversation, writing it down, rereading it, comparing it to Aurelius’ account. She set that text beside the Battle of Gliz, a piece of history she knew intimately but never quite understood.

That last night, Sim fell silent in the face of her mother’s plan, which was the best they had, but felt close to nothing. “Why can’t you just run, if Gethin and all the others are going?”

“Because there is nowhere. There is no part of this planet they won’t be able to see. And someone needs to go back to Earth for trial.”

Sim knew she was probably right. The Colossus had begun launching its satellite swarm, and there’d be new stars every evening, even more unseen on the far side of the planet, above the graphite deposits. In a year or two, they wouldn’t need boots on the ground because every inch of Gliz would be under the Company’s eye, everything that crept or flew or crawled, every mark in the ground rendered naked. But not quite yet.

“How long will you be gone?”

Charis made a face, the one she made when someone was too stupid to see what must be done. Then she said, “I don’t know. But, Sim, you need to leave town. Don’t stay just to see what happens.”

“I know. We’ve talked about it. But you were supposed to come—”

That look again. “Don’t underestimate them. It’ll be a lot harder than you think.”

“What could possibly be harder than this?” she asked. The memories ran roughly through her mind: the girls who died of eclampsia and infection; old people worn down by high gravity, joints swollen to immobility. “What could possibly be harder?” she repeated, and she heard the shock in her own voice, that her mother could have missed the truth of life on Gliz, how short it was, and how wild.

“Maybe not,” Charis conceded. “They won’t want you to succeed. You’re squatters. I wish I could be here to help—”

(Much later, Sim would think, you did help. Because we watched you handle Peele and the various calamities of a small town in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but your wits and salvage and goodwill.)

“The foothills,” Sim said, again. “There’s water, and we’ll be hard to find.” One of the valleys she’d found between the rising hills, with a rivulet at the bottom. They’d have to think about privies downstream. They should take the shovels and the plastic sheeting, the protein biscuits. But the Company owned Gliz: every shovel and biscuit, every slag heap and privy and wall and tarp. “We’ll be like thieves,” she said.

“You are thieves. But just now, they don’t have the manpower to take you all in. And by the time another shipload of Company militia gets here, the lawyers will have done their jobs. And I’ll be shouting to high heaven about you.”

Then they were down to business: passwords for the tablets, little Diya’s cough, and Charis’ case notes. Finally, she concluded, “I might be able to send you a tent and a sleeping bag. It’ll be a while, though, because we can’t go through the Colossus. It’ll come from Ignatius because I’m obviously a criminal, but the Philoctetes’ printers still work, if we can get the substrate.”

“Yes,” Sim said, “Sure. What about Ignatius?”

Charis looked away. “He’ll have to stay. The Philoctetes is the only way you’ll have any communications. And it would be nice to get you some antibiotics. Maybe a shovel.”

“Two, if you can afford it.” Sim tried to say it lightly. What outrageous wealth to have two new shovels. She’d never had anything new in her whole life.

Charis’ smile died, and her eyes brimmed. She hugged Sim tight, her thin arms like wire binding them close. “Yes. Shovels. Aurelius will need a few.”

“We’re going to be okay,” Sim said.

“You will. You will be okay. And next time I see you, I’ll bring you apples from the orchards at home. They’re keepers. They’ll last at least a year on shipboard.”

“We’ll be okay, and you’ll come back with apples,” Sim said, like repetition could make it true.

“And you’ll look after Aurelius.” Her voice cracked on his name. “He thinks he can do everything. He’ll destroy his back before he’s thirty if he doesn’t rest. Make him rest sometimes.”

That was too much, somehow. Sim told the truth for the first time, her voice slight and childish, “You could be dead, too, like the rest of them.” She sounded like she was five again and crying, Where is Daddy, where is Daddy, where is Daddy.

---

When Ignatius left the Philoctetes for the Colossus, he felt—for the first time in two years—the weight of his own body. Even sedated for transit through the ship to his low-gravity bunk, the weakness was intolerable, and with it a spinning nausea that made it impossible to eat, even with all the delicious things the ship offered.

“That’s your cochlea,” Doctor Cook said cheerfully. “Your vestibular system will take some time recovering, and you’ll need implants. But they can do wonderful things back on Earth.” Ignatius wasn’t sure a year of nausea and ship’s gravity was worth whatever would happen on Earth, but he was too tired to speak.

That evening, Salmerón blew through the door, stepping gracefully into the air near Ignatius’ bunk. He didn’t bother with a greeting.

“Thirty years on that rock has turned them all into a bunch of filthy little barbarians. The chief Factor’s a fool. We’ve got Crèvecoeur at least.”

“Is she here?” Ignatius asked.

But Salmerón didn’t hear him. He went on as though he could not stop himself: the ugliness of GLZ7G, its uncivilized gravity, its brutish population, who felt not one iota of gratitude to the Company; the depths to which servants fall on the far side of the Dominion. Its mud, which clung so insistently to his boots, he considered tossing them and printing new ones with a more fashionable heel.

When Salmerón had exhausted his irritation, Ignatius spoke mildly, “You’ll send down the miners tomorrow, then, if you’ve got de Crèvecoeur, and be away.”

“We’ll send down the miners, yes, to knock down the houses. Your deserters will turn up soon enough.”

The savages Salmerón excoriated were Charis and Sim and Aurelius. Persephone and Marcus and Gethin and Lin. How to explain to such a young man, so spiky, so preoccupied with the state of his boots, that Gliz was their home and they were no longer the Earthlings they had been when they arrived. “Wait, Alexander,” he finally said. “Please.”

Just now, Salmerón was listening, but soon the moment would pass, and the young man would drive the Philoctetes crew out of their homes, and if anyone stood in their way, there was Gliz gone, the deserters rounded up, the children forced to sign on, and anyone else dead. He could feel the disaster close beside them, only drawing closer if Salmerón was afraid, if he felt slighted or embarrassed. The Battle of Gliz and all the other spats of the last thirty years would be nothing to the Company’s sudden and obliterating violence.

“Spit it out, Faber.”

“When you were at FH67L after the armistice, you watched the Martian ship collide with one of our mines.”

Salmerón’s face was still.

“Did you take any of them onto the Colossus?”

He hesitated, and when he spoke it was confidential and low, as though they might be overheard. “They didn’t tell me to stand down the mines. I would have done it if they’d said. We had all the codes. But the orders didn’t come.”

“The orders don’t come, not when you need them. We’re far on the edge of things here. So far out, the Company’s laws don’t mean what they do on Earth. Not quite.”

Salmerón bristled. One must be gentle with them, these prickly children of War. Ignatius was bitterly tired, but he went on, his voice gentle, “The remaining crew is dead, but I have been remiss in registering those deaths. It would be easier, I think, if I wrote the official letters. Persephone will give me the names, and I will send them. Then you’re clear of the whole business. And it’s not all disaster, either. You’re returning Aurelius de Crèvecoeur’s granddaughter to Earth. His favorite. Take care of her, and you’ll be in his good graces. And you could grant a little latitude to his unsigned grandchildren and their friends. It’s the kind of thing a man like that remembers.”

Salmerón smiled a little. He was imagining himself: a handsome young officer with dramatically curly hair, bowing low to the old man and relating, bashfully, that he honored Charis and her children, despite the charges. It was his natural aristocracy, gracious to one’s enemies in defeat. What gifts he could expect! What patronage for such a favorite!

“They’re all dead,” Ignatius said, “all my old crewmates.”

“That’s what the Factor said.”

“Yes, and now you’ve taken the lone survivor into custody. You’ve done your duty to the Company. You’ve held the line.”

The people of Gliz held their line, too. They decided, daily, to persist, eating protein biscuits and drinking water, keeping company with strangers on the edge of known space. After Simram died, Ignatius had tried to stop all this ridiculous exercise, the Philoctetes, and exile, and protein biscuits, but the inertia of custom kept him what he was: a man of Gliz. He was no longer the Company Man who had sent the letters of desertion home. How sad and strange that he had only discovered that now, as they came to bring him home.

Salmerón hesitated. He’d been raised inside this long, meandering war. Ignatius wondered if he’d ever been alone, had ever struggled to understand who he was with no one around.

“They’ll want to know. They’ll want it documented.”

That was an opening. It was difficult to think under the pressure of even this reduced gravity. He wondered how he had stood the weight of it, for those first decades on Earth, before he became St. Ignatius, who dwells bodily in heaven. How noisy one’s mind must be on Earth. How heavy one’s thoughts. How much freer one was, far from the reach of the Company, alone. One could become a different sort of person at the edge of things.

They’d scuttle her after the restock, when she’s got tenders and lifeboats. He imagined the catalog of things Sim would need to make a new village in the foothills: bunks and sleeping bags and protein biscuits ten years past their disposal date; the store of uniforms he had kept back, remade into clothes for children, or baskets, or tents. She’d build roofs of metal decking, and Aurelius would construct garden walls against the side of a noon-facing slope. She’d find clear springs of water and circle them with rocks. She’d dig wells. She’d walk farther into the mountains, know their secret valleys and passes while the Company filled the sky with satellites and the ships departed with loads of palladium and iridium and graphite. Aurelius would carry his apple seedlings from Town, and some would survive to bear their strange, gnarled fruit.

“Yes, Company men. And they don’t like their orders ignored,” Salmerón said.

Perhaps Salmerón’s parents were also in debt for his commission, paying the heavy maintenance in civil cash.

“The orders wouldn’t be ignored, just delayed a little. She will be scuttled, but perhaps not this minute. And there’s latitude on the edge of things.”

“Not the edge of anything anymore,” he snapped. “There are rules.”

“You have a certain freedom as the ranking officer of the New Stars. And a War hero, I understand. You have the authority to leave it all to me, and I’ll carry it out according to the Company’s rules. I swear. The Philoctetes will be scuttled.”

Ignatius watched the struggle between ego and obedience in the young man’s face and was surprised at how much affection he felt, despite all the irritating pomp of Salmerón’s authority. He had been born at war. Perhaps he, too, wondered what he would be in this new world and what he might have been in a different, peaceful history.

“You’ve arrived at the old edge of Dominion. You’ve found an old man going mad in his ship, and perhaps you felt a little compassion for him in his madness. The Philoctetes has been his home for most of his life.”

“You’d have to stay—”

“—I’ll serve with pleasure,” Ignatius said quickly, before either of them could change their minds.

The young man relaxed, as though some matter had been resolved. The crew of the Philoctetes was dead. Ignatius would send the letters and scuttle the ship. He would hold the line for Gliz. Sim should name something after him, a stream she had yet to discover. Some tiny, gray-green plant she might find in the mountains. On the surface, they had time—just a little more.

Sim should name something after Salmerón, maybe a stream she had yet to discover, or some tiny, gray-green plant she might find in the mountains. Salmerón’s stonecrop.

CHAPTER SIX

Late that afternoon, Sim stood in the middle of Town and could not remember what she was meant to do next, though her mother’s instructions ran through her mind. Food. Any plastic sheeting they could find. Shovels. Peele was louder than ever now, talking up his status as the senior surviving Martian of the region, and now a loyal servant of the New Stars. He’d requisitioned a flag and a uniform from the marines, now permanently camped outside of Town. Sim had heard they didn’t want to hand them over until he got pretty loud about it, and some NCO gave in. All that, despite the gunfire overhead, and the kids dropping to the dirt, and Charis gone. Peele must be a forgiving soul.

“Come on,” he said when he spotted her. “Come say goodbye properly.”

She wasn’t going to, but he was her uncle, so she followed him. She wished she hadn’t when he said, “Jesus. You’re really staying on this rock?”

She just looked at him. “So you’re New Stars now, huh?”

Peele shrugged, then gestured with a swollen hand toward the new tent, “They’re all good kids,” he said. “We just have to go along to get along.”

Sim was turning away when Peele laughed. “Stop, stop, you’re as crazy as your mother. Just wait a sec.” He dug a small rectangle out of his pocket.

And—this shocked her—his eyes were wet when he offered it to her. She stared dumbly at the smooth, gray glass, cool in her hand. It was a screen without a single scratch, finer and cleaner than anything she had ever seen. She didn’t know what to say until he explained, “Your dad would have liked you to have one. It’ll be good for all that exploring.” Here, he waved at the foothills. “He would have been proud of you—but he also would have said get the hell off this rock and sign on while you still can.” That last bit trailed off into a sniffle. Then he added, “I did a little work on it, so it’s synced to the Philoctetes, not the Colossus. I remembered St. Ignatius’ old frequencies. But maybe don’t tell the Company that just yet.”

It took her a minute to understand what he had given her and how important it would be. She said, “Thank you, Mr. Peele.”

He looked like he was going to hug her, but then Lisa emerged from the house with the baby on her hip and talked about all the things they were giving away because the Colossus could print anything they needed on credit. In six months, they’d be at some new station, with the whole universe ahead of them. Lisa offered the clothes they wore, the very walls of the house, and their share of the biscuits.

“All of it,” she said, laughing. “Take it all. We’re rich now!”

---

The children of Gliz left before dawn the next morning, melting into the long twilight by ones and twos. There were two marines on watch, drowsing in front of their tents through the short night, but they ignored the exodus. Perhaps by order of Salmerón. By midnight, thirty-seven people had collected a kilometer from Town, including the eleven surviving deserters of the Philoctetes, now officially dead, six children too little to walk, and twenty others who had chosen to throw their lot in with Gliz, whatever that meant.

Sim had to be careful not to outpace them, dawdling sometimes at the end of the column and counting heads. Thirty-seven, and all under her care. Thirty-seven whose lives might depend on the place she’d chosen. At their third or fourth stop, Patricia—usually so calm—insisted that this path Sim said they were following was no different from the steppe.

“Do you even know where you’re going?” she asked, fussy and doubtful. She had wanted to sign on, but her mother was Philoctetes, and there was Lizzie the baby to think about.

“I’ve been doing this for years, Patsy.”

“You keep saying that, but I have no idea where we’re going. And I hate it when you call me Patsy.” She bounced Lizzie on her hip and looked away before Sim could be sure those were tears glittering in her eyes. Patricia had never wandered far, and now Town was gone, and there was nothing in front of her but the steppe, and Sim’s word that the foothills would be safe for a while.

That first night, they camped at one of the water holes Sim had hollowed and watched shuttles rising from the distant pads, a rumble and a cloud of dark red collecting on the horizon, and then a star shooting into the night sky. Sim named the people who might be on them, though she could not say which soul rode which star: Peele and Lisa and Shin, Persephone, Charis. Misty. Sim said, “Goodbye, Mom,” to every one of them.

---

They stopped before the foothills, when the ground rose, so they could see Town for the last time. The air was clear enough to see the outline of tall sheds where the Company’s mining equipment rotted.

“There,” she said to Alex, just six, who had been walking beside her. She’d carried him on her back for a few kilometers that afternoon, since his dad had bales of plastic sheeting. “That smudge over there is Town.”

“Are we on Earth now?” Alex asked.

“No, this is all Gliz.”

“But we’ve walked farther than anyone has ever walked ever! I thought we walked all the way to Earth!”

Sim remembered that muddled feeling from childhood, so she explained it carefully. “Gliz is much bigger than just Town. It’s bigger than Earth, even. We could walk for our whole lives and not see it all, but right now we’re going to a place I know, a nice place where we can build houses. We’ll be closer to the mountains, too, and there’s a lake I want to find, and rivers where you can learn to swim.”

Alex considered her words, then nodded seriously. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. This is Gliz, too, and there are rivers.”

“And you know,” she said, the moment finally right, “I can tell you a secret about it.”

He grew still, listening hard. Secrets are always good to hear when you’re little.

“Sometimes when I’m out here alone, I think there are other people, too. I don’t know what they look like or where they are, but they know much more about Gliz than we do. And maybe if we find them, we can talk to them, and they’ll tell us all sorts of things.”

“Are they aliens?” the boy asked, incredulous.

It took Sim a moment to answer the question. “No,” she said, finally. “They’re from here. They probably think we’re aliens, though.”

“We’re from here, too, though,” Alex said meditatively, then added, “Maybe we could ask them where the lake is. Maybe they know.”

Maybe they did. It was good to know that Gliz had a real name, even if she’d never hear it. But she still might find them, if she went farther, listened harder. A new village meant a new base, and a month’s journey from there would take her well into the mountains. She’d find their Gliz, wherever that was, and if she was brave and lucky, she might hear what name it held.

---

Ignatius heard the hatch slide open but could not turn his head to look. A figure stepped lightly into his peripheral vision, out of focus until she drifted before him, then tilted her head, slight and imperious, revealing Charis. She was stooped now, too, having also grown old in the previous decades, though in his dreams she remained as she had been the last night they spent together in her quarters.

“Ignatius,” she said. “Ignatius.” Repeating his name like she knew how wonderful it sounded in her mouth. Her hands slid to his shoulders, and he could have wept for the touch of another human being he loved. Resisting the oppressive gravity of the ship, he raised his hands enough to rest them on her arms. In their year together on the Philoctetes, she had smelled expensive. Now she smelled sharply resinous and clean, like open air. That’s the scent of Gliz on her shoulder, where he buried his head. Her clothes must have hung on those low, scrubby bushes that grew near Town, the ones Sim had not yet named. He had never known the wind that crossed the scrub, but he felt its ghost on Charis’ skin.

“You know,” she said, as though continuing a conversation only briefly interrupted. “I feel so light here. I feel like a ballerina. Ship gravity is heaven. But.” She looked at him critically. Doctor’s eye. “How do you feel?”

“I’m going blind, and I can’t move,” he said. “So, you can guess.”

She nodded. He’d kissed her twenty-eight years ago, a perfunctory goodbye because he still didn’t believe she would really desert. She took the tender to the surface with everything she owned and a significant portion of the medical bay. “Thief,” he’d said, only half in jest.

“If we want to survive, we need everything we can get,” she had answered. Then he’d gone and sent the letter of desertion home.

He’d refused to speak to her, and now all that time was lost, regretted as he regretted the letters of desertion. Nevertheless, he’d made Simram tell him everything happening on the surface. He’d heard about the Battle of Gliz and that she and a Martian medic had expanded the clinic as more ships limped into orbit. He’d relented and spoken to her again only when she’d had Sim because Sim meant it was all real, and he must accept it.

“How did you get in?”

“Salmerón is surprisingly understanding.”

“De Crèvecoeur,” he said. “How much did it cost?”

She sighed, “Grandfather has spent a lot of money on this. But it won’t be enough. We can’t rely on one man behaving reasonably well because of my family. There are 150 strangers on the surface now, and they’re loyal servants of the Company. And they’re armed.”

It pained him that all he’d done—persuading Salmerón, committing the rest of his life to Gliz, and promising to scuttle the Philoctetes—had cost everything and accomplished so little. “At least bribery works,” he said. “What will you do now?”

“Not much. I’ll spend most of my time in the brig. You know it’s only a year back? Miraculous. War’s good for tech, I suppose. They’ll have to agree to the trial on Earth, and then maybe we’ll have a shot. And Sim will hide them, in the meantime.”

She stumbled on Sim’s name.

“Will you come back?”

“It depends on how good the lawyers are.”

“Perhaps I’ll see you, then.”

She ignored the obvious lie. “What will you do?”

“I’ll stay with the Philoctetes as long as I can. Then we must scuttle her.”

“Ignatius, the gravity on Gliz—”

“—I know. But I promised Salmerón, and my orders stand. I do have some ideas for how I’ll scuttle her. She could be useful, down on the surface.”

“But not just yet.”

“No. Not yet. They’ll still need communications.”

Charis’ mouth was small and tight, and she did not meet his eyes until she said, “I have something for you.” From one of her pockets, she produced a small, misshapen apple, red-cheeked and streaked delicately green.

Ignatius took it from her clumsily. “Adam’s apple,” he said. And then he wished he hadn’t, because Charis laugh-cried as she curled his fingers around its cool, smooth skin. He had forgotten how apples smelled, how sweet they were. How warm Charis could be when she curled beside him in the narrow bunk.

---

Doctor Cook helped him to the airlock, where he crept from the Colossus to the Philoctetes and felt gravity leave him, replaced by this sudden, directionless buoyancy. Home. And himself again.

Two days later, the Philoctetes had been reprovisioned, and he wore a new uniform. He watched the Colossus depart, taking Charis with it, and a terrible regret flashed through his heart as the ship’s emptiness settled around him. But the grief he felt came to be bearable. He supposed it was because he had become a different sort of creature, belonging neither to Earth nor the Company, but to the Philoctetes as she kept time with Gliz. How painful it would be to return to Earth and be trapped under the millstone of its gravity. A long time ago, Simram had told him he should descend and live a human life on Gliz, instead of remaining in the firmament, watching over people he loved but could never touch. Simram—and Charis and all the other deserters—had been right, of course, but he hadn’t understood until it was far too late. And anyway, they needed the Philoctetes now. He would descend when the work was done, but not yet.

Not everything was lost. Much remained to him. The bridge was fuzzy and haloed, the world drawing closer to him as his eyes failed, but the Philoctetes’ new sensors replaced them, and he could overlook the whole of Gliz now. He preserved the tenuous thread that linked him to Sim and linked Sim to the rest of the universe. They would need the link if Charis’ plan was to work.

Somewhere near him, a chime. He felt for the screen.

“Sim,” he said, his eyes closed but his ears alert. “You reading me?”

“Reading you, St. Ignatius. Better than ever. Is that the new gear?”

“Probably. It’s good to hear your voice. The orchards are fine.”

“It’s the graves. They know better than to disturb the dead.” Far away, Sim seemed to hesitate, and he knew what was coming next: “Any word from Mom?”

It hurt to tell her the truth, but he did. “Nothing from her or the Colossus.”

“What about the lawyers?”

“Not the lawyers, either, but she’ll send us word when she can.” He waited for her to respond, but she said nothing, so he added, “She’s so proud of you. Wherever she is, she’s proud of you.”

Hold the line, he supposed, but not for the Company anymore.

---

Aurelius stayed back long enough to watch Town fall to pieces and to stand in front of the garden walls, reminding everyone who approached that there were graves inside as well as apple trees. He told Sim it took less than an hour to knock down the shacks they’d built, their insides turned out, and treasures people had guarded with pride now just junk. Like that prism they’d both loved as kids, hanging in the window of the miner’s bunkhouse and casting rainbows on the walls. He’d pulled it out of the rubble.

“There’s nothing to go back to,” he said when he caught up with them in the foothills, apple seedlings on his back, having followed the path they’d trampled. “I guess that’s the point.”

“But not the orchards? Ignatius said they’ve left them alone.”

“No. Not the orchards.” They shared a moment of silence for the graves, then Aurelius went on, “I saw some of the new mining equipment. It’s huge. It’ll chew through the surface in seconds. There won’t be much left of anything in a few years.”

The new camp was a full kilometer from what had been Town. When they returned, the orchards would be all that was left of their home, and this new camp would be full of strangers, who called it by some other name. A hundred and fifty-two people, the printers running day and night to make new buildings, a laboratory, meeting rooms, a canteen. Aurelius said some of them would be two stories.

“They’ll have stairs,” he’d said. “It’ll be like a city.”

Meanwhile, the children of Gliz were slow to make their new home, and for the first days of their exile, Sim walked from one end of camp to another, supervising and counting heads and taking inventory. She tried not to think about what came next. Above them, the trade routes would reopen, and ships full of substrate and fabricators and building equipment and meds would arrive. Gliz would be a way station to farther ports, and the sky at night would be brightened by passing ships, flotillas of strangers in such crowds she shivered and wondered how she’d remember their names. If Mom was right, and Ignatius was clever, she’d get new boots and a tent and a ground sheet, maybe even the kind Company explorers used. In the future, she might reach the planet’s oceans, where archipelagoes raised their stony headlands over the sea. Maybe she’d find them, if they let her: their footprints on the ground, their marks on the walls of valleys she had not yet seen, leading her farther into Gliz.

Eventually, their foothills camp would become permanent. They’d build something very much like Town, but perhaps better arranged. It would be in the shadow of the mountains, where Aurelius thought the soil was volcanic and rich. The water was fresher, and she had seen fish in the deep pools. Or no, she corrected herself. Something like a fish, but not a fish—something that belonged wholly to this place.

She tried out names for this new place. Gliz. New Town. None of them felt right, but they would find it. Some day in the future, a child would call out to her friends and say, I’m going home now, and the name she used would come naturally to her. The right name, familiar in her mouth, that meant she was where she was supposed to be.