Dron leaned toward the display, his cheeks swirling speckled blue. ‘Huh,’ he said.

Viola pointed at Dron’s face. ‘What’s that one mean?’

The Aeluon gave Viola a tired look. ‘Stars, you are not going to let this go, are you?’

‘How else am I supposed to know what’s up with you if you don’t explain your colours? See, now there’s some yellow in there. What’s yellow mean?’

‘Yellow means lots of things.’

‘What’s this yellow mean?’

‘Annoyed. It means I’m annoyed.’

Viola cuffed the innocent Laru. ‘Jeez, Tuumuu, stop bugging Dron. Can’t you see he’s yellow?’

‘Kip,’ Dron called. ‘Will you please get over here and make your cousin behave?’

‘And will you all please shut up?’ Kreshkeris said from a bench nearby. She was taking furious notes on her scrib, like always. ‘Some of us would like to actually do well on this assignment.’ She was a lifelong spacer, too, and always acted like she had to prove herself to the grounder Aandrisks they went to school with. Some things weren’t that different.

Kip walked up to Viola with his hands in his pockets. ‘Hey, cousin,’ he said. ‘Behave.’ He could hear his accent, his imprecise words. But it was cool. With this group, he knew it was cool.

Viola smirked at the joke. Their first day at school, Dron had asked if she and Kip were related, which was hilarious, because Viola came from Titan, and they looked nothing alike. At least, they didn’t think so. Everybody else did. ‘Bug-fucking spacer,’ Viola said in her weird, flowy Ensk.

‘Cow-licking Solan,’ Kip shot back.

‘That’s for Martians, you idiot. There aren’t any cows in the Outers.’

‘I dunno, I’m looking at one right now.’

They both grinned.

‘They’re talking shit about us again,’ Dron said in the others’ general direction.

‘You have no idea what we’re saying,’ Kip said.

An elaborate explosion of colour danced across the Aeluon’s face. ‘And neither do you.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Viola said.

‘You guys,’ Tuumuu said, the fur on her neck waving in the air as her big funny feet danced impatiently. ‘Look at this.’

They leaned in to see what had gotten their fuzzy history nerd so excited. On the pedestal before them rested an ancient lump of metal, smashed in on itself, worn down by time.

‘It’s a star-tracker,’ Tuumuu gushed. ‘It’s what they used to study the sky. Think about it! They were trying to find people out there, too. Only . . . only we showed up too late.’ Her head sagged. ‘Stars, that’s sad.’

They leaned in closer. ‘Doesn’t look like much,’ Dron said.

‘That’s ’cause it’s old, dummy.’

‘How’d it work?’ Viola asked.

Kip cocked his head. ‘Looks like there was a switch here.’ He reached out and picked up the star-tracker.

Everything went batshit at once. An alarm went off. Previously unseen lights started flashing. His friends yelled in unison.

‘Kip, what the fuck?!’

‘Dude, what are you—’

‘Put it back!’

A shout in Reskitkish came from behind. A line of translation shot across Kip’s hud: Put the object down.

He turned to see an Aandrisk security guard standing behind him. She was about two heads taller than he was, and had a stun gun at the ready.

Kip stammered. ‘I – what—’

The Aandrisk repeated herself in hissing Klip: ‘Set the item down.’

Kip looked down at the lump of metal he was still holding stupidly. He had no idea what he’d done wrong, but he did as told. ‘I – I wasn’t stealing—’

The guard glared at him, and everyone else. She looked straight at Kreshkeris as she walked away. ‘Mind your foreign friends,’ she said.

Kreshkeris got up from her bench and stormed over to Kip, her feathers on end. She was tall, too. ‘What were you thinking?’

Kip looked at his friends – Tuumuu an anxious puff from front to back, Dron red as a bruise, Viola laughing with her forehead in her palm. What was he thinking? He had a better question: what had he done? ‘I wasn’t stealing,’ he said again.

‘Kip, you – you know you can’t touch stuff at a museum, right?’ Dron said.

Kip blinked. ‘Why not?’

‘Oh, stars,’ Viola said, laughing harder.

Tuumuu stepped in. ‘These are priceless things,’ she explained. Her fur started to settle. ‘This star-finder might be the only one left. If you break it, that’s . . . that’s it. There are no more, and we can’t learn anything.’

‘If you break it, why not fix it?’ Kip frowned. ‘You can’t learn anything like – like this.’ He gestured to the trouble-making metal. ‘You can’t learn how it works if it’s broke.’

‘I – well – you should take an archeology class,’ the Laru said, her tone brightening. ‘Professor Eshisk is great. You’d learn all about restoration techniques, and preserving context, and—’

‘The point, Kip,’ Kreshkeris said, ‘is that you can’t touch. That’s the rules.’