Her colleague gestured at his scrib and opened his satchel, and the camera spheres flew out, glowing blue as they absorbed sight and sound. Isabel reached up and tapped the frame of the hud that rested over her eyes. She tapped again, two short, one long. The hud registered the command, and a little blinking light at the corner of her left eye let her know her device was recording as well.

She cleared her throat. ‘This is senior archivist Isabel Itoh, head of the Asteria Archives,’ she said, hoping the hud could pick up her voice over the din. ‘I am with junior archivist Deshi Arocha, and the date is GC standard 129/303. We have just received word of— of—’ Her attention was dragged away by a man crumbling soundlessly to his knees. She shook her head and brought herself centre. ‘—of a catastrophic accident aboard the Oxomoco. Some kind of breach and decompression. It is believed a shuttle crash was involved, but we do not have many details yet. We are now headed to the public cupola, to document what we can.’ She was not a reporter. She did not have to embellish a moment with extraneous words. She simply had to preserve the one unfolding.

She and Deshi made their way through the crowd, surrounded by their cloud of cams. The congregation was dense, but people saw the spheres, and they saw the archivists’ robes, and they made way. Isabel said nothing further. There was more than enough for the cams to capture.

‘My sister,’ a woman sobbed to a helpless-looking patroller. ‘Please, I think she was visiting a friend—’

‘Shh, it’s okay, we’re okay,’ a man said to the child he held tight against his chest. ‘We’re gonna be home soon, just hold on to me.’ The child did nothing but bury xyr face as far as it would go into xyr father’s shirt.

‘Star by star, we go together,’ sang a group of all ages, standing in a circle, holding hands. Their voices were shaky, but the old melody rose clear. ‘In ev’ry ship, a family strong . . .’

Isabel could not make out much else. Most were crying, or keening, or chewing their lips in silence.

They reached the edge of the cupola, and as the scene outside came into view, Isabel suddenly understood that the clamour they’d passed through was appropriate, fitting, the only reaction that made any sense in the face of this. She walked down the crowded steps, down as close as she could to the viewing glass, close as she could to the thing she didn’t want to see.

The rest of the Exodus Fleet was out there, thirty homestead ships besides her own, orbiting together in a loose, measured cluster. All was as it should be . . . except one, tangled in a violent shroud of debris. She could see where the pieces belonged – a jagged breach, a hollow where walls and homes had been. She could see sheet metal, crossbeams, odd specks scattered between. She could tell, even from this distance, that many of those specks were not made of metal or plex. They were too curved, too irregular, and they changed shape as they tumbled. They were Human. They were bodies.

Deshi let out a wordless moan, joining the chorus around them.

‘Keep recording,’ Isabel said. She forced the words from her clenched throat. They felt as though they were bleeding. ‘It’s all we can do for them now.’

Eyas

‘Do they know how many yet?’ someone asked. Nobody had said much of anything since they’d left the Asteria, and the abrupt end of quiet startled Eyas out of wherever she’d been.

‘Forty-three thousand, six hundred,’ Costel said. He cleared his throat. ‘That’s our best estimate at this point, based on counting the evacuees who scanned in. We’ll get a more accurate number once we— once we collect the rest.’

Eyas had never seen her supervisor this rattled, but his halting words and uneasy hands mirrored her own, mirrored them all. Nothing about this was normal. Nothing about this was okay. If someone had told her the standard before – when she’d finally shed her apprentice stripes – where accepting this profession would lead her, would she have agreed to it? Would she have continued forward, knowing how this day would unfold?

Probably. Yes. But some warning would’ve been nice.

She sat now with the other caretakers from her segment, twenty of them in total, scattered around the floor of a volunteered cargo ship, headed to the Oxomoco. More cargo ships and caretakers were on their way as well, a fleet within the Fleet. This ship normally carried foodstuffs, she could tell. The smells of spice and oil hung heavy around them, ghosts of good meals long gone. Not the smells she was accustomed to at work. Scented soap, she was used to. Metal. Blood, sometimes. Methylbutyl esters. Cloth. Dirt. Rot, ritual, renewal.

She shifted in her heavy exosuit. This, too, was wrong, as far a cry as there was from her usual light funerary garments. But it wasn’t the suit that was making her uncomfortable, nor the spices tickling her nose. Forty-three thousand, six hundred. ‘How,’ she said, working some moisture into her mouth, ‘how are we supposed to lay in that many?’ The thought had been clawing at her ever since she’d looked out the window thirteen hours prior.

Costel said nothing for too long a time. ‘The guild doesn’t . . . we don’t know yet.’ A ruckus broke out, twenty questions overlapping. He put up his palms. ‘The problem is obvious. We can’t accommodate that many at once.’

‘There’s room,’ one of Eyas’ colleagues said. ‘We’re set up for twice our current death rate. If every Centre in the Fleet takes some, there’s no problem.’