‘We can’t do that, not all at once,’ said another. ‘You’d fuck up the carbon–nitrogen ratio. You’d throw the whole system out of whack.’

‘So, don’t do it all at once. A little at a time, and we . . . we . . .’

‘See,’ their supervisor said. ‘There’s the issue.’ He looked around the group, waiting for someone to step in with the answer.

‘Storage,’ Eyas said, shutting her eyes. She’d done some quick math while the others spoke, much as she hated to reduce something this important to numbers. One hundred and eighty Centres in the Fleet, each capable of composting a thousand corpses over a standard – but not at the same time. A Human body took just under four tendays to break down fully – bones and all – and there wasn’t space to lay in more than a hundred or so at once. Even if you could set aside the carbon–nitrogen ratio, you couldn’t change time. You’d have to store tens of thousands of bodies in the interim, which the morgues could not handle. More importantly, you’d have to tell tens of thousands of families that they’d have to wait to grieve, wait to hold a funeral, wait their turn to properly say goodbye. How would you choose who went first? Roll dice? Pick a number? No, the trauma was great enough without adding anything smacking of preferential treatment to the mix. But then . . . what would they do? And how would those same families respond when told that the people ripped away from them would not be joining their ancestors’ cycle – would not transform into nourishment for the gardens, would not fill the airways and stomachs of those who remained – like they’d always been promised?

She put her face in her hands. Once more, silence returned to the group, and this time, no one broke it.

After a while, the ship slowed and stopped. Eyas stood, the pain inside stepping back to make room for the task at hand. She listened to Costel give instructions. She put on her helmet. She walked to the airlock. One door closed behind her; another opened ahead.

What lay outside was an obscenity, an ugliness she would wrestle another time. She blocked out the ruined districts and broken windows, focusing only on the bodies floating between. Bodies she could handle. Bodies she understood.

The caretakers scattered into the vacuum, thrusters firing on their backs. They flew alone, each of them, the same way that they worked. Eyas darted forward. The sun was muted behind her tinted visor, and the stars had lost their lustre. She hit her stabilisers, coming to a halt in front of the first she would collect. A man with salt-and-pepper hair and round cheeks. A farmer, by the clothes he wore. His leg dangled oddly – possibly the result of some impact during the explosive decompression – and a necklace, still tied around his neck, swayed near his peaceful face. He was peaceful, even with his eyes half-open and a final gasp at his lips. She pulled him toward her, wrapping her arms around his torso from behind. His hair pressed against her visor, and she could see the flecks of ice woven through it, the crunchy spires the cold had sculpted. Oh, stars, they’re going to thaw, she thought. She hadn’t considered that. Spacing deaths were rare, and she’d never overseen a funeral for one. She knew what normal procedure was: vacuum-exposed bodies got put in pressure capsules, where they could return to normal environmental conditions without things getting unseemly. But there weren’t enough pressure capsules for the Oxomoco, not in the whole Fleet. No, they’d be piling frozen bodies in the relative warmth of a cargo hold. A crude half-measure improvised in haste, just like everything else they were doing that day.

Eyas took a tight breath of canned air. How were they supposed to deal with this? How would they give these people dignity? How would they ever, ever make this right?

She closed her eyes and took another breath, a good one this time. ‘From the stars, came the ground,’ she said to the body. ‘From the ground, we stood. To the ground, we return.’ They were words for a funeral, not retrieval, and speaking to corpses was not an action she’d ever practised (and likely never would again). She didn’t see the point of filling ears that couldn’t hear. But this – this was the way they would heal. She didn’t know where this body or the others would go. She didn’t know how her guild would proceed. But she knew they were Exodan. They were Exodan, and no matter what threatened to tear them apart, tradition held them together. She flew back toward the ship, ferrying her temporary charge, reciting the words the First Generation had written. ‘Here, at the Centre of our lives, we carry our beloved dead. We honour their breath, which fills our lungs. We honour their blood, which fills our hearts. We honour their bodies, which fuel our own . . .’

Kip

Not in a million years would Kip have wanted to be held up – that was for kids, not eleven-year-olds – but he couldn’t help but feel kind of envious of the little droolers sitting comfy around their parents’ heads. He was too big to be held, but too short to see over the forest of grown-ups that filled the shuttledock. He stretched up on tiptoe, swaying this way and that, trying to see something other than shoulders and shirt sleeves. But no, whenever he found a gap to look through, all there was beyond was more of the same. Tons of people packed in tight, with kids up top, making the view all the more impossible. He dropped his heels down and huffed.

His dad noticed, and bent down to speak directly in Kip’s ear. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an idea.’