Tessa searched for the right response, the right comfort, some of that motherly instinct bullshit you were supposed to just have. She found nothing.

Aya sniffled mightily and said: ‘Can I say a swear word?’

Tessa remembered a couple tendays prior, when she’d knocked a mug of mek onto her workbench while repairing a cleanerbot. A cascade of profanities had exited her mouth before she’d noticed the kids had entered the room. Don’t say stuff like that, Tessa had told them at the time. I only said it because I was mad. She’d spent several days after trying to make Ky stop gleefully chanting ‘son of a bitch’ – and had won that particular skirmish – but hadn’t realised Aya sponged up a lesson from the exchange, too. ‘Yes,’ Tessa said. ‘This is a time when a swear word is entirely appropriate.’

Aya took a breath. ‘I fucking hate them,’ she said. ‘I’m gonna kick all their asses.’

Tessa smothered the laugh pressing against her lips. She gave a serious nod. ‘That was two swear words.’

‘Well, I’m really mad.’

‘And you know fighting solves nothing, right?’

‘Ugh, Mom.’ Aya rolled her bloodshot eyes. ‘I didn’t mean like that. I just meant . . . I meant . . .’

‘I know.’ Tessa put her arm around her daughter and kissed the top of her head. ‘I want to kick all their asses, too.’

Eyas

Sunny had become a habit, and Eyas didn’t know what to make of that. It wasn’t romance, she knew that much. Romance had never been her thing. She watched him as he traced the path back from the bed to where his pants had ended up. He picked up the rumpled pair and dug around in a pocket. ‘Do you mind if I . . . ?’ he asked, holding a retrieved redreed pipe and an accompanying tin.

Eyas shook her head. ‘Not at all.’ He’d never done this before, and she found it endearing. This wasn’t part of a seductive script. There was nothing in this for her. The man wanted a smoke. On the clock though he was, something had shifted enough for him to feel comfortable not spending every second entertaining her. They were just . . . hanging out now. She liked that.

He returned to bed, leaving the pants where they’d been. ‘Do you want some?’

‘Not really my thing.’ She reached for his bottle of Laru kick, an ever-present part of these evenings. ‘This, however, is.’

Sunny nodded as he filled his pipe. ‘Help yourself.’

He puffed; she poured. They sat side by side, leaning against propped pillows, close enough to feel the warm brush of the other’s bare skin but nowhere in the realm of a cuddle. Eyas felt perfectly at ease. No pretence, no bullshit. No ‘M.’ She felt like herself, nothing more or less. Judging by the content neutrality on Sunny’s face, he felt the same.

It was really nice.

‘Is this what you always wanted to be?’ Eyas asked, cupping her glass in the palm of her hand. Sintalin benefited from a bit of warmth, she’d learned.

Sunny exhaled. The smoke twisted up toward the air filter above. ‘You mean, a host?’ His face shifted into a far-away smile. ‘Not my first choice. I was going to be a Monster Maker.’

‘A what now?’

‘A Monster Maker! Didn’t you play that sim?’

‘Oh, stars.’ Eyas shut her eyes and laughed. ‘I’d forgotten about that. Where you go around the galaxy scanning different animals to . . . collect their DNA, or something.’

‘Yeah! And then you smash them together to make hybrids!’

‘This was for some superficially educational purpose, right?’

‘Yeah, yeah, you did it to solve problems. Say, like – say you’ve got to cross a flooded area. You’ve got DNA scans for something with long legs, and scans for something that can move through water. You punch ’em both into your Monsteriser—’

‘Your—’

‘Your Monsteriser. Eyas, please, this is serious technology we’re discussing.’

‘Of course, I’m sorry.’ She swallowed her smile. ‘Please explain how a Monsteriser works.’

‘Well . . . I can’t, but that’s beside the point. The point is, it makes a monster. It is the most crucial tool a Monster Maker has.’ He bowed his head. ‘It was a very, very hard day when my dad broke the news that none of it was real.’

Eyas patted his shoulder. ‘My condolences.’

Sunny scrunched his face into a parody of grief. ‘Thank you.’

‘So once you got over the shock,’ she said, ‘you decided the only thing left for you was a life of getting people off.’

Smoke shot out of Sunny’s nose as he laughed. ‘There were a few more steps between that and this. I bounced around for a while. I thought about being a doctor, but I’m a lazy student. I spent some time in one of the festival troupes—’

‘You play music?’

‘No, I sing. It was fun, but . . . I dunno. Wasn’t what I wanted to do forever, y’know? Then one of my friends, she started her host training, and she was telling me about it – not just the physical side of it, but all the ethos and whatnot. I was like, hey, that sounds pretty cool. And it was, and here I am.’

Eyas sipped her drink. ‘You found something that incorporates everything else you tried. You perform, you make people feel better.’ She took another sip and smiled. ‘And maybe sometimes you help people with their monsters.’