She thought about how much she liked the things he sent them – the plex window, the sim hub, a box of spices from some alien port. A guilty, toxic idea surfaced, the same one that had awoken her hours before. Tessa shoved it away before it could make itself plain. She focused on her son.

She slid off the hanging bench onto the cupola seating area. It wasn’t much, just a shelf around the edges. The view wasn’t much either – at least, not compared to the big, broad starscapes you got at the plazas. But this was her own corner of sky, and she liked that. She’d always liked that.

Ky wriggled against her grasp. She let him go. He toddled out onto the plex, brown feet against black sky. He sat, all at once, unceremoniously. ‘Stars!’ he said, looking down through the gap between his bent knees.

‘Yep,’ Tessa said.

He pointed a chubby finger. ‘Is five stars.’ With his other hand, he held up two fingers and a thumb.

‘It’s a bit more than five, baby.’

The stars darkened as a hefty transport shuttle sailed past, docking lights blinking, hull crusty with tacked-on tech and repurposed siding. Ky shrieked with glee. ‘Oh man!’ He looked to her, his eyes and mouth perfect circles. ‘Mama, did you see?’

‘Yeah!’

‘Wow! Did you – did you see?’

‘Yeah, I saw.’

‘Dat’s my ship.’

‘Wow, that’s your ship? Cool.’

‘’s my ship. ’s all fixed.’

Aya had lost dessert privileges for a tenday over the origin of all fixed, but even though the illicit sim babysitting sessions had ended, the vocabulary addition remained. Tessa sighed, hoping her eldest hadn’t irrevocably mixed up the younger’s brain.

She let him play on the window, automatically responding with stock affirmations as he babbled on and on (he was on about . . . pillows? She’d lost the plot, and so had he, it seemed). Her mind was on the sky at her feet, which was to say she wasn’t thinking about much at all. Something about that view always set her right, even though she’d seen it a million times. She thought back to the first time she’d been planetside, on a family trip to Hashkath. Ashby hadn’t been much older than Ky. Mom was still with them. Their first night, Pop called Tessa out to the courtyard by their bunkhouse. ‘Look at that, kiddo,’ he’d said. She’d tilted her head up to match his. As an adult, she remembered how different the stars looked in that moment, how muted, how fuzzy. Her father had wanted to share something special with her, she knew in hindsight, but her immediate impression then was one of fear. There was no plex, no frame between her and that sky. She felt that any second, someone would switch the gravity off, and she’d float up and up, out forever. She’d stayed outside for all of two seconds before running back in and clinging fast to her bewildered mother, sobbing that she wanted to go home.

That experience still lingered on the few subsequent vacations she’d taken in adulthood, even though she knew nobody could turn off a planet’s gravity, even though she knew her walls were less reliable than grounders’ atmospheres. She knew that at home, she wasn’t really looking down. She was up, sideways, all around. She was looking in the direction the artigrav nets told her to look, the same direction the old centrifuges made her ancestors look (and their view, of course, had always been spinning). But she could know that and still feel in her gut that stars lived below her feet. That was normal. That was where they belonged.

She thought, though, of visitors she’d had from somewhere else. The last time Ashby had been there with his crew – Ky had been tiny then, she reflected, remembering him kicking his untrained legs in her brother’s arms – those two odd techs and the Aandrisk had parked themselves in the cupola for hours, sitting on the floor like Ky was now, freaked out and fascinated, never tiring of the novelty. A person’s view of the stars was, ultimately, a matter of perspective. Of upbringing.

Tessa wondered how Aya would do with a planetside sky. She never came down to the family cupola – or any cupola, for that matter. These days, wherever she was in a room, she strategically placed herself as far from walls as she could manage. Would she mind being close to a wall if her feet were always held fast to the ground? Would she look out windows if she could trust them to not suck her through?

As for Ky, he was small. The sky was just another constant to him, like cookies and pajamas and family. He wouldn’t care one way or the other for a few years yet. He’d absorb whatever environment you stuck him in. All fixed.

The guilty idea began to surface again, and Tessa knew it was time to get about her day. ‘Come on, baby,’ she said, gathering Ky, wiping his spit off the plex where he’d been licking it. ‘I gotta get to work.’

They returned to the bench and headed upward. He looked up, watching the cable carry them. Tessa looked down just in time to see the stars darken again. ‘Hey, Ky, look! There’s a skiff!’

Ky nearly threw himself out of her arms, doubling over at the waist, pointing his head toward the cupola. But he was too late. The ship had already passed.

‘Aw, bummer,’ Tessa said. ‘It’s gone now.’

Her son looked at her, stricken, betrayed. His eyes widened. His lip trembled. The entirety of his face collapsed into itself, and he wailed with bitter injury.

Dammit. Well. Time for everybody else to wake up anyway.