‘No,’ Aya said, annoyed at the question.

‘You sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay.’ Tessa raised her palms. ‘Why do you want to move, then?’

Her daughter’s bravado was shrivelling before her eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ she mumbled.

‘That’s not what you told me,’ Pop said. Tessa craned her head back to find him standing in the doorway. How long had he been watching? ‘Go on, bug,’ he said kindly.

Aya said nothing. She fidgeted.

Pop looked to Tessa. ‘She’s upset about that grounder they found.’

‘Oh, honey,’ Tessa said. A pang of jealousy blossomed in her, and she hated it, but she couldn’t shake it, either. Why had Aya shared that with Pop over her?

Ky fell quiet, understanding as far as his baby brain could that something was up with the grown-ups. Pop reached over and picked him up, making distracting nonsense sounds, leaving nothing to get between mother and daughter.

‘I’m upset about that, too,’ Tessa said. ‘Everybody’s upset about it.’ That was true, and how could they not be? Some grounder thief, murdered and tossed away. Murdered. In the Fleet. Was there anyone who wasn’t rattled by that news, who wasn’t still wrestling with the idea of something like that happening here? There wasn’t much to the story yet, but that didn’t stop everybody from talking endlessly about it. Tessa scolded herself for not bringing it up with Aya before now. She hadn’t thought it was anything a little kid needed to concern herself with, but clearly, it was. Sometimes, she lost sight of how easy it was for children to absorb the things adults whispered about. ‘That was an awful thing that happened,’ she said. ‘A really terrible thing. But the patrols are on it. They’re gonna find the bad guys who did it, and it won’t happen again.’

‘How do you know that?’ Aya said. It was a direct challenge, a question that demanded an answer.

‘I—’

‘She doesn’t,’ Pop said. ‘She wants you to feel better.’

Tessa glared at her father. ‘How is that helping?’

He shrugged. ‘She wants the truth, Tess. She’s old enough to understand what happened, so she’s old enough for – hey, hey, quit it, buddy.’ He turned his attention to his grandson, who was pulling hard at his remaining hair.

His refuting her in front of her daughter was irritating, but he was – all the more irritatingly – right. Tessa folded her hands together and spoke to her daughter, who was growing up too fast. ‘I don’t know that it won’t happen again. I’m bothered by it, and I’m scared, too. But I also know that . . . that kind of thing isn’t normal here. Our home is a safe place, Aya. It really is.’

‘That’s not—’ Aya struggled. She understood so much, and yet, not quite enough to pick apart her feelings. ‘I’m not scared about it happening again.’

‘Then what?’

‘I’m not scared.’ She frowned harder. ‘You said we can’t go live on a planet because bad stuff happens there. But – but bad stuff does happen here. I don’t understand why we can’t live on the ground if bad stuff happens here, too. If it happens everywhere, then . . . then it’s everywhere.’

Aya’s words were clumsy, but Tessa understood. Every lesson she’d tried to impart was based in principle, rather than practicality. No, we can’t move planetside, because it’s too dangerous. No, you can’t have creds, because you need to learn to trade. No, you can’t watch Martian vids, because they solve every problem with violence, and that’s not our way. No, you can’t keep all the cookies to yourself, they belong to the hex, and you have to share, because we share. That’s what we do. That’s who we are.

But now there was one news story, one unpleasant headline, that had thrown all that out of whack. There was danger in the Fleet, and it came from people who hadn’t cared about trade, who hadn’t minded violence – and those people were Exodan. That was the part that bothered Tessa the most. Everybody was so focused on the grounder, they sidestepped the one sentence that had shaken her: the patrols were pretty sure the dead guy’s crew was Exodan, and would anybody who knew anything please come forward?

She looked at her daughter, bags packed, brow furrowed. Her daughter, who didn’t understand that rooms cost money, who had unabashedly called on extended family for help when she lacked the ability to trade. Fear was the primary driver for Aya wanting to be elsewhere, despite how not scared she claimed to be. But maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe it wasn’t that Aya didn’t want to be Exodan. She was Exodan already.

Maybe, in her daughter’s eyes, it was the Fleet that wasn’t Exodan anymore.

‘I think,’ Tessa said, getting to her feet, ‘I think we could do with something out of the ordinary this evening. How about . . . fish fry for dinner?’

Aya looked suspicious. ‘We only do that on birthdays.’

‘Well, I want to treat my kid. Is that allowed?’

Tessa watched her daughter wrestle between a nagging existential problem and the promise of greasy, crispy, calorie-laden food. ‘Can we go to the waterball game, too?’ she said.

‘Is there a game tonight?’ Tessa asked her father.