He nodded. ‘Fast Hands versus Meteors,’ he said. ‘Just a scrimmage, not a qualifier.’

‘Still, that sounds fun,’ Tessa said. She wasn’t much for waterball, but for her kid, she’d put up with a scrimmage. She smiled. ‘Sure. We can go to the game.’

‘Looks like it’s you and me tonight, buddy,’ Pop said to Ky, who was dozing off on his shoulder.

‘No,’ Tessa said. ‘No, we should all go.’ She took in her family, the mess, the room that had been hers. ‘It’s more fun if we go together.’

Eyas

Eyas hurried into the Centre, her heart a touch lighter. Her supervisor hadn’t said anything over the vox except that patrol was there and wanted to talk to the grounder’s caretaker. That had to mean progress. The stasis chamber holding the corpse had been left undisturbed since she’d cleaned the body over a tenday ago. Finally, finally patrol had found something. They’d found someone to take him home.

She headed to one of the family waiting rooms, where she’d asked for patrol to wait for her. The door swung open at her gesture, and a woman wearing a distinctive shoulder patch sat on one of the couches inside.

The patroller stood. ‘Hello, M. I’m Patroller Ruby Boothe,’ she said. ‘I understand you’re the one looking after Sawyer Gursky.’ She was full-time, her patch indicated, but oddly, she didn’t have a volunteer second with her. Under any other circumstances, Eyas would’ve reported her, but in this case, she got the impression the absence was for discretion’s sake. Perhaps the patroller didn’t want to stoke the gossip further. If so, Eyas respected that.

The addition of a last name to Sawyer’s first should’ve kept Eyas’ mood aloft, but the grim look on the woman’s face prompted a spike of concern. ‘You found his family?’

The twitch of Patroller Boothe’s mouth said otherwise. She gestured for Eyas to sit, then pulled out her scrib. ‘Sawyer Gursky,’ she read. ‘Twenty-four Solar years of age, born on Mushtullo, no siblings. We had to do some digging, but he’s a descendant of the Arvelo family on the Al-Qaum. Housing records say they left to grab some ground right after contact.’

‘No relations here, then?’ This wasn’t a surprise, given what Sawyer had said during their brief interaction, but she’d been hoping she remembered wrong.

‘No.’ Boothe cleared her throat. ‘We don’t have much communication with anybody in Central space, so it took a while to find the proper folks to talk to. Local law enforcement helped us out in the end.’ She was dancing around something. Whatever it was, it bothered her. ‘There was an outbreak of saltlick fever that tore through the Human district on Mushtullo about thirteen standards ago.’

‘I don’t know saltlick fever.’

‘Neither did I. One of those wildfire mutations you hear about from time to time. Some minor alien thing that jumps species and fucks everyone over for a few tendays until imubots can be updated. I’ll spare you the details. It was . . . well, it was bad. He lost his whole family. Grandparents, parents, everybody. Sawyer was the only one that made it.’

Eyas converted standards to Solars. ‘He would’ve been . . . what? Six?’

‘’Round about.’

‘Stars.’ She frowned. ‘Why did he remain on Mushtullo, then? He must have had relatives elsewhere.’

The patroller shrugged. ‘I have no idea. Maybe they weren’t close. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe they didn’t care. Grounders, y’know?’

Eyas didn’t care for that assumption. She gave a noncommittal ‘mmm’ and waited for Boothe to get to the point.

‘Anyway, we couldn’t find much about him, but based on his bank records and known addresses, it looks like he bounced around until adulthood – some kind of foster home setup, or friends, maybe. I don’t know. He worked a bunch of odd jobs, then he wound up here.’

Eyas sighed. Trying something new. ‘So who’d he record as his next of kin?’

‘That’s the shitty bit,’ the patroller said. She tossed her scrib onto the table between them. ‘He didn’t.’

Eyas stared. ‘His emergency contact, then.’

‘Nope.’

‘All GC records have them. It’s right there for you to fill out when you update your patch.’

‘Yeah, well, apparently he missed that bit. Didn’t think he’d need it, or something.’

How could you miss that bit? Eyas thought incredulously. How could you— She shook her head, ending the loop between scorn and pity. ‘There has to be someone.’

The patroller shifted in her chair. ‘I’m telling you, M, we tried. We tried to get on the local news feeds, we tried to get law enforcement to put out a notice or something. But they’re not Human, and they don’t get it. The way they see it, somebody with no family and no emergency contact is dead and has been identified, and their job is done. If he has friends, all we can do is hope they read Exodan news, because we don’t know who to—’

‘Are you saying,’ Eyas broke in, ‘that nobody’s coming for him?’

Patroller Boothe nodded. She cleared her throat again. ‘We might hear from someone. I don’t know. I can’t predict that. Could be tomorrow, could be next standard. But I also know that the, um . . . the stasies you guys use here aren’t built for long-term storage. So you might . . .’ She trailed off.