She meandered over to Speaker, who was setting her cargo down on the garden lawn. Pei looked at the equipment in question. She’d seen sound tech before – at bars, at parties, in other sapients’ homes – but had no idea how to set it up, and had never paid it much attention. All the same, she asked: ‘Can I help?’

Speaker looked at her, then around at her gear; she moved her head, but the mech suit stayed still. ‘Uh, yes, if you like. Are you able to lift the speakers?’ She made a funny expression. ‘The common-noun speakers, not … me.’

Tupo laughed much harder at this than was warranted, chuffing through xyr nostrils in that strange Laru way.

Pei looked at the equipment. Speakers were basically talkboxes made large; that much, she knew. She picked up a fat, keg-shaped thing she was pretty sure was a common-noun speaker, and when proper-noun Speaker did not object, Pei knew that she’d got it right. ‘Yeah, it’s not too heavy,’ Pei said. ‘Where do you want them?’

Speaker adjusted the mech suit in order to look around the lawn. She pointed one of the suit’s hands and said, ‘Just evenly distribute them around the edges. Make a circle.’

Pei lugged the thing over as directed, and as she set it down, a small etching in the outer plating caught her eye. ‘Are you sure this isn’t you?’

‘What?’ Speaker said.

Pei pointed at the etching: a single-line drawing of an Akarak’s face, carved into the metal with something thin and sharp. ‘That’s definitely you.’

Speaker walked the suit over, bent it down to look, and let out a laugh. ‘Tracker must’ve done it,’ she said with fond exasperation. ‘That’s very much her sort of stupid joke.’ With this, Speaker fell quiet.

Tupo dropped the wires xe’d been trying to suss out and trotted over to Speaker. ‘She’ll be okay,’ xe said. Xe patted Speaker’s suit with a forepaw.

Speaker met Tupo’s eye. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

Pei did not chase that subject further. This Akarak was still an enigma, a walking, breathing blank space in Pei’s inner reference manual for the galaxy at large. But unaccustomed to her kind as she was, she knew better than to press on what was clearly a sore spot, especially with a stranger. It wasn’t her business, plain and simple.

Still, though: Speaker’s silence had dampened the previously congenial mood, and Pei understood that she was not the only one in need of distraction. ‘Hey Tupo,’ she said. ‘What’d you think about that vid we watched last night?’

Speaker gave her a quick glance; it was hard to say, but there seemed to be an air of gratitude in it.

‘Um, it was pretty good,’ Tupo said. Xe rubbed xyr chin against the lower end of xyr neck. ‘Some parts were kinda boring, though. I like vids that are more exciting.’

Pei leaned against one of the lighting posts. ‘Yeah? Like what?’

Tupo did not need to think about this. ‘Have you seen Creds and Revenge?’ xe asked, eyes growing wide.

A laugh barked through Pei’s talkbox. ‘Have you seen Creds and Revenge?’ she said. ‘That’s a … pretty intense vid.’

‘Yeah! It’s so good!’ The kid was theoretically standing on all fours, but xyr feet were dancing around so much that there was never a moment in which there were more than three paws touching the ground at once. Xe whipped xyr head in Speaker’s direction. ‘Speaker, have you seen it?’

Speaker’s attention was focused on her cockpit controls. ‘I have not,’ she said. ‘That sounds like a bit much for me.’

Tupo tsked. ‘You’re missing out.’ Xe turned xyr attention back to Pei. ‘You know the part where that bad guy gets hit with a plasma cannon way up close, and he turns into a skeleton and then he explodes?’

‘Yeah,’ Pei said, not sure where this was going.

‘Could that really happen?’

Ah. That’s where it was going. ‘Absolutely not,’ Pei said.

Tupo’s neck drooped. ‘Not even maybe?’

‘Not even maybe,’ Pei said. She didn’t mind Tupo asking, per se, but she did not share the kid’s enthusiasm for this pattern of questioning. She couldn’t tell xyr that she knew precisely why a person’s skeleton would not even maybe be visible if you hit them with a plasma cannon, because then xe’d ask what a plasma cannon at short range would do instead, and that was not a detail a kid needed to be privy to. She didn’t know how to tell Tupo that vid war and real war were not the same thing at all, that it wasn’t a stylish series of heroics punctuated by kick-ass music and witty retorts. War was ugly, exhausting, and above all else, tedious – an odd thing to say about a situation in which there were more explosions and adrenaline than you knew what to do with. But for all the strategising, for all the narrow escapes and near misses, when you boiled it down, war was nothing more than an argument in which no one had landed on a better solution than killing each other. The suffering, at some point, became commonplace. Pei did not mind working on the edges of that. She did not mind the things she saw or the things she did. Her stomach was strong and her conscience was clean. But what did sometimes unsettle her was the disconnect between here and there. Here was a kid with big eyes and busy paws, for whom war was a fun story you watched before bedtime – a sugar rush, a metaphor. There, there were no kids. There were only exhausted adults who were desperate in a way Tupo would hopefully never be, people who wanted nothing more than for the miserable business to be done so they could go home. Except it never was done, and many would never see home again.