‘Where is it you’ve travelled from, if you don’t mind my asking?’ Speaker said. Her suit’s hands were busy with gadgets whose names Pei did not know.

‘The Rosk border,’ Pei said. That was as much of an answer as she was allowed to give, and she knew there were only a few reactions to this that would follow. She’d heard them all. As soon as the Rosk were invoked, people would say ‘wow’ or ‘whoa’ or ‘holy shit’, or anything else along those lines. Some were impressed. Some were sympathetic, in a clueless sort of way. Most people, unless they were military themselves, merely stumbled through the moment in which war stopped being a story – fun or otherwise – and instead found themselves talking to a piece of it.

But Speaker surprised her, for she did none of those things. ‘Ah,’ was all she said. Ah, as though Pei had told her she was a fruit farmer or that she’d come from the Capital or that she’d bought a new pair of shoes last tenday. Ah, as though Pei had confirmed something Speaker found obvious. What that might be, Pei had no idea, and Speaker offered no insights to help her along. She continued her work, saying nothing else.

Pei didn’t particularly enjoy the gawking responses she was used to, but she was so accustomed to them by now that their absence puzzled her. All right, so the Akarak didn’t care. Or maybe she didn’t know what else to say. Most likely, she was just an alien that Pei couldn’t read. So what?

The exchange stuck in Pei’s teeth all the same, a single grain of sand she didn’t really give a fuck about but also couldn’t ignore.

‘Ah, shit,’ Tupo said. The phrase left xyr mouth exactly as it had left Ouloo’s the night before, and it took everything in Pei’s power to keep her talkbox from laughing. The kid held up a pawful of tangled wires. ‘I dunno what I did.’

Pei walked over and sat down by Tupo. ‘You made a mess, is what you did,’ she said congenially. ‘C’mon, let’s sort this out.’ She picked up a knot and began to work through it. As she did so, she glanced over at Speaker. The Akarak wasn’t looking at her, but she shifted her beak ever so slightly, as if she, too, had something stuck in it.

ROVEG

A cup of tea sat upon the table before him. The projection walls were dark. The tea was untouched. He had made the drink with the intent of comfort, but though it was sitting right in front of him, he’d forgotten to pick it up.

There had been a time once when the galaxy had been simple. There were Quelin, and there were aliens. Quelin were people. Aliens were … aliens. They were almost like people, but not quite, and never would be. Never could be. You could talk to an alien, and trade with an alien, but aliens were not like you. You should be polite to them. You should respect the laws you shared.

You should not be their friends.

The thing that held a society together, Roveg had been taught, was shared narrative. A common history, a bedrock of ethics. This was the shell that held the world together, and protected all that was soft and fragile. Turning away from your own story was to open yourself to chaos. This was not academic opinion, his teachers had told him. This was observable fact. This is why good Quelin made pilgrimages to the Silent Warfields, so they could gaze upon the crumbling ruins of the civil war. The land there was still scarred from caustic artillery fire, still littered with debris. This was not to be disturbed, nor were the exoskeletons to be removed. Some of their faces remained, those of the old soldiers, their insides long eaten away by rot and time. One of these in particular was scarred into Roveg’s memory – a single eye casing, partially crushed, bleached with sun, all that was visible of a body embedded in a fallen rock face. He had stared at it, living gaze meeting dead, and his teacher had stood with him, nodding with approving sympathy as Roveg rattled his mouth in the percussion of grief.

The Silent Warfields were what straying from Quelin teachings brought: destruction and decay. The Quelin could not pretend they were alone in the universe, and it was wise to cooperate with your galactic neighbours (especially when said galactic neighbours were bigger and stronger and had more toys than you). But you could not try to think like them. People who had tried that were lost. Wretched. They were forever torn inside, and they would never know peace.

Roveg had believed that once, wholeheartedly. As a child, he’d been determined to live a good life, a virtuous life. He heard the way adults clicked with pride when he memorised the Twelve Central Tenets or made paintings of the founding of the Grand Library. He fed on that approval as though it were the only nutrient he required. He remembered the day of his First Brand in the Watchful Hall. He’d been afraid, of course. He’d watched the older children go through it, heard their shouts and the hissing of the iron, smelled the acrid stink of scorched keratin that lingered for tendays after. One could not watch that and not be afraid. But something had happened when the Curate held the sizzling metal to Roveg’s shell. There’d been pain, yes, and the panicked scent of his own body burning, but he’d looked at the joyful assembly, and he’d understood that he was just one in an immeasurable chain of people who had stood exactly where he was standing and born the same brand, that he was part of something noble and incredible and beautiful, that he could not only look at history but further it. The crowd around him roared their support as he screamed, and truly, in that moment, he had felt no hurt. For a moment, he transcended it. He was whole. He was loved.