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“Who taught you?”

“My mother.”

The child's ear fins lowered.

“Before extraction.”

Kesta slowly lifted her face from the scope. The other children had gone quiet.

“What does extraction mean?”

No one answered immediately. Tavi shifted against the wall, careful of his injured shoulder. His gaze had dropped toward his knees.

“Sometimes a collar activates,” he said. “It tells someone to report to the old landing field. Sometimes drones come directly to the camp. Years ago, soldiers came.”

“And the people who leave?”

“Some come back.”

Kesta looked at the girl. Her small fingers tightened around the clay tablet.

“Your mother?”

The child turned it over. Names covered the back in uneven columns, some written by older hands and some scratched with the laborious care of children still learning symbols. Beside each name was a date and one of three marks. Tavi touched them carefully.

“Returned. Dead. Unknown.”

The circle beside the girl's mother's name remained open. Unknown. Kesta's forensic training immediately began noticing details she wished she could stop seeing. Patterns in the dates. Clusters of extractions following certain orbital passes. Families represented more than once. She forced herself to stop reading the tablet as evidence.

A little girl was holding a record of her missing mother. Kesta moved away from the scope and sat cross-legged beside them instead.

“What are your names?”

The blue-gray girl blinked at the change in subject.

“Iri.”

The furry boy beside her announced that he was Besh and that he could climb the western furnace tower faster than anyone his age.

“You absolutely cannot,” Tavi said.

“I did yesterday.”

Tavi stared at him.

Kesta smiled sweetly. “Interesting. Perhaps we should tell Sera about that too.”

Besh looked betrayed. The smallest Kharovian was Taro. The two sisters sharing a blanket were Meva and Kiri, although they corrected Kesta's pronunciation three times before deciding humans probably could not do better. The last child, the almost-human boy, gave his name as Renn.

Kesta stayed until the cold worked through her trousers and the stone beneath her became uncomfortable. She learned which roof panels were safe enough for adults, why Besh believed the western moon was hollow, and that Dreven had once told the children a story about a third moon that vanished because it had become tired of listening to commanders argue. Kesta glanced toward Tavi.

“Dreven told them that?”

“Apparently.”

Iri nodded vigorously. “He did voices.”

Kesta stared.