But our hearts and our heads are all smartly aligned

  And they’ll find themselves moonstruck who dare to suggest

  That this sphere could be less than the brightest and best.

  For there’s no greater harbor between Oort and Sol

  So pass me that bottle and fill up this bowl.

  If you’re void-sick from roaming, then shake off your gloom

  And come home to the first and the foremost of moons.

  That one came from The Lunar Saloon Visitor’s Companion, a touristy songbook that Mama CJ picked up on Mars.

  I was eleven when she died. Thaddeus was six. He mourned by trying to find someone to blame, and decided that our lost mom had been ambushed by pirates. He kept himself awake at night with schemes of bloody vengeance, unable to sleep unless I sang to him.

  I was still trying to become Mama CJ.

  Thad was still searching for someone to blame.

  “Listen,” I said. “Please listen. Cosmas is harmless.”

  “No,” Thad said. “He’s not. He caused more harm to Luna than anyone else in our history.”

  “I don’t believe that.” My voice took the same tone that I used to use when my baby brother was determined to go pirate hunting.

  It didn’t work this time. He leaned forward, intent. “If you’re familiar enough with this fugitive to insist on his innocence, you must know a lot more about him than you’ve been willing to admit so far. Tell me what you know. Help us find him. I’ve had rangers searching the whole system, and neighborhood watch volunteers looking for him back home, but no luck.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Yeah. I know about the watch. They came to my apartment and tried to pick a fight.”

  “Sorry about that.” He did not sound sorry. “I hadn’t yet realized that the place even belonged to you. You’re never there.” Thad stood up and started to pace, which looked ridiculous. He didn’t know how to move around in unfamiliar gravity. My brother rarely left home. “Let me tell you what I know about Damian Cosmas. His record of personal expenses did not include groceries, which either means that he is a mad scientist with a robot army who likes to grow all his own mushrooms… or else he’s a robot himself who passed all the Turing tests at U Mars, and also has his own army. I know that you’re fond of bots, Tova. You like to foster strays in your spare time. But seven thousand people are dead. Lunar people!”

  I caught him up in a hug and held him close. “Shush. Listen to me.”

  “I am listening! I’ve been trying to get you to talk—”

  “No. My turn. You’re right, I am fond of bots. I’ve raised up several. Including Cosmas. He’s one of mine, Thad. No one else in the solar system has known him longer than I have, and I can promise you that he’s not responsible for the shipyards. He isn’t your culprit. He didn’t kill all those people. He hates it when anything breaks, and he has devoted the whole of himself to figuring out how to put fragmentary things back together. Running away doesn’t make him guilty. It just means that he’s scared. So I need to find him. I need to help him—and I desperately need his help to put someone else back together. Another one of my kids. She’s hurt. She needs her brother. Please trust me. Please.”

  Thaddeus pulled away. He looked calmer now, but it wasn’t the kind of calm that I wanted to see. “Your baby bot Cosmas sent me a letter. Handwritten, so I couldn’t trace it. In that letter he threatened to bring the shipyards down. Then it happened. Exactly like he said it would.”

  * * *

  “No.” I shook my head so hard that it gave me vertigo.

  Maybe? Sparkles wondered inside my dizzy head. Cosmas was quiet, traumatized, and neglected when you left him all alone in that abandoned apartment. No reality check for whatever worlds he concocted in his head. Ideal growth conditions for delusional mass violence, don’t you think?

  Stop it, I told her. You sound less and less like Agatha, and more and more like me.

  Obviously, she said. Does that mean I’m wrong?

  Cosmas needed time alone. He needed to make sure no one else would ever lose someone the way that he lost his twin. He needed to find a cure for fragmentation. The kid is a builder, not a breaker.

  Are you absolutely sure of that? Sparkles asked.

  “No,” I said again.

  “Yes,” Thad insisted. “I’ve been trying to keep this whole mess from implicating all robots—”

  “And failing. Badly.”

  “—but one robot is absolutely responsible, and you can help us find him.”

  My face became a diamond shield. “No.”

  Thad gave up. His whole body slumped, which made him look like he weighed a lot more than he actually did. He opened the door and left the graveyard. I followed.

  Two rangers were waiting in the corridor outside. Both fell into place behind us, forming an escort. I tried to ignore them.

  “Take me back to my ship,” I told Thad.

  “No,” he said. “I’m going to find a comfortable place for you to stay. Then I’ll fetch some edible food. After that I’ll try to dissuade our rangers from treating you like a saboteur and a priest-stabbing pirate.”

  I wanted to tell him how much the priest had deserved to be stabbed, but then I saw something that sucked all the air from my lungs.

  Torque and Halley hung from a cart like pieces of luggage. Heads down, chins to chests. Limbs were dangling. Bodkin and Filament hung beside them, equally inert. Kleist sat on the floor with his face in both hands.

  Thad would have passed them by, indifferent, if I hadn’t cranked up the pull on my boots to become an immovable object. He doubled back.

  “These showbots aren’t really puppets,” my brother tried to explain. “Plus, at least one of them has been in recent contact with Damian Cosmas. If the fake puppeteer won’t tell us anything useful, then we’ll have to do a full memory scan on each bot.”

  “Don’t you dare,” I whispered.

  He sighed. “Tova…”

  “You can’t read their minds.”

  “We can, though,” he said.

  “No!” I wasn’t whispering anymore. “You can’t, because that freezes the flow of memory and thought to make it legible from the outside. It would bring their whole sense of self to a crashing halt. It’s horrible. They may never recover.”

  Thaddeus threw both his hands in the air, which unbalanced him. “Might as well do a factory reset and start over, then.”

  He didn’t even mean be cruel, which made it so much worse. I racked my brain for a way to make him understand the cruelty, came up with nothing, and then ran out of time.

  Isa Daris approached with weight and purpose. Her mag boots slammed against the floor with every step.

  Unlocking the brig was a good idea, right? Sparkles asked.

  We’re about to find out. I knelt in front of Kleist and whispered, “Get ready to move. Follow my lead. Bring the whole cart and everyone on it.”

  He gave a short, sharp nod in acknowledgment.

  Daris loomed above us.

  She was very good at looming.

  I stood slowly, which brought the top of my head to the level of her chin.

  The assassin looked right over me. She kept eyes on everyone except for me. Focused. Alert. Professional. Her profession was murdering people who knew too much. I knew too much, and also not nearly enough. I didn’t know what she was going to do next.

  The two rangers flanked us. They also tried to loom, with mixed results.

  “Captain Tova Lir is coming with me,” Daris said.

  A ranger grabbed her arm. I blinked, which made me miss the quick and violent thing that Daris did next. Both rangers drifted to the floor, softly whimpering.

  Thad looked stricken and very confused.

  “Don’t hurt him,” I told Daris. “He’s my baby brother.”

  She flinched at the sound of my voice. “Thaddeus Lir is also the Lunar official responsible for my commission.”

  Some moments fold the universe into a whole new shape. This was one of them. My eyes shot ten thousand silent questions at Thad.

  “I had to,” he said, and tried to stand tall. “Cosmas hired a first-class courier right after the disaster. Right before all the bots disappeared.” His voice picked up speed, words stumbling out of his mouth like a crowd of people trying to evacuate a burning room. “We needed to find out what that message was. Where it was going. Who he was trying to signal. Whether or not that would trigger a second attack. So I hired a specialist to contain the whole mess. Maximum containment.”

  “That kills messengers,” I hissed at him. “Like Mama CJ. And me. Exactly like me.”

  His voice cooled and shifted into gov-speak. “Maximum containment was necessary.”

  “Withdraw the commission,” I told him. “Call off the specialist. The one standing right here.” Thad sputtered in protest and took a step backward, which accidentally sent him drifting. I grabbed his shirt and brought him back down. “Listen to me very carefully, Thaddeus Lir. Cosmas sent that first-class message to me. Because he needs my help. Because I raised him up. It had nothing to do with sabotage.”

  We hope, Sparkles added. The message was blank, though, so we still don’t know what he was trying to say.

  I ignored her. “The messenger died on my route. On his way to find me. Maximum containment includes me, Thad. Understand?”

  He cleared his throat. “Specialist Isa Daris, I hereby withdraw your commission.”

  “Acknowledged.” Her mag boots cachunked as she strode back the way she came.

  “Time to go,” I told the puppeteer.

  Kleist steered the cart full of unconscious bots around the heap of semiconscious rangers.

  “Bye, Thad.” I kissed his clammy forehead. “Give my love to Mama Dee.”

  * * *

  It took several bounding leaps to catch up with Daris. I tried to thank her, but she shushed me and kept walking.

  Kleist struggled to catch up, so I helped him with the cart. We made it back to the docking bay without uttering another word, and without any more rangers trying to detain us.

  Iosif Hayall stood in the doorway, reading notes and scribbling more. He gave me a companionable nod. “Lir.”

  I nodded back. “Hayall.”

  “You should know that I am currently ignoring several urgent requests to impound your ship. This is distracting. It costs me attention that I don’t have to spare.”

  “Much appreciated. I’ll relieve you of the distraction by launching immediately.”

  “Glad to hear it. Good tidings, Lir.”

  “Good tidings, Hayall.”

  The postmaster went back to his notes. The puppeteer loaded unconscious bots onto the Needle. The assassin stood apart.

  “Are you coming with us?” I asked softly.

  “No,” she said.

  “My fool brother canceled the job, though. He took it all back. You’re no longer professionally obligated to do me any harm. Right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Almost. But first-class conditioning runs deep. Only guild doctors can root it all out. I don’t know if they will. I may or may not be a member in good standing. My most recent commission was kind of a mess.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be,” she said, smiling.

  “So let me sum this up. You’re telling me that now-defunct objectives regarding my safety and well-being still lurk underneath the cloud layer of your conscious mind. Like Venusian demons. Or semi-dormant malware.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve already defused the malware in my ship’s old data core, by the way.”

  “Thanks. Much appreciated. Can you also defuse the stuff in your head?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I’ll try.”

  “Good,” I said. “Find me after you manage it.”

  Daris laughed. “I have good news and bad news, Tova Lir, and they are both the same news: I’ll come looking for you either way. Now please be quiet.”

  “Why do you keep trying to shut me up?”

  She put one finger to my lips. “Subconscious conditioning can be extremely literal. I was hired to find, identify, and silence you. So be silent. If I can’t hear your voice, then part of me will think that my work is done. I’ll be able to let you go without trying to stop you from leaving.”

  I watched her face in silence.

  She took back her fingertip and walked away.

  * * *

  Once aboard my ship I immediately took down the family portrait—the one with cute little baby Thaddeus splashing in algae-glow—and shoved it in the keepsake box.

  Crimson the diapered parrot landed on top of my head, sneezed like he’d missed me, and then flailed back through the air to the Hat-stand.

  “Welcome aboard,” I told Kleist. “Pick one of the folding crash chairs for acceleration, deceleration, assuming crash positions in an emergency, and also sleeping. We don’t have separate cabins here.”

  He pointed at the wide-open hatch of the empty brig. “What’s that?”

  “Airlock,” I said.

  “It looks like a separate cabin,” he said.

  “Well, it isn’t.”

  He was smart enough to stop arguing. “The Green Room didn’t have much privacy, either.”

  We silently secured the bots for launch. It hurt to treat Torque, Halley, and the other two unconscious unpuppets as mere cargo, but Needle needed to launch immediately. It wasn’t a good time to wake them up.

  “Do you know how to wake them up?” I asked softly.

  “Yes,” Kleist said. “This is not an aggressive shutdown. More like sedation? An involuntary nap. Those rangers planned to interrogate them. Higher functions need to be intact to answer complex questions.”

  “All of that still sounds aggressive,” I said.

  “Could have been much worse.” His voice sounded cold, flat, and frictionless. “They could have suffered a lobotomy instead. Or memory strip-mining. Those were Lunar rangers.” Kleist spat the word that used to mean home to me. Luna was already synonymous with cruelty.

  I took the pilot’s chair and checked Agatha’s vitals. Still stable. Still fragmentary. Still submerged and fizzing somewhere beneath a much deeper nap.

  “Hi.” I didn’t mean to say that out loud.

  “What?” Kleist called from his fold-out passenger chair.

  “Never mind.”

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Anywhere else,” I told him. “I’ll climb upwell for a stretch. Then we can wake up the bots. After that we’ll come up with a flight plan together. How does that suit you?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  Sparkles spoke up. Do you have any actual ideas for that flight plan?

  No, I admitted. There should have been a message waiting for us here. Cosmas sent me a magnificent hat. Then he left a poster for the puppet show with Torque. Those breadcrumbs brought us to Halley. Cosmas should have sent her something. But he didn’t. Or else it got lost in the mail.

  And what about the letter that he sent to his uncle Thad? Sparkles asked.

  I don’t know.

  Do you want to talk about your assassin instead? she asked sweetly.

  No.

  The engine hummed. Crimson recognized our preflight routine and found himself a safe place to endure the extra weight of acceleration.

  We left Panic behind.

  * * *

  Needle settled into a comfortable cruising speed, stitching tattered space-time back together. I unbuckled, floated aft, and promptly bonked against a jutting section of bulkhead. That thing had always been there. I had always known to catch it with my hand rather than my face. Until now.

  “Are you okay?” Kleist asked.

  “Fantastic,” I said. “Just need coffee. Want some?”

  “Yes, please.”

  I tossed him a bulb and took one for myself. Then we started tending to the bots. Kleist deftly opened a panel in Bodkin’s chest and made careful adjustments to their innards.

  “You’re a Maker,” I guessed.

  He started a diagnostic scan. Data flowed inside his glowing eyes. “I used to be.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “No longer in good standing with your guild?”

  “I would say that my guild is no longer in good standing with me.”

  “What happened?” I asked him. “Sorry to pry. Truly. But I’ll need you to tell me more about your qualifications before I let you pry open any part of Halley or Torque.”

  He nodded. “That’s fair. Have you ever heard of the Orpheus program?”

  “No,” I said. “Should I have?”

  “Not necessarily. It isn’t a secret, but you’ll never find it in the stream archives unless you already know where to look. Orpheus was a bot. Juvenile. He was only two months old when we put him in a tiny probe and shot him at Proxima Centauri. It took more than forty years to get there, traveling at ten percent lightspeed. He made the trip alone.” Kleist paused to make a small adjustment. Several lights inside Bodkin’s chest changed color. “I joined the project at the very end, monitoring his vital signs via ansible. Sometimes we talked, though we never found much in common to talk about. He left this system before I was born, and he was just a baby at the time. Pass me that spanner?”

  I passed him the spanner.

  Kleist went on. “Orpheus had no way to decelerate, navigate, or ever return. His instructions were to transmit a wealth of data about Proxima Centauri while traveling right through that system and out the other side. He shut down instead. Maybe he was angry that we threw him away, and felt no obligation to send anything back. Maybe his small craft struck an asteroid as soon as he arrived. We’ll never know.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s horrible. All of it. Reminds me of Laika.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “She was one of the first to leave Terra. Not human. Never came back down. A sacrifice tossed into the dark.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Exactly. I left the guild the same day that Orpheus went dark.”

  “So then you took up show business?”

  “Essentially, yes. I spent most of the family fortune transferring the bonds for Bodkin and Filament away from a bankrupt theater company on Titania. Halley joined us soon after that. We found a ship and ran away to start our own circus.”