A warm sense of accomplishment coils inside Kallie’s gut when she enters Madame Leutho’s Pawn Shop. She’s made it. Her daughter will be provided for, for another week. She takes small steps inside the cramped, low-ceilinged shop, clutching the bundle of this week’s loot to her chest. Perhaps she’ll even make enough to treat herself, too. A strawberry-flavored algae bar—or a ticket to the station’s observatory, to watch Jupiter in all its splendor while slurping a protein smoothie. Her mouth waters at the possibilities. Too early for such plans. She’s been disappointed before.

The moment Kallie enters, Madame Leutho bundles up the neural implants she’s been tinkering with. She wraps them up in a dirty cloth, probably unwashed since before the station opened twenty years ago, and hides them under the counter. Kallie pretends not to notice—Leutho tries her best to appear law-abiding and respectable at all times, even though Kallie knows first-hand of her side- hustle. Leutho is the one who installed Kallie’s implant six years ago, after the traumatic childbirth that left Kallie comatose. Leutho’s implant helps Kallie’s surviving neurons to “connect the dots.” It helps her be a productive member of society, while someone else—someone better—raises her child. The burden of her debt weighs on Kallie’s shoulders—a debt she’ll never be able to pay off in full. Kallie owes her eternal gratitude. Money, too. Children are expensive.

She approaches the counter, deliberately ignoring the persistent stare of a ghostly soldier perched atop some dismantled wartime exoskeleton. Her implant is acting up again, making her see things that don’t exist. There goes any extra credit from today’s loot.

Without a word, Kallie dumps her bundle on the counter. Madame Leutho adjusts the goggles over her optical implants that calculate weight, value, and profit margin, then takes a sip from a tall mug. Her beverage smells of cinnamon. Kallie’s gut contracts with envy for everything she cannot have: her daughter, breakfast, new shoes, or at least a cinnamon-flavored algae smoothie. Leutho cocks a perfectly plucked eyebrow and uses her long tweezers to lift a multicolored scarf in Kallie’s bundle.

“Silk… good stuff. The rest is the usual junk.”

Leutho goes through the rest with the tips of her tool, as though the clothes and trinkets are infested with lice. And they probably are. The station’s janitorial stuff won’t go anywhere near the area of the old docks where the immigrants from Earth gather, before being distributed to the agro and mining domes of the Belt. Only scavengers like Kallie go through the piles of things the immigrants leave behind, after they’re told of the weight limit per person on the transports.

After some more shifting and huffing and sighing, Leutho sits back on her chair. “Ten creds. Best I can do.”

Kallie’s heart sinks to her feet. Five of those will go toward her daughter’s expenses. Three for rent, and another two to have her implant adjusted. Perhaps one-and-a-half, if Leutho feels generous. How will she survive until the next shipment of unfortunate humans arrives? No point in haggling; Leutho doesn’t haggle. Kallie nods.

“Can… can you fix this, too?” Kallie taps the implant on her left temple.

Leutho looks almost concerned. “You’re seeing shades again?”

Kallie glances at the ghostly soldier now peeking over Leutho’s shoulder as if to read her screen. Shades. Yes, let’s just call them that. So she just nods.

Leutho adjusts her goggles again, and picks up her tools. Her touch is gentle, almost comforting—Kallie has heard rumors that Leutho was a military surgeon once. Today, Kallie almost believes it, and allows her shoulders to relax.

A jolt of pain from a sudden power surge in her implant drills a hole through her skull, shoots bolts down her spine, and makes her toes curl inside her worn sneakers. But the ghostly form fades away. The lines around Leutho’s mouth deepen. Sneer? Concern? Or something else, entirely?

Leutho leans back in her chair and tosses her tools in a tray beside her terminal’s screen. “Done.” She types something, then her terminal buzzes and spits out a credit chip. She slides it over to Kallie on the counter. “Here. Five creds. The fix was free of charge. And you’re welcome.”

That was unexpected. Kallie grabs the chip, her earlier sense of accomplishment washed away by how weightless the chip feels in her palm. One credit or a thousand doesn’t affect its physical weight, only the knowledge that Kallie will go to bed hungry for another week. She turns to leave, but then the same words she speaks every week jump out of her mouth.

“Will you send my little girl a message? Tell her that I love her?”

And like every week, Leutho flashes a forced smile, and lies. “Of course, Kallie. I’ll tell Danae how much you’re doing for her.”

Kallie knows that Leutho won’t tell Danae anything. She has denied all of Kallie’s pleas to help her see Danae, even from afar. She’s never seen her child—not even in dreams. In her dreams, Kallie only hears herself screaming Danae’s name.

Kallie drags her feet on the dim corridors between Leutho’s shop and the old bays area, where the military spaceships docked during the wars. Now the area has been repurposed to house the countless homeless stranded here: disabled vets, immigrants who were sold fake futures in the outer colonies, and all the civilians who became collateral damage. Droves of people still pass through here to be distributed where flesh is cheaper—and more desperate—than droids, but the ones left behind are usually too broken to move on. They huddle in corners and seek shelter in long-abandoned mech repair shops and ammo storage areas.

Kallie is one of the lucky ones. She has a home. It’s no bigger than a three-by-three meter cube, but it has basic water supply and insulation. It used to be an interfaith chapel, back during the war, but the chaplain has long been discharged—probably repurposed too, and dispatched to some mine. Now no one wants to live in it, because this part of the station has too much electromagnetic interference and there’s no network signal. It didn’t matter when it was a chapel, because the network silence was good for meditation and prayer. But now this silence makes people’s minds wander to dark and scary places, bringing to the surface long-buried regret and guilt. No wonder there’s a rumor around the station that it’s haunted. Kallie doesn’t care. She’s used to her shades—it’s less lonely this way, and Leutho’s tinkering takes care of them, once they become overwhelming.

There’s one now. The visage of a little girl, clutching a toy spaceship with one hand, and pointing toward a dark corner with the other. Kallie has seen her before, but never out here. Why now? That area has been picked clean. Then the shade dissipates, the pointing finger the last to go. What has Leutho’s latest adjustment done?

Kallie checks the corner, and finds one of the wall panels slightly dislodged. She carefully pries away the corner of the panel to reveal the narrow space between cables and pipes beneath. A small backpack is stuffed in there. A child’s backpack, made from sturdy cloth dyed in all the colors of the rainbow. Some unfortunate child hid it there, before being shipped off to Fates-know-where. Kallie gulps down the bitterness that lines her throat. She cannot help that child. She’s nobody. But perhaps she can help her own child. Danae will need decent food and an education—she should be starting preschool soon. With her find clutched to her chest, Kallie flees to her chapel home.

Under the approving stare of the little girl’s shade, Kallie examines her find. The backpack is filled with colorful clothes for a girl of about twelve, and a cheap drawing pad. The greatest treasure is hidden in the front pocket: paper—real paper, with a drawing on it. Kallie straightens the sheet. A crude drawing of a child between two adults, holding hands. A small house at the side, circled by trees, beneath a planet with a big red spot—clearly Jupiter. There are letters over the drawing, but Kallie cannot read them. After her brain got damaged during Danae’s near-fatal birth, Kallie lost the ability to connect letters to words. Her understanding of numbers did return, eventually—counting with her fingers helped. But not the letters, no matter how much Madame Leutho tinkered with her implant. She told Kallie that sometimes neurons take their time to chart new paths in a damaged brain even with the implant’s help, but it’s been years. Kallie no longer hopes.

She sits a long time gazing at the drawing, then gets up and walks to the alcove across her cot, where the chapel’s sanctum once stood. She’s placed an old plastic stool with broken and duct-taped legs there, and a faded printout of an infant atop it. Leutho had told her it was hours-old Danae. She’d probably lied about that too. Kallie doesn’t care. That’s the closest thing to a memory she has of her daughter. She cannot remember holding or breastfeeding her. The empty memories hurt more than Kallie’s empty stomach ever will. But now her little one won’t be alone; she’ll have the memory of another child to keep her company. The ghostly girl smiles and vanishes.

With the printout and the drawing now in their rightful place, Kallie retires to her cot. Perhaps she’ll keep some of the clothes—her frame is small enough. A steady diet of unflavored algae gruel every other day keeps people thin in body and resolve. She draws her itchy infantry blanket up to her nose and stares at her little shrine until her lids grow heavy.

When the station’s rotation hits a certain angle, the whole of Jupiter shines over the station’s observatory. With the covers retracted, everyone under the glass dome feels like they’re standing in open space, watching the nearest moons and the planet’s rings. Tourists flock to visit this wonder of human engineering—all while people like Kallie can still die during childbirth. But Kallie wills all grim thoughts aside. Here and now, she cannot believe how much she got paid for a child’s meager belongings. Her fortune has the taste of a cinnamon algae smoothie and she’s enjoying every mouthful of it.

The dome is brimming with people: tourists, military personnel on leave, station officers and clerks on their lunch breaks, and those lucky few from the Ruling Houses that have never had to work. No one sits on the bench beside Kallie. For a brief moment, she wonders if she smells; she hasn’t been able to afford the communal shower for a while now, and wash-cloth cleaning only helps so much. But she doesn’t care. She slurps more of her smoothie, and stretches out, almost spread-eagle on the bench, as if she could hug Jupiter. There are a few ships in view—mostly transports, and the occasional patrolling fighter doing lazy rounds around the station.

That’s the wrong approach. They’re going to crash into each other.

She sits up, her shoulders now stiff, her gaze fixed on a transport approaching the station. Where did that thought come from? What does she know about spaceships? And yet, there it is, the transport making a hard starboard turn to avoid a mining drone departing for Ganymede. A susurration spreads across the crowd under the dome, but dies down once the crisis is averted. People return to their own affairs—some of them a little disappointed, even. Kallie rubs at her forehead, probing a headache nesting just behind her eyes. Seeing shades is bad enough. She doesn’t need auditory intrusions in her thoughts. Not today. Not ever.

She turns her gaze to the crowd. Singing and laughing attracts her attention near the center of the dome where communication terminals are set up. The commotion comes from what appears to be a newlywed couple and their friends. They kiss and laugh and toast each other, taking snapshots and recording messages for their loved ones, all with Jupiter at the background.

Loved ones. How does that feel? she wonders.

She feels a pang of overwhelming envy. Until it dawns on her: she does have a loved one. She has a daughter.

She races to the nearest terminal, while counting her remaining creds on her fingers. Her headache waxes to the size of Jupiter at the letters flashing on the terminal’s screen. Thank the Fates, it has a voice recognition button. When the terminal asks her to choose, Kallie answers, “Send a snapshot.” Then the screen changes to mirror, with a blinking checkmark button beneath it.

Her eyes mist anew as she attempts to make her hair presentable. What a fool she’s been, thinking that her frizzy hair that not even the scarf can tame wouldn’t stand out in a crowd with sleek, shiny hair. But it is what it is. That’s who she is. So she wipes her sniffles on her sleeve and forces herself to smile.

“Danae, it’s your mom. I love you, baby girl.”

Letters appear on the screen, and Kallie presses the button before the knot in her gut makes her abort this wild adventure and flee. That knot tightens when the terminal asks, “Who is the recipient?”

“Danae,” Kallie manages. “Here, on the station.”

A list of five appears on the screen, but Kallie cannot read the names. Only two have headshots, and they’re adults.

Before she can ask for the terminal about their ages, the robotic voice asks, “House?”

Leutho told her, didn’t she? One of the smaller but decent Houses… what was it? Ah, yes!

“House Harpokrates,” she blurts out, then adds, “Six years old!”

But the terminal seems to have started processing her request before she spoke Danae’s age. Then the credit sign appears on the screen in big red font.

“Three credits,” it says aloud.

There goes supper. Before her stomach can overrule her heart, Kallie slides her chip into the slot, never to see it again. A trilling sound follows.

“Message delivered.”

It’s done. Danae might never get the message, if her adoptive parents delete it. Kallie isn’t even sure if she’s sent it to the right person, but how many people with that same, old-fashioned name can there be on this station? Surely, an older Danae in the same House will be compassionate enough to pass the message along? As a sob builds up in her throat, she hurries out of the observatory and back home.

She finds her home infested with shades.

Ghosts, shades, whatever these things are, have the substance of thin, luminous mist that Kallie can walk through. Almost like holograms, but they feel different—like languid waves of grief, sadness and regret that slowly wane down to almost peace, like pieces of a puzzle finally clicking in place. Kallie settles on her cot to watch the unexpected gathering. There’s that child again, playing with her toy spaceship in the corner. A little to the left, next to the tiny sink, an old man in an outdated military uniform tightens his combat boots. Several emaciated children are gathered around him—his wards or his victims? A dancing couple swirls by with fast steps and festive faces. And just over there, beside Kallie’s cot, an old woman sits cross-legged and knits. No level of technological advancement can uproot certain habits from Earth’s old-timers.

Kallie allows her mind to go numb at that faint clickety-clack of the needles. She hears them, just like she heard that voice in her head earlier, regarding the transport’s trajectory. What had Leutho’s fiddling done to her mind this time? But the sound brings her peace and, as she drifts away, she wishes that the granny could knit her new, functioning neurons.

She wakes up to the aftertaste of cinnamon, and her mind feels light. A tingling of apprehension remains at the base of her spine at her audacity to reach out to her betters, but she misses Danae so very much. Strange, how much one can miss someone they never knew. There’s this gap between throat and heart that nothing can fill, and only the sound of Danae’s name brings fleeting relief.

All the shades are gone. Her gaze seeks the drawing on her makeshift altar, secretly hoping that her dream came true, that the granny’s ghost knitted her new neurons, and that she can now read.

She cannot. Her stomach grumbles, and she reaches for the clothes she wore yesterday. She’d like to keep them; she’d also like to eat and stay strong for her daughter. So she wraps them up and heads over to Madame Leutho’s. The other pawn shop might give her more, but perhaps she might get another fix to get rid of those shades, like the one she finds awaiting her just outside the shop.

It’s that damned trooper again, the one who’s apparently too attached to his mech. He stares at her and brings his right index finger to his lips, warning her to be silent. At this moment, he looks exactly like the depictions of Harpokrates, the patron deity of the eponymous House. What kind of sign is this? What is her brain trying to tell her, now? Is it a warning? Kallie stops in her tracks. Perhaps she should turn around and take her business elsewhere. Or perhaps she should ignore the glitches of her broken brain. The trooper tilts his head just so, toward the entrance.

She draws a deep breath and slips into the shadows of the shop, keeping close to the high selves brimming with gadgets. A sudden noise further inside, like the slap of a hand against wood—the counter? Kallie ducks behind the mech armor a few paces away from the commotion. She crawls through the narrow space between armor and wall, and peeks from under the suit’s armpit.

A tall, athletic woman, with her hair dyed in that red shade that the Mars-born favor and braided on her back, towers over Madame Leutho, who seems to have shrunk in her seat behind the counter. The woman wears blue and black—the colors of House Harpokrates—and holds a fold-out baton in a white-knuckled grip. There’s a faint buzzing coming from the baton—is that some sort of a neural whip, like those the station’s security guards carry?

“You swore you took care of her.”

The stranger’s voice is perfectly steady, her words perfectly articulated, her tone perfectly cold. And yet it stirs a tempest in Kallie’s gut like none she’s ever felt.

Leutho raises her hands. “Lady Danae, I did! I swear I did!”

Danae? Danae? Who is this woman who shares a name with her daughter? Then the slap of the baton against the counter makes Kallie’s heart jump to her throat. A cockroach scurries past her and Kallie envies its size and ability to crawl through cracks and flee. She dares another look, when this Danae speaks again.

“You swore the last time, too. I waived your debt to get rid of Kallista’s body!”

Kallie, still hidden, feels the knot building up in the pit of her stomach. Kallista? Who’s Kallista?

“A dead body. She wasn’t dead.”

A scoff. “And? She was close enough. You didn’t have to patch the hole in her head with a fucking implant! Tell me you didn’t use a military-issued implant, you idiot!”

Leutho shakes her head. “No, that’s a first generation implant. There are a few of them still around. I don’t even know what it does—I only know how to reset it to its default settings, every time it glitches. And I did, over and over again, so Kallista would stay compliant. Forgive me, my lady, I would have disposed of her corpse, but I cannot take a life. I cannot go against my oath to do no harm. I thought—”

“You thought?” Another slap against the counter. “You thought?”

“Lady Danae, I can still salvage this.”

“How? She’s looking for me!”

“Not you, my lady. Her daughter. When Kallista came to, she kept calling your name. She wouldn’t drop it. She only screamed louder. I had to tell her something.”

“And you told her she had a daughter? Are you sure you don’t need an implant yourself? Because you sound senile to me. How could this not backfire, you idiot?”

Leutho shrinks even deeper into her chair. “It made sense, at the time...”

You told her she had a daughter.

In the still moment between one heartbeat and the next, the sum of Kallie’s parts crumbles. Her heart, her mind, her grumbling stomach, the rising sobs in her throat, everything she is and everything she’s hoped to be scatter around her. No daughter. No daughter. No daughter? No. It cannot be. No one is so cruel as to lie like this. Why?

Those dots do not connect. They have to.

Connect, dammit!

She hits her head with her fist, just like Leutho often smacks her terminal when it glitches. She hits herself again and again, aiming to stir her lazy brain, to wake up her faulty implant, to cause the world to make sense again. But her fists are small, and she’s weak from hunger. She plucks a loose screw from the mech’s armpit and picks at her implant with the screw’s blunt, magnetic tip. Perhaps she should start banging her head against the wall? But then they’ll hear, and they’ll know she’s there, and they’ll know she’s heard, and they have a neural whip and will hurt her, and she cannot take pain, and…

The burst of light inside her head robs her of breath. Her sore fists drop to her sides. The screw slips from her grip and rolls into the shadows. Something just clicked in her implant. Not a real, audible click. This click she feels in her bones, like the persistent tingling at the nape of her neck, harbinger of motion somewhere deep. Upgrade or reboot? She blinks the bright spots away. When she can see clearly again, when the ringing has waned in her ears, the other two are still quarreling. She doesn’t know what about; she can only watch the ghostly trooper slowly disintegrating in a loose swirl of translucent fireflies. It floats just before her face for a moment, then it’s siphoned through her implant and into her head.

The surge of energy lights every neuron in her body aflame. No, not a surge—awakening. Her entire body bursts with countless pinpricks. Like her arm after she’s slept on it and it’s gone numb, and the restored blood flow slowly and painfully brings it back to life. Only this time it’s every muscle, every tendon, every joint that begins to remember its sense of self-preservation. And all of them stretch and flex and ache and urge her to flee.

Run now to fight later on your own terms.

Kallie dares a last glance. Danae—now that name hurts!—looms over Leutho, who’s sunk in her chair, pale and sweaty. They no longer shout, but Danae’s whispers scare Kallie more than her screaming did. Kallie crawls away as noiselessly as possible. She thinks she hears someone calling her name as she bolts, and hopes they don’t notice her faltering step. Then she starts running, and does not stop until she is back home.

Home. Her ghost-infested hole-in-the-wall. The forsaken chapel, where no one else has wanted to live. Her shades are still there, but they no longer float around her. They stand still, as if waiting. Kallie thinks she understands now. They’re nothing but echoes, projections of things and people long gone that her implant generated, to help her remember who she was.

The echoes of her broken mind.

A deep breath, a long exhalation. Kallie invites them in, and her implant becomes a doorway for her lost pieces on their way home.

The little girl playing with the starship is the first to return, and Kallie almost doubles over with grief. Where had her childhood gone? Her early years back on Earth, her careless days on an island of the old country, dreaming of flying to the stars? Her grandma warned her, didn’t she? Yaya Evdokia warned little Kallista not to aim to rise above her station. Her place was dirtside, hauling ghost-nets with her brothers out from the depths of the Aegean, in the recycling plant with her mother, or ministering to the orphans alongside her aunts and grandma. “You care too deeply for others, child,” Yaya told her. “The stars are not for you. Space will devour you, piece by piece, until there’s nothing clean left in you to bait a single fishing line.”

But Kallista hadn’t listened, had she?

Then the dancers return home and the fire in her mind sets her heart aflame too. Danae. The name that sinks hooks and grapples onto her throat, threatening to pull her heart out through her mouth if she dares to speak it now. Danae—Mars-born Danae of House Harpokrates, Danae with the slender bones, and the soft skin of those who haven’t had to haul plastic from the depths of the Aegean… Danae, who had chosen her, little dirt-born Kallista. Had their love been a lie? Was the effortless silence during the small hours of the night, when their bodies coiled together, a deception? Were their plans for a life together just sweet little nothings to fill the void between one deception and the next?

Nothing more straightforward than a shot to the head. And Danae had pulled the trigger.

Kallie remembers now. The dots finally connect, when the ghostly vet salutes her and begins his pained march back inside her head. He’s both her honor and her fall from grace, as his host of ethereal children remind her. They regard her with eyes the color of space vacuum, as they drag their sore-covered feet behind him. Her victims of another kind: the children she’s failed to save, once she discovered what House Harpokrates was up to. How many families have they deceived into thinking they’ve bought a slice of the Promised Land on the Belt, only to have them shipped off to their hard labor camps? They can call them agro colonies and mining expeditions all they want. How could Danae think that Kallie would agree to be a part of that?

She blinks tears away, and her gaze falls on the old woman knitting by her cot. Kallie knows her by the craftwork in her gnarled hands: that’s Kallie’s implant. It has indeed been weaving new neurons in her brain. The spectral grandma flashes Kallie a toothless smile, and lets her knitting rest on her lap. It’s an Arachne Weave-brand implant, originally used to treat patients with degenerative neurological ailments. The treatment included teaching them simple repetitive crafts, like knitting, crocheting and embroidery. After one reset and an electrical jolt too many from Leutho’s hands, disabled sections of the implant were now enabled in a configuration never used before. Had it woven itself into something new—something unheard of? Kallie catches a glimpse of its new function when the grandma begins another craft: spinning thread from a distaff onto a spindle, occasionally pausing to measure its length. Kallie is certain she spots a pair of scissors on grandma’s apron before her echo dissolves in the gloom, the toothless grin now mirthless and unforgiving.

Kallie dares a glance at her makeshift altar of paper, plastic and duct-tape. Now she can read the writing: “My Dads and I, and our new home on Jupiter’s moons.”

Kallie gulps down her sobs. Where did that poor family end up? Is it too late to track them down? And if she does, how can she help them, the destitute nobody she has become? Her unfinished business on the station will follow her everywhere she’ll go, and she’ll only endanger innocent people by association.

No. Here, tonight, she will make her stand, in this forsaken chapel of neglectful deities and unforgiving Fates.

Kallie holds onto the hope that Danae will come alone. She doubts that Danae has told anyone about the skeleton in her closet—Kallie’s own stubborn, not-yet-dead skeleton. Not that it matters much—Kallie isn’t up to fighting anyone, as weak and malnourished as the past six years have left her. She doubts she can talk her way out of it either—the implant is still rearranging neurons in her head, and Danae comes from a House of diplomats and politicians. No, she has to find another way. But she won’t run. And she won’t hide.

In the gloom of her now-empty home, the lone light over the alcove illuminates her two icons: the printout of the infant, her daughter-who-never-was, and the drawing made by the lost child, her daughter-of-Nemesis-awakening. Kallie picks both up and sits on the plastic stool. The stool creaks but doesn’t collapse, and Kallie sits with her back rigid, facing the entrance. May her pain become her shield and her vengeance. Neither justice nor mercy shall be found here tonight. Only the wrath of a Fury.

When Danae arrives, she slips inside like the gliding shades of Kallie’s mind, and sets her blood aflame—like a living, breathing shade of lost love and betrayal. But no mere shade could ever stir such yearning. Danae tilts her head, her eyes scanning the surroundings—the dust-covered floor, the bare walls, the cot with the threadbare blanket, until it comes to rest on the light that’s shaped like a votive candle over Kallie’s head.

“How… quaint,” Danae says with that little smug smile. “You’ve returned to your dirt-born roots, I see.” Then she looks right at Kallie. “You remember.” Not a question. Danae’s own implant prods its cheap sister in Kallie’s head. It doesn’t breach its newly-enabled firewalls, but it tells her as much.

Then Danae tilts her head just so, and Kallie struggles to avert her eyes from the curve of Danae’s neck. How she longs to bury her face in that fiery hair and rest her head, at last… But she cannot. This Danae is a stranger.

Kallie inhales deeply. “Did you kill Leutho?”

“Why do you care? She exploited you for years.” Then Danae shrugs. “No. She understands her place now. And she can be useful.” She keeps her right hand in the shadows just behind her hip, and Kallie’s sure her neural whip is charged and ready. “But you, Kallista, love, you never learned your place.”

“I thought it was by your side,” Kallie blurts out, before she can control the bitterness that seeps into her voice.

“No, your place was in my bed. I see now when things started to go wrong.” Danae glances at her wristband, before her eyes dart about—she’s probably just realized there’s no network connection in here.

“Things started to go wrong when your House decided to profit from the suffering of innocents.” Kallie shoves her icons in her undershirt. “You couldn’t possibly have thought that I’d go along with it?” Kallie’s implant attempts a cautious nudge at Danae’s. It shouldn’t be doing that. Those early models didn’t have short-range wi-fi enabled. How deeply had Leutho’s tinkering reached?

“No, I thought you smart enough to keep your mouth shut. Or at least that your love was strong enough to overcome all those radical ideas your dirt-side days planted in your pretty head.” Danae sighs. “A pity, really, Kallista. Of all my lovers, you were the one with the most potential. I could almost see a future with you, if you hadn’t been so headstrong.”

“And your solution was a shot to the head.” Danae’s implant prompts Kallie for a password to enable the pairing. What fucking password?

Kallie stands, and Danae takes a step backward, measuring Kallie from unkempt hair to worn sneakers. She can’t possibly consider Kallie a threat—her implant is an up-to date model, and Kallie’s too weak to overpower her, even without the neural whip.

“Your head proved to be quite thick. And Infantry surgeons are such saps for saving those injured within an inch of their lives. Oh well. Live and learn.”

Kallie takes a step forth. It hurts. But she will no longer walk with the obedient hunch six miserable years cemented into her spine. Inside her head, she hears the familiar clickety-clack of knitting, and another prompt for a password.

Danae meets her gaze. “Leutho patched you up well enough, I see. So…” She taps her temple. “What does it do?”

Password?

Another step forward. Danae holds her ground.

Fragments of a long-lost memory resurface in Kallie’s mind. Static in the air. Distant thunder. An ancient, volcanic island. Mugs of hot chocolate behind thick glass windows, watching the approaching storm over the Aegean. Danae curled beside her, cursing at the connection failure to her House’s neural network. Her password denied, again and again. Password reset. And now, Kallie remembers.

Kallie knows. And smiles. “Are you scared that it’s a sarcomancer implant, and I’ll rip your heart out through your nostrils? Or perhaps an assassin enhancement?”

“If you kill me, you won’t get far. When you didn’t report for duty and no corpse turned up, you were logged as a deserter. Unless you can come up with enough creds to be smuggled out, your biometrics will alert Command to apprehend you the moment you step on a transport.” Danae’s voice quivers a little. Fear?

Good.

Kallie chuckles. “Oh, relax. It’s an Arachne Weave. It taught me knitting.” Ah, there’s that clickety-clack again. Password?

Danae’s eyes widen. She grins.

Another step closer. “And weaving.” Now Kallie hears the woosh of a shuttle through the threads of a loom. “Let me go, for old times’ sake. I’m no longer a threat to you.”

Danae licks her lips. Before she can deny Kallie’s plea, Kallie is upon her, and takes Danae’s face in both her hands.

“Remember Santorini?”

Password accepted.

Danae nods, just before her implant sends Kallie the request for the final authorization step: the memory embedded into that single word. And while Kallie’s mind cannot be certain, her body remembers that one kiss against the approaching storm over the caldera, a rare moment of affection instead of conquest and surrender. Lips against lips, warmth and longing and the aftertaste of strong coffee, of countless lazy mornings with breakfast in bed. Danae cups Kallie’s hand with hers. For one breathless moment they linger, caught in their before and their now and their never-after, in one tangled tapestry of affection and regret and opposing loyalties. When Danae tries to pull away, Kallie holds her firm. Her implant has now full authorization, and breaches firewall after firewall.

Danae’s mind unfolds before Kallie like a multicolored tapestry. Like the fingers of another Penelope, Kallie’s implant begins the unraveling. It disables sectors, deletes memories, and overrides protocols. No more access to all the languages she speaks. No more secrets, no more deceptions, no more manipulation and taunting. There goes the account of their brief time together, and the taste of their first kiss. The onslaught stops only when it reaches the core functions; disabling more would be an affront to the Fates themselves, for they alone can sever the final thread. Kallie pulls away, breathless and spent.

Then the Arachne Weave begins another sort of craft. It knits miniature trojan horses from ones and zeros, little gifts Danae’s implant will bear to her House’s network once she’s connected again. In the stillness of Kallie’s home, they gather in every crack and crevice of Danae’s neural pathways, awaiting orders—awaiting release.

Danae blinks, her eyes vacant, her knees weak. Kallie helps her down to the floor, and kneels beside her. There’s no hate, no anger in those eyes now, only confused sadness. Then Danae starts glancing about, almost panicking.

“Kallista? Kallista!”

“Easy,” Kallie tells her, her voice soft. “Who’s Kallista?”

A blank stare.

“A friend? A sister? Or, perhaps… a daughter? Kallie holds up the baby’s photo. “You dropped this. Is this Kallista?”

Eyes darting about. Confusion. Then a nod. “Kallista?”

“I’ll help you find her.”

Kallie needs Danae’s thumbprint to withdraw enough creds. To get off the damned station and to where she needs to go. Danae can go on and infect the rest of her House, and destroy them from within, while mourning the daughter she never had. May Danae mourn that daughter to the end of her days, and by proxy mourn every child her House has condemned.

The lost child’s drawing now nests by Kallie’s heart. In her mind, the visage of those she failed to save settle down. And they wait.

The child Kallie never bore is now legion. And she’ll be an avenging mother to them all.