As soon as we stepped through the door, Sage burst down the steps. She threw her arms around me. "Shad, you're back!"

I noted with a shock that she was only about six inches shorter than me. When had my baby sister grown up? I’d only been gone a week — right?

She drew back, put her hands on her hips, and scowled. "Shad, you dummy! What have you been doing for the last week? You weren't answering my messages!"

"Sorry," I said, "Busy. Working on a project for Kronos. I have you set to be able to override my 'do not disturb' in an emergency."

"Yes, but it wasn't an emergency, was it?" She stepped back and then followed Juana and me into our tiny living room. "You were gone, Grandpa's gone, Juana's barely been home. It's a good thing I've got my school projects to keep me busy or I'd be really angry with you."

"How's that going?" I asked. I took off my duster and hung it on its peg and set my hat on top of it before collapsing onto the sofa with a sigh of relief. Juana set our plate of brownies down on the table in front of the wall screen. Sage flopped bonelessly into an overstuffed armchair opposite. Aside from the house being made of plascrete and compressed rock, it could have been a scene out of middle American life any time in the last 60 years.

"School's great.” Sage rolled her eyes. "I've got mean girls on my case, jocks trying to give me crap, and the vice principal hates me, and I don't know why. But my tutor's pretty cool, and I'm starting to make friends with my teammates. Did you know Grignarians reproduce two different ways?" I blinked at the sudden change in subject.

"What?"

"We've got a couple in my class. They molt, which means they split into two identical smaller Grignarians with most of the memories and some of the personality of the original. When a Grignarian molts too many times and can't anymore, he has to return to the clan tree. Sometimes junior molts get traded out to other clans. They merge into the tree," Sage pulled a face. "Sounds creepy. I guess they turn into some sort of hive mind. The tree can bud and create brand new Grignarians with the genetic patterns of any or all of the adult molts."

"That's fascinating," Juana said. “Sexual and asexual reproduction in the same species. I think we've seen that on Earth with certain sorts of sea life. As far as I know, none of the other galactic species do anything like that. They're all pretty much like us. Two distinct sexes combining gametes to produce new individuals. Which makes sense if we really are all spawned from the progenitors.” She shook her head. "It's cool that there are other ways of being alive, though. I wonder what the galaxy would look like if the progenitors hadn't built all these reality engines and then disappeared. If they'd just let themselves go extinct naturally and other races rise up to replace them."

"Well, seeing as we're supposedly descended from those same progenitors, we wouldn't know because we wouldn't be here.” I leaned over and grabbed one of the brownies from the plate. “And both those methods sound asexual to me.”

Juana sighed. “It means whether reproduction involves a single individual or more than one, in this case. Though I guess the Grignarian hive trees might be considered an individual.… Huh.”

Sage snatched up a brownie, took a deep bite, and sighed. "That's good."

I glanced at Juana. I could tell she wanted to have a conversation with me about the past week. I wanted that too. But not here, with Sage in the room. "Shall we catch up on what's been happening back on Earth? Grandpa should be there by now, right?"

"Yes, the Ad Astra made orbit earlier today.” Juana accessed the info packet from Earth and scrolled through it. Her custom algorithms sorted through the gigabytes of data looking for anything we'd be interested in. A couple of news programs and a podcast or three popped right up to the top, things to do with reality engines and our current immigration scheme.

I looked at the first two podcasts. "Reality engines: exposing the lies." I shook my head. "Let's save that for a night when I'm having a beer and need something to laugh at."

The next one looked a little more balanced. "An in-depth interview with six candidates for reality engine integration."

The next clip down caught my eye. It was from a big news show out of Europe called Investigation 24/7. The tagline read, "A tell-all with Earth's forgotten champion."

"What's that?" I asked. "Never heard of that show."

Juana pulled up the information. "It's French.” I stared in horror at the thumbnail image that appeared. Major Waters was sitting down with a pair of journalists dressed in his best uniform jacket.

"Put it on," I growled.

Juana hesitated. "Maybe tonight's not the best."

"Put it on."

Juana sighed but activated the clip. The interviewers spoke in French, subtitled for our convenience by the system. One was a gorgeous 30-something woman with long pale hands and close-cropped black hair plastered to her head like a helmet. She wore an incredibly short miniskirt and had her knees crossed. The other was a striking man about the same age with a skeptically quizzical expression on his face.

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"Let us introduce our guest, Major Waters," the woman said. "He is speaking to us from an undisclosed location. He says his safety is at risk in bringing us this interview tonight, but we here at Investigation 24/7 believe it important to share these truths with the world. Major Waters.” She turned. Waters wasn't actually in the studio with them. Instead, his face and torso appeared on an enormous screen beside the two anchors. That fat asshole looked even worse than the last time I'd seen him. His face was red, his nose puffy like he'd been drinking too much. His uniform looked good, though, and he had even more medals than I remembered before.

"Thank you, Estelle," he said. "And you, Francois. I appreciate you having the courage to interview me. I fear this may make you both a target."

I nearly choked on my brownie. Sage pounded the arm of her chair. "A target of who? Disgusting little prick.”

"Sage," Juana said.

"Oh, come on. He is. And you know it," Sage retorted.

"I'm sorry for that,” Waters continued. “An unhappy side effect of the capture of Earth's reality engine by a faction claiming to be representatives of Earth but actually puppeted by a galactic conspiracy that wishes to see all of us slaves, extorted for all we're worth."

"Please, tell us more," Estelle said. "We have been informed that a brave human alliance, under the control of some of your own countrymen, won a daring victory for us against outsiders seeking to take this reality engine for their own."

Waters snorted. "I'm sure you don't believe that horseshit, Estelle. If the Galactics were truly that powerful, there is no way they would give up a reality engine to a bunch of what must seem to them as primitives. The faction headed by the miscreants who style themselves as Misfits Guild was working with a galactic sponsor too cowardly to put their own faces on the screen. I have always been honest about my dealings with Proxima, and they, in turn, have been straightforward with me. I urge anyone listening who may be considering moving to the reality engine to speak with your local Proxima representative. They will be able to get you a fair and honest deal. They have multiple slots opening up soon in this reality engine for galactic integration."

"You promised us some tell-all secrets," Francois said. "Such as what?"

"I may reveal now that the human traitor pulling all the strings is a man named Colonel Jefferson Ames of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Colonel Ames has had his finger in a dozen different black operations, some of which you would recognize if I revealed them. I will say this: Do you recall the uprising in Guyana a few years back? Colonel Ames certainly does."

"Wait, Ames is CIA?" I said. "You think he's telling the truth about that?"

"I suspect we'd have to ask him," Juana said, her eyes fixed on the screen.

It made sense. Ames didn't like being in the spotlight but was good at getting what he wanted—the hallmarks of someone who's spent a career working one side of intelligence or another.

"These backers are a shadowy cabal of aliens with perverse motivations," Waters said. "The race known as Grignarians are outcasts in galactic circles for a very good reason. They have already tried to destroy a reality engine, stripping it down to its component parts in order to learn its secrets. But when we remember that a reality engine is not just a gift from our distant ancestors but contains the last fragments of their racial memory and soul, an inheritance which the Grignarians, unlike any other species known in the galaxy, have no claim by birthright, we must ask what motivation this faction has."

I made an angry gesture. "Shut it off!" I shouted, and the house's internal systems responded. Waters' glowing face vanished. Juana and Sage stared at me.

“Asshole!” I got to my feet, my fingers itching as I wished Waters was right here so I could shoot him in the gut, or better yet, punch him in the face. "Cowardly, no-good, yellow-bellied asshole!"

"Shad," Juana said, but I ignored her.

"He's a... he's a..." I struggled to find the right word.

"He's a prick," Sage said helpfully from her spot on the overchair.

I looked at her and nodded. "That'll do until I think of a better word. How big an audience does this program have?"

"Usually in the low millions, but that clip went viral," Juana said. "It's had about a hundred million views in the last week."

"Great," I muttered, "fucking asshole." I glared down at the inoffensive plate of brownies, then turned to Sage. "Sorry, sis, I'm going to bed. That just got me angry, and I haven't had a good night's sleep in I don't know how long." That was literally true.

"I'll see you tomorrow, if you're down before I have to leave," Sage said brightly. "My squad's got a study group planned before classes, so I'll be leaving early."

I grunted as she hopped up and brushed past us on her way up the stairs to bed. Juana rose, frowning.

"You know Waters isn't your problem."

"He is if he pulls that kind of stunt. It's going to make everything harder for the rest of us, spreading that sort of bullshit. What's he mean, Proxima's going to have slots coming online?"

Juana hesitated. "Well, while you were gone," she said, "Proxima came and asked to buy a bunch of integration slots in the Reality Engine. They offered us 70% of the ethereum we’ve been asking.The council voted to accept their offer. I persuaded Kronos it was in his best interest to accept."

"Wait, you let them undercut our prices? Why?"

"Because," she said, "this way, they're going to think their plan to starve Kronos is working, that he'll accept whatever they offer. I don't want them to know we found another source of Ethereum.”

“So they're buying slots at—” I did some quick calculations—"only about twice what it costs Kronos to actually integrate someone into the system."

"Yes," Juana said. "We thought they were going to be bringing in a bunch of their own people to try to gain our more interesting classes. But if what Waters is saying is right, they're going to be contracting humans."

"Do we have to supply living quarters and training?"

"If they want us to help, they're going to have to pay," Juana said. Then she frowned. "Only, I'm afraid that they're just going to get people classes and ship them off who knows where with no preparation or training at all. Damn." She passed a hand across her brow. "I should have seen that coming."

I looked at her, noted the sleepy bags under her eyes. "You've been attending council meetings and speaking to Kronos and working the control room for my team?"

She nodded. "Yes, though Arjun and Allison did most of the work."

I didn't believe her. I might not have any memories of the past week, but I was certain Juana had been standing over Arjun's shoulders, watching every video feed from my team. Our plan had been to work 18-hour days, sleeping only what we had to in order to finish a fragment as fast as possible. Of course, I had been expecting it to take two days or less, not over a week.

"You need to go to bed.”

Juana gave me a pale smile. "You usually make that sound like a much more inviting offer.” she covered a yawn. "But I'll admit I'm pretty tired."

My mind was spinning as I followed Juana up the stairs to bed. She was asleep in minutes. I lay awake much longer, staring at the ceiling, thinking about our problems.