Liu wrestles briefly with the mail envelope—that never works—then hops up to retrieve a pair of scissors. She walks back from the kitchen already pulling out smaller envelopes, reading off names. "Dea, Dea, me... Tobias... me again... Dea... Tobias... Dea..." She stops on the next one and frowns at the name. If it's me, I think I'm going to be sick.

But Liu's face splits into a grin. "Awww. 'To daddy, from Ana.' She learned how to write!"

Krüger has a kid?

I make a conscious effort to keep my shock from showing on my face. I did my research on every member of this team while planning this mission, and I never saw a kid in Krüger's record. Kwon's, yes—she's got two adult sons—but no others.

Liu dumps most of the envelopes on their respective recipients, but hands Krüger the one with a small child's chicken-scratch on the front like it's something special. Krüger is smiling, but there's something pained in it. He sets the envelope on his pile of personal items, glances over his other two, and drops them on top. Then he goes back to a box of new microscope parts.

Liu plops back down. "You're not going to open it?"

"Not right now."

"Where's she staying? With your parents?"

He nods absently. A single dad, then? I wonder if he only recently got custody. Even that aside, though, I've never heard him mention a daughter, and I know he spends more time in the field than at home. Several times more. They must barely see each other.

"How old is she?" I ask quietly.

He glances up, startled when he sees that came from me. His pained smile returns. "She turns four this week."

I can tell he doesn't want to talk about it. I lean back so he knows I'm not going to press. "We should meet her sometime," I say, and leave it at that.

"You know who else we should meet?" says Liu. I look over to find her looking directly at me. All the breath is knocked out of me as she slides a slim white envelope across the space between us.

It's Yahvi. I don't even need to see the name. I'd know that handwriting anywhere.

"You know Yahvi Sanghera?" says Liu, and Krüger genuinely chokes on his coffee. Kwon thumps his back.

"Wait—what?" he manages when he can breathe again. "Dr. Sanghera? Like, from Neelambar?"

My pulse is kicking me so hard, it blurs my vision, and my stomach is going to overturn at any moment. It's been three years since I heard from her. Part of me wants to cry that she found me again. That she's still sending letters. She didn't even use the Neelambar Research Group stationary; this is personal correspondence. How many of these has she sent over the last three years, that never managed to chase me down on a moving F-300, or in a temporary hotel room somewhere in the UIS?

The other part of me is approaching panic, listing off all the possibilities of what I might find when I open that envelope. She has every right to be furious with me. What if she is? What if she isn't? I want to read the whole thing, and I want to burn it without reading a word. I take it from Liu, set it beside me, and return my hands to my mug before the others can see them shaking.

"Is it?" says Krüger again.

I nod.

"They used to work together," says Kwon, sparing me. Liu and Krüger both look dumbstruck. I keep forgetting Yahvi is a legend in the research world. She was always trained as a scientist, but my memories of her predate her new profession in astrobiology.

"At Neelambar?" says Krüger incredulously.

"No," says Kwon. "On earth."

"Holy shit." Liu presses her hands over her mouth as the revelation dawns on her. I'm not ready for this. "Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. I didn't—but you both worked—did you work together? I thought—"

"Wait," says Krüger. "You were both Aventureros leaders, right? Were you co-leaders?"

I nod again. Liu flings herself back against a couch, hands pressed to the sides of her head like her brain is going to explode. Krüger is giving me a very odd look. Everyone in the UIS knows the Aventureros. If he knows that much of Yahvi's public backstory, too, I'm willing to bet he's putting the pieces together right now.

Yahvi never mentions my name to the media out here, and I've thanked her for it every day of the last nine years. I've returned the favor. No UIS news outlet has dug far enough to learn we're connected: planetary news is local news, we got famous in different circles, and interstellar information requests are a pain in the ass. But that information is out there. For someone willing to dig, who knew where they were looking. Yahvi's public bio lists an "accident" as the reason she switched careers, and it made headlines on earth when a once-respected organization's star team got mired in a tragedy and then quit within weeks of one another.

I still don't want that connection drawn. We both deal with enough without it going viral that famous scientist Sanghera and famous pilot Gallegos have a lot more history than either lets on. I hope these two keep it on the down-low without me having to pull them aside for a chat.

I think Krüger sees that I don't want to talk about this any more than he wants to talk about his daughter. "Well, I can see how you two would get along," he concludes, and I mentally thank him with all my heart.

"No shit," snorts Liu. "Put either of them in a room with Dr. Ramadhani and the air feels ready to explode."

In spite of everything—the letter beside me, the dredged-up memories, the weight of having one more person know what drove me off my home planet—that makes me smile. Zuri Ramadhani is these two's boss and Yahvi's scientific rival. More than that, she's the type of personality Yahvi would hate on sight: exceptional at what she does, but only loosely wedded to moral and ethical boundaries in her pursuit of it. Bad enough that Zuri shamelessly poached her rival's ex-teammate for her own research mission—I wonder if Yahvi's gotten wind of the harassment she put me through to get me on this team. If these two think they've felt tension in a room, I can almost guarantee that clash will redefine the word.

The wish to have Yahvi between Zuri and I hits me like a truck. I knock it down and kick it away before it can get its teeth in, but it lingers, gnawing at the edges of my willpower. I tell myself to be satisfied that there are already sparks between them back on Lumiuk, the UIS's scientific hub. With their labs and research topics in such close proximity, they must rub shoulders often.

Liu and Krüger are now swapping anecdotes of Zuri's ruthless competence. Respect and awe colour their words. I've heard she's an excellent boss, but I wonder if her people know how she treats anyone outside her own team.

Kwon has gone back to unpacking the resource pod. I join her. This reminds the scientists, and we swing mercifully back to digging up treasures and exclaiming over food items, new board games, and other small additions to our station quality of life.

The letter stares at me all evening, until I have to take it away and leave it in my room just to focus on the task at hand. Even then, the mental image of it sitting on my desk haunts me as we unpack, sort, and take inventory of the resource pod's contents. Liu and Krüger disassemble its outer shell and haul it off to our waste converter. Bolts aside, the material will burn into greenhouse-ready fertilizer ash when incinerated, the delivery's last gift to our station.

By the time we've tallied up our full haul, it's too late to do anything but sit around, eat cookies, and chat. I hang out just long enough to not make it rude when I excuse myself and return to my room. I drop onto my bed and bury my face in my pillow. I can feel the letter behind me. I'm not prepared to open it, but I can't handle this sick feeling for much longer. I'm not going to sleep tonight or function tomorrow if I don't know what she wrote now that she's caught me in a place where I'm guaranteed to receive her mail.

I've never gotten the sense that Yahvi is mad at me for avoiding her, but she's nothing if not eloquent. In writing, she can hide her true feelings behind any front she likes. She's always been honest with me, at least, but if she turned that skill on me instead, I don't know if I would trust myself anymore to catch on. That only adds to the mass of undirected dread sitting on my back like it's trying to suffocate me. I roll over, and it crushes me from the side instead.

She was mad at me, once upon a time. I doubled down on safety after what happened in the Philippines, but she carried on just as she always had. We fought more in the two weeks it took to get our team home than we had in any full year prior. By the end, it devolved into a mutual silence that was never really broken. My last clear memory of that trip is taking my backpack and walking away from her at the Santiago International Airport, not fully knowing yet that it was the last day I would spend on earth. I left the next morning. It's still a blur. I don't think we even said goodbye.

I push myself up and stare at the letter for a long time. Then I retrieve it and sit on my bed again, just reading my name on the front over and over. Or not even really reading it. Just looking at the handwriting.

I miss Yahvi.

Finally, I fish a pocketknife from my miscellaneous drawer and slit the envelope. The letter inside is a single page on cream paper, crisply folded. It's typed. They all have been; we both write in cursive, but my own handwriting is the only cursive I can actually read. A paper printout of what looks like a scientific journal article flutters into my lap. I set it aside. For a moment, my hand hovers over my phone. Do I want to scan this one? It'd be faster, but I don't think I can handle a synthetic voice delivering words I know are Yahvi's. I drop my hand again.

Hi Alex.

Even seeing my own name lodges a thorn in my throat. I brace for the rest.