"No!" Finn stopped Nitha. "I need answers! You have to explain to me what the hell is going on with Asgard and Pluviam! And what happened to A154? Where are the passengers of the lost spaceship? And why did the government lie? Tell me!"

Nitha faced Finn, walked up to him, and took halt menacingly close. Tears filled his eyes but he blinked them away and scowled at her.

"You have so many questions, and I don't have the time to answer them all."

"You're leaving again?" Finn said, his teeth squeezed so tightly that he thought his jaw would snap.

"I must," she shrugged and smiled in a way that was neither sweet nor sympathetic. To Finn, it was a hauntingly familiar expression.

"Where will you go?" he asked, hurried.

"I can't tell you."

"So what? You'll just pretend to be dead? For how long?" She gave him another shrug, tearing his patience. "Nitha, tell me! At least explain what happened to the other passengers!"

"They are all fine. All are hidden."

"They are sick! Your mother most of all. How can they be fine?"

"The medicine was on the ship. Each passenger was specifically selected to be infected, and then they were treated directly," she said casually.

"Who selected them? And why?"

While Finn had struggled for months to achieve the goal of rescuing Nitha, she was looking healthy. While he had been chased and hunted down by guards, she carried not a single scratch on her skin. While he had been wearing the same clothes for weeks, she was wearing a cute summer dress. While he was feeling the skin around his gunshot wound pulsating, Nitha flipped her straight hair over her unharmed shoulder. She puffed and squinted.

"Nitha! Say something!"

"If you yell at me, I won't tell you anything!"

"I'm sorry," Finn lied and asked her to enlighten him as to the causes of her unforeseeable appearance.

"I'll tell you, but you can't tell anyo—"

"I won't tell anyone," he said madly, "I promise."

"Fine. I've been dying to tell someone anyway." She plunged to one of the old wooden chairs and adjusted her dress to avoid wrinkles in the thin fabric. "It's really dumb." She rolled her eyes, while Finn remained standing in the center of the room like a misplaced ornament. He bit his tongue, trying to fight the urge to scream. "Firstly, tell me what you know? Did you find out anything? Or do I really have to tell you the entire thing?"

"I know the black hole was a lie," Finn said, confident, while everything he believed in was at risk of being shattered in about two minutes.

"No kidding? I think my presence very much though establishes that."

"Well, I'm sorry!" Finn flung his arms in her direction. "You were supposed to be dead. I'm just telling you what I found out while you were having a good time with your family!"

Nitha snarled, "Good time? I hated the bunker. The kids were constantly crying, I was the only one of my age, and the adults were mostly gone somewhere in secret. I barely got to see my mom and dad! They were always gone and don't tell me where or why. I'm glad to be out of there. You have no idea what I've been through."

"Same to you! I risked my life to find you! And you were safely hidden!" Finn's throat was burning. He felt provoked and betrayed, and his entire body was tensed up and quivery. He wanted to break stuff, pierce the walls with his bare hands. But he clenched his fists hard enough to guide his anger out of his body.  "Did you know you were going to hide when you broke up with me?"

"No."

And just like that, his heart hit the bottom of the void in his stomach. "You didn't know we'd see each other again?"

"I didn't. I was clueless like you. I was going to explain everything, but you had to interrupt me."

"Sorry. Please continue," he begged, but she crossed her arms. "Please. Nitha?"

"If you want to know everything, you should learn to listen."

"I am!"

"You're not! You're already talking again!"

"I won't say another word, just please make sense of it all."

"I'm trying. Will you let me?"

Finn gave her a nod and another one when she asked, "You found the bunker, right?"

With slow movements, he grabbed the other chair and sank down to it. They sat so close together that their knees almost touched.

"Okay, so," Nitha tugged her hair behind one ear, the earing she was wearing must have been new, for Finn saw it for the first time. "You know that a few hundred years ago Kepler was at its breaking point." Finn nodded. "And then everyone started leaving to find another planet. Well, the rich started leaving, the poor stayed behind."

"Left behind," Finn corrected, "They were left behind, they didn't just stay. They had no choice."

Nitha glared at Finn and he became very quiet. "As I was saying," she resumed, "the space station with which they traveled, Asgard, never found another sustainable planet. So they just stayed in space for a while, and then, recently, they started to receive frequency on their computers. Or something like that, I didn't really get that part. It's not that important for the story. Asgard found out that people were still on Kepler and they saw that its environment recovered. They saw our great cities with their satellites, I think, or maybe they received our news. Yes, that's it, when they came close enough, they could see our society through their screens."

Finn pressed his lips to a slim line and hoped to stay silent. He had little trust in himself to keep his questions behind the border of his teeth, but even less trust was given to Nitha. He doubted that she would explain the full story if she were to be interrupted one more time.

"They contacted the government on Kepler and asked to land, but Kepler said no."

"Why?" Finn covered his mouth immediately. "Sorry," he muttered into his fingers.

"Because they are no longer our allies. They abandoned us when Kepler was doomed to failure."

"We weren't even born when that happened," said Finn, lost in a dark forest of tall facts.

"Do you want to know why or not?"

"I do!" he shouted, regretted, and shrunk on his seat. "I do," he repeated calmly.

"Kepler didn't want them because they didn't want history to repeat itself. When the humans destroyed Earth, they found Kepler, and not much later, those people destroyed our planet too, and our government didn't want to risk that happening again. We have finally created a good environment with good laws and a working system, and Kepler didn't want to risk that being wasted. We just couldn't trust Asgard. And where would we put those people anyway? The number has five digits; we don't have space for them. So Asgard started their desperate search for a second option."

"Wait," Finn could not help himself, "Kepler just said no, and that's it?"

"Honey, they didn't just say no. There was a long discussion between the two parties."

"When did all of this start? Why don't I know any of this? How could it have been a secret for so long?"

"I think this has been going on for a long time. I mean, just by the length of the contract—"

"What contract?"

"Finn! You'd know if you'd let me finish!"

Finn scowled, crossed his arms, and leaned back, "Keep talking then."

"Kepler rejected Asgard, and when the space station started searching for another option, they accidentally found out that Earth had recovered as well. Just like Kepler. Seems that the environment had never been the issue. It had been humans. And when they were gone, Earth began to heal."

Finn's body jumped up again. "Earth! I knew it! I knew it!"

"So you know that Asgard wants to go there?"

"Wait what?"

"Asgard wants to go to Earth and—"

"It's way too far away!" Finn cut in.

Nitha stood up and began walking to the door. "You should feel flattered," she said to him, one hand on the doorknob, "KSP calls you a genius, but you're nothing more than an immature blabbermouth."