Laila quite happily ate the meat mush as she nodded along to Jecca’s unprompted explanation of why she was only reasonably sure that her name was, indeed Jecca Ogden. This was followed by an equally unprompted summary of Jecca’s experiences of being wherever she was.

  ‘So I don’t know what you want to do, but I suppose you’re welcome to stay here if you need to, to recover,’ Jecca concluded.

  ‘I think I’ve heard of this,’ Laila said, through a mouthful of the mush.

  Jecca’s grey eyebrows snapped together. ‘You have?’

  Laila finished chewing before she answered. ‘Only as a… “here’s the evil stuff that corporations are really up to” sort of conspiracy theory,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if it’s real, is my point,’ she clarified, when Jecca’s eyebrows didn’t separate at all.

  Jecca nodded. ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ she said.

  That was not the response Laila had expected, so she launched into the story anyway. ‘What I’ve heard is that unethical genetic experiments are still ongoing within the gene developers through the colonial administration. It’s supposed to be something to create super soldiers, but again, I don’t have any proof. So people with real wild drift apparently get kidnapped, infused with more stuff, get their mind wiped, and get dropped into adverse conditions to see how they do.’

  Jecca’s frown had continued not to move. ‘I have a few questions.’

  Laila nodded and took another bite.

  ‘What’s a conspiracy theory? What are genetic experiments? What are gene developers? What is the colonial administration? What’s real wild drift?’

  Laila nodded along and chewed. She supposed if someone had their mind wiped, they wouldn’t know what any of those things are. Maybe some of the absolute nonsense her parents had believed wasn’t so completely baseless.

  ‘A conspiracy theory is… speculation that some organisation or group of people are doing secret business, typically something that would be bad for normal people if it were revealed to be true. Genetic experiments… um… do you know what genes are?’

  Jecca’s frown disappeared. She shook her head. ‘No.’ And she left the room in a hurry. A minute later, she came back with a tablet computer in one hand. ‘It’s like the instructions that determine how a living thing works, right?’

  Laila nodded.

  ‘So genetic experiments are when someone, possibly some organisation or group of people, do experiments with those instructions?’

  Laila nodded.

  ‘Are gene developers people who do those experiments?’

  Laila shrugged and nodded at the same time.

  Jecca’s eyebrows met in the middle again.

  Laila chewed faster. ‘They do the experiments, yes,’ Laila said. ‘But primarily they make the materials needed to apply the changed instructions to people. So not all of them experiment or create new ones, and only make instruction sets that have already been created by someone else.’

  Jecca’s eyebrows relax. She nodded. ‘So… colonial administration?’

  Laila had a realisation. ‘I can’t actually remember what the proper name is,’ she said. ‘It’s the organisation that’s in charge of make sure all known inhabited planets remain safe to inhabit, and that people follow the rules.’

  ‘So unethical genetic experiments are against the rules?’ Jecca surmised.

  Laila nodded and didn’t shrug this time. It would probably come back up later.

  ‘And real wild drift?’

  Laila pressed her lips together. ‘Drift is the common term for the unexpected ways in which multiple gene patches, those instruction sets, interact, particularly over generations.’

  Jecca nodded. ‘What makes drift real wild?’

  How to explain a colloquialism? ‘That’s just the way I’d describe extreme forms of drift. For example, your skin colour or teeth. My guts and teeth, and my metabolism in general, I suppose.’

  Jecca nodded some more. ‘I’ve never met anyone who had skin like mine,’ she said. ‘Most people don’t like it.’

  Laila frowned. ‘I find that strange,’ she said. ‘I’ve met plenty of people with strange skin tones. Some people do it to themselves, but I’ve met plenty of people with drift skin.’

  Jecca kept on nodding. ‘Some people are the opposite, then? They don’t like it?’

  ‘Drift? Plenty of people don’t like it,’ Laila said. ‘It used to be that gene developers could do basically whatever they wanted, before the admin. So there’s some types of drift that are quite dangerous to people, even deadly. It’s one of the reasons I got myself sterilised as soon as I left home.’

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  Jecca pursed her lips and her eyebrows drifted closer together. ‘Sterilised?’

  ‘I can’t have children,’ Laila said.

  Jecca nodded. ‘Because you were worried that your genes might be deadly to a child?’

  Laila shrugged. She hadn’t expected to have to explain this for the first time to a genetic experiment in the middle of nowhere after a ship crash. ‘Partly,’ she said. ‘I also didn’t want to have kids either way. My parents left a bad impression.’

  Jecca nodded. ‘That sounds sensible.’

  Laila relaxed. She hadn’t realised she wasn’t relaxed. She had very little reason to be relaxed. Relaxing was actually a bad idea. Her guts hurt, quite a lot. Eating wasn’t helping, except that she was hungry. It would help soon.

  For several moments, the two of them looked at each other. Then Jecca turned and left the room. Then she opened the door again. ‘I’m going back to disassembling that pod you were in. You can stay here and rest.’ She opened the door further and pointed to her right. ‘There’s more food over there, if you want.’

  Laila nodded.

  Jecca nodded back, and closed the door.

  Laila huffed, tried to get more comfortable, failed, and continued eating her rapidly cooling meat goop. From behind her, presumably outside, she heard the muffled sounds of Jecca operating a hacksaw and apparently talking to herself.

  Laila had spent very little time alone in her life, except when she was sleeping. And she imagined that she, too, would talk to herself given enough time not talking to anyone else.

  Jecca was, indeed, talking to herself. She talked to herself quite a lot. Usually she didn’t notice it, but this time she had decided to take the opportunity for self-assessment.

  ‘I think that went reasonably well,’ she said, returning to her cut on the bearing rail. ‘She was very willing to tell me things, which was nice. And I think she was more surprised that I didn’t know things than she was judging me about it. It’s hard to say for sure, of course.’

  The hacksaw said ‘grrr shhh’.

  ‘And I do know quite a lot more than I did before I talked to her,’ Jecca continued. ‘So even if she was judging me, it hardly matters. I’m not sure what to do with the information, is the trouble.’

  The bearing rail said ‘rrrr clunk’ as the end fell off.

  Jecca repositioned and started a fresh cut. ‘I hadn’t realised how much not know why I was here was bothering me,’ she explained to the small pile of metal at her feet. ‘I suppose I figured I would find out eventually, and that’s why I had to stay here, so that someone would come and tell me when I was done.

  ‘But if I was waiting to be done, shouldn’t I have kept going with the tasks? There’s nothing else here that needs to get done, exactly, is there?’

  The hacksaw said ‘rrp’ and stuck solid where she was cutting.

  Jecca took a deep breath, wriggled the hacksaw free, and tried to concentrate on keeping the blade straight. ‘But it doesn’t exactly point me in a direction, does it?’ she asked the hacksaw, who was behaving for the moment. ‘I still don’t have anything to go on beyond a rumour that some woman who fell out of the sky heard somewhere and considers dubious.’

  The hacksaw said ‘rrrp’ again.

  Jecca sighed, let go of the hacksaw, and bent the rail until it snapped at the cut. ‘We’ll see what Laila Williams wants to do,’ Jecca decided, putting the hacksaw back onto her little tool cart and retrieving her metal shears. ‘Maybe I’ll get back to that task list tomorrow. It could still point me in some direction, couldn’t it?’

  The metal shears said ‘kachunk’.

  Jecca nodded in agreement. ‘Quite right.’ And she let the thoughts stew in the back of her head while she cut the broken sphere into slightly bent plates and very worn bearing surfaces. The seat even seemed to have a motor attached to it, which might be handy.

  Back inside, Laila helped herself to a second bowl of lukewarm goo and poked around Jecca’s little, brick house. It only had three rooms, and the only one that was well lit was the surgery room.

  The little kitchen dining room was dim, cramped, and vaguely threatening with a plastic tabletop and partially exposed copper wires surrounding an electric stove.

  There was a little light set above the stove, which was just enough for Laila to see by, but she supposed must have been more than enough for Jecca, with those massive irises.

  A narrow hall led to what was presumably the front door, where the sounds of Jecca disassembling the gunnery pod were a bit louder. Off the corridor was a pitch dark storeroom. The faint light that made it from the kitchen reflected off stacks of metal, fabric, and plastic.

  Laila shrugged to herself, and went back to the surgery room to eat.

  Laila didn’t talk to herself. Her thoughts stayed inside her head. They bore some similarities to Jecca’s thoughts, but were certainly not the same.

  The problem presented to Laila was that she wanted to get back to civilisation. She didn’t know for sure where she might find it, or how far away it would be. And she didn’t want to accidentally run into a pirate base that might be out here in the middle of nowhere, where the ship that had landed her here would be stationed.

  When that conundrum crossed her mind, though, it was swiftly expelled by an alarm. Whatever the pirates may have wanted from the Friendship, the only way for them to get it would be to come out here and search for it.

  Laila hadn’t seen what they were smuggling over the south pole, so she had no idea the chances it would have survived the crash. The ship should have been basically worthless to the pirates, what with exploding and being pretty much garbage even more that.

  But, just like Laila, the pirates would have no way of knowing if the Friendship’s cargo had survived without going out looking for it.

  Laila got up again. Her gut pinched again. She didn’t know anything about what Jecca was like. But she knew that Jecca had saved her, given her food and water, and didn’t seem to be on the verge of killing and eating her.

  It should not have been a shock when Laila opened the door and was immediately struck with a blast of cold air. And yet she stood there, gaping, as if she hadn’t expected that to happen, for several seconds.

  Jecca looped over from where she was cutting the gunnery pod into small pieces with a comically oversized set of tin snips. Or where Jecca was frozen in the middle of cutting the gunnery pod into small pieces with a comically oversized set of tin snips.

  ‘Whoever shot us down might be looking for the wreckage,’ Laila said, without stuttering even once as her teeth started to chatter. ‘You should… if you go out again… you should be careful.’

  Jecca’s whole body visibly relaxed. ‘Oh, it’s fine,’ she said. ‘If they don’t know not to come here by now, it’s really their own fault.’

  Laila frowned. ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Must have been… oh, two hundred and forty-six days since anyone came here looking for valuables,’ she said. ‘They decided I shouldn’t have them, so I did have to fight them over it and… I’m pretty sure some of them left alive. So they should have learned their lesson.’

  Laila kept frowning, and started shivering. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Good.’