Nyx sat across from an adorable Felis child with black hair and fur, her bright green eyes focused on the cloth doll she held. Nyx played with her own doll as they played pretend scientists.

  She doesn’t remember what they said, but she loved passing time with the child, Oyx.

  Tyx, the boy with orange hair and brown spots on his fur, comes over and tries to get them to play with blocks. He has a new bandage. They’ve drawn more blood or given him more drugs, but he seems okay.

  Oyx and Nyx continue to play with their dolls, so Tyx throws a fit, but soon sits down and plays with his blocks by himself.

  The lights suddenly dim, and all the children float off the floor.

  Panic and crying as they don’t know what’s happening.

  An explosion shakes the room, and the walls reverberate.

  Oyx flails, but catches Nyx. She’s terrified and crying. Nyx knows she must be brave for her sister, though she wants to cry and hide too.

  Maybe the adults know what’s going on?

  Nyx uses the table to push to the door and ends up tumbling until she hits the wall.

  She hears familiar voices outside. Pirates? She doesn’t know what pirates are. They seem like bad people, though.

  More explosions and more screams of fear from the children, including Nyx.

  She hears something. Something about disposing of the test subject and another place on Mars?

  Nyx knows the adults are talking about them. Dispose? Isn’t that the word they use when they throw away needles and bandages?

  Nyx gets scared. They’re going to throw us away? It doesn’t sound good. Trash goes into the recycler.

  What can she do? She doesn’t want to get recycled. She doesn’t want Oyx or Tyx to get recycled either.

  How can they get out? Only adults can open the door.

  But they’re floating now! She can reach high places now? Some place to hide until the adults leave for this Mars place?

  Nyx looks around.

  The robot door! There’s a door she’s always wanted to explore. The place where the cleaning robots come in and out. Maybe they can reach it now that they’re floating?

  She pulls Oyx, and fumbles around until she slams into the robot door after her fourth try. She urges Oyx and Tyx to come. The other kids are too confused or scared to move. Tyx is trying, but it’s hard to go when they’re floating.

  Nyx opens the robot door and climbs inside. She grabs Oyx and crawls inside, but her frightened friend refuses to enter.

  Nyx can’t see the room anymore and hears the door open. There’s angry shouting, and she knows she’ll be in trouble if she’s caught. Oyx is just there. She can get in too! Tyx is fast and can make it too.

  She hears popping noises and more screams. She knows she should wait for her friends, but she’s scared. The popping noises are scary. She needs to run away from them.

  She crawls and crawls. It’s cold here, but she keeps going. Oyx and Tyx are just behind her. She needs to be brave!

  An exit!

  Finally, she looks behind her and sees Oyx and Tyx haven’t followed. The adults caught them and threw them away?

  She can’t go back. The adults will get her too! But Oyx and Tyx? Maybe she can hide until the adults calm down and the loud noises stop and go back to save them?

  Nyx opens the exit and floats out.

  Where is she? It isn’t the place the adults take her. Maybe she can find a place to hide or find Natalie. Natalie was the only nice adult and played with them. Maybe she’d stop the other adults.

  Noise, then people in suits round the corner. They look scary, and she tries to run. She doesn’t want to get thrown away!

  “Nyx!” comes a voice. “Nyx!”

  Nyx feels her heart beating hard as she comes back to her senses.

  Her voice is hoarse from screaming, and she screams again.

  It’s the playroom. Dry and flaking blood splatters cover the walls. Seven bodies float in the vacuum. Small bodies. Children.

  They’re all desiccated, but she remembers each of them.

  Little crybaby Oyx. Nyx sees the familiar face frozen in terror. Tyx is holding her protectively. Her other siblings too. She wasn’t friends with them like she was with Oyx and Txy, but she remembers them all.

  Each has a bullet hole in their head.

  The popping noises in her memory ring in her ears again, and she cries some more.

  “Nyx! Are you alright?” calls Cai.

  “Cai… I’m… just be givin’ me a minute.” She whispers, her voice shaking.

  Nyx moves to Oyx and Tyx and caresses their faces. They’re dried and frozen, but she doesn’t care. It’s been so long, but now that she’s here, she remembers their faces clearly. Oyx’s adorably cute smile. Tyx’s pouty face. His smirk. Oxy’s bubbly laugh.

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  Nyx always blamed herself for leaving them. If she had been faster, she could have. But she was only four or five years old. She was lucky she got out herself.

  Nyx wishes she had died with them. With her friends. Her life had been hell with the pirates. Theirs would have been too if they’d escaped.

  She shudders at the thought of Oyx growing up with the pirates like she had. It would have broken her favorite crybaby. It had broken Nyx. She was so bitter and distrusting. Only doing anything she could to survive another day of living hell.

  She should have died with them.

  Cai’s face flashes in her mind. If she’d died, she never would have met him. She wanted to distrust him. How could she not? She’d seen how selfish and callous humans could be every day of her life.

  Except Natalie. And Wrench.

  Could she trust Cai?

  She needed to trust him. She wanted to. If she got betrayed again, at least she got to experience a few hours of happiness. She wanted to take the risk that he wouldn’t betray her.

  “Cai. I’m gonna be killin’ the spark outta them. I’m gonna let’cha in, then we be goin’ to Mars an’ kill all the goddum murderers.”

  Cai takes a moment to respond, “Nyx, calm down. If you can find a way to let me in, you can tell me about what’s happened.”

  Nyx thinks she knows how the scientists get in and out, “Be there faster ‘n stank on a pirate’s az.”

  Nyx uses this task to quell her anger and sets off.

  Now that she’s here, she remembers details she’d thought long forgotten. There’s the room that stuck needles into them. That’s the time-out room… There’s Natalie’s room. Then many forbidden rooms.

  More murderous rage as she comes across a woman’s body. After a moment for her memories to catch up, she realizes it’s Natalie and there’s a hole in her forehead. She must have tried to save them, and they shot her.

  Nyx screams in rage and grief again. She shouldn’t have come back here. She should have forgotten this place. Now all she can think about is finding those who did this and murdering them. Making them pay for the lives of her friends and the woman who’d been closest to being her mother.

  She needs Cai, so she moves on. Will he help her if he sees all of this?

  She came to a door she caught packages and people coming and going from that couldn’t have come from anywhere but outside the lab.

  There was no power, but Nyx had tools that could fix that.

  She pulls out her flathead and pries the keypad off. No fooler this time, but she has something even better than this.

  It’s a device that can power doors and hack passcodes.

  All she has to do is hook the wires into the proper places… let the device think… and…

  The door opens.

  At least her time as a pirate came in handy for situations like this.

  There’s a long walkway. It’s heavily insulated from the liquid hydrogen and leads to what looks like a blank wall.

  This time she only needs to press a button, and it opens.

  Into the bilge room, “Cai! It’s bein’ in the dum bilge room!”

  “Huh… I’ll be there in a minute. It’s not far.”

  Nyx looks around. The salvagers and pirates stripped here too, but it seems like they’d left the bilge tank hiding the secret passageway alone. The tank was only worth the scrap metal, and with so much more that didn’t involve human shunk, it doesn’t surprise her no one looked very hard here.

  Cai appears as Nyx stews in her thoughts, “Nyx! Are you okay? You weren’t saying anything for a while there.”

  Nyx growls, “Let’s find anythin’ we can to be findin’ these sparkin’ murderers.”

  Cai’s face darkens, “I take it that what you saw wasn’t pretty.”

  “Shot a round in their skulls ‘n left, sparkin’ pieces o’ shunk…”

  “Do you want to wait on the Donati? I can take care of things here.”

  Nyx shakes her head, “I’m gonna put ‘em to rest. Not gonna leave my family huskin’ around like mummies.”

  Cai nods, “I’m fine with that, and if we cremate them, you can keep the ashes to remember them. ”

  Nyx thinks for a moment. She barely remembers them. But they were the closest thing she had to family. Her brothers and sisters.

  “Yeah. Do it. I’m gonna show ‘em the goddum universe. Get ‘em off this sparkin’ station.”

  Cai thinks for a moment, “I’ll take care of the bodies so you don’t have to see them anymore if you don’t want. Could you strip the hard drives? They’ve probably been wiped clean, but I want to see if I can recover any data. As for your friends, maybe make some diamonds from each of them? Some think it’s morbid, but some like it as a way to remember their loved ones.” He touches his heart as if touching something. “Or we can give them a sun burial. Return them to the stars.”

  Nyx shakes her head, “I’m gonna be takin’ them on the ship. My regrettin’ and sayin’ sorry for livin’ not savin’ ‘em. And maybe be doin’ the diamonds?” She likes the idea of having a part of them with her.

  Cai nods, “Don’t get caught up in survivor’s guilt. None of this is your fault and you would have been killed too if you hadn’t run.”

  Nyx’s ears flatten, “I be knowin’ that but…”

  Cai puts a hand on her shoulder, “Let’s take care of them, and get out of here. There’s some place I want to take you where you can think about everything. A place I use to think when my thoughts go to dark places.”

  She looks at him and wonders what he’s been through. He mentioned a wife dying? And he lived through Earth being Earthed… “Okay.”

  They enter the secret base together.

  Cai pauses when they reach Natalie’s body, “You knew her?”

  Nyx nods, “Yeah. She was bein’ nicest to us. I’m thinkin’ she tried to stop ‘em from killin’ us, so they were doin’ that.”

  Cai nods, “I moved the Donati to the breach we found. If you need anything. And I mean anything. I’m leaving the line open.”

  Nyx looks at the body, and a chill goes down her spine, “Yeah. Okay…”

  Cai nods and moves to the closest door and pulls a pry bar from a pocket on his leg.

  Nyx takes Natalie’s body and moves to the exit.

  “What the sparks…” Comes Cai’s voice.

  Nyx looks back, “Cai?”

  She can see inside the room as she backtracks to Cai. Inside are eight glass cylinders. Each filled with fluid and a pickled baby inside.

  “What the sparks these babies in here?” Nyx hisses.

  Cai is looking at one, “Maturation pods. Instead of a mother, they use these to grow babies. I imagine you were in one of these.” He points to the fetus, “It’s human this time. I think they were designing humans that can live better in space if what I saw in your DNA says anything. Resistant to bone and muscle loss. Smaller stature so they can make smaller ships. Better low-light vision. Things like that. They made Felis first, and when you and your siblings were successful, they went to human babies?”

  Nyx isn’t quite sure what Cai is talking about, but she understands enough, “So were usin’ us Felis for testin’ then made humans when we didn’t go dyin’ or somethin’?”

  “Yeah. That means wherever they are now, there’s probably more children being experimented on. Maybe even teenagers by now.”

  Nyx’s head is hurting, “Cai, I’m gonna be gettin’ goin’. Leave the thinkin’ to you.”

  She doesn’t want to think about why she was born. Who the people that made her were. She just knew that she’d kill them for what they did to her and her siblings and Cai wouldn’t stop her.

  Cai leaves the room with her and goes to check the other rooms. By the time she returns from taking Natalie to the Donati’s cargo hold, she finds Cai staring at the nursery room where her siblings were murdered.

  For the first time, Nyx is scared of Cai as he stares into the room with a look of anger. Anger like hers.

  He turns to her, “No one who does this to children should be allowed to roam free. Let’s finish here and go find them. And when we find them… I’m going to fucking kill them.”