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W hen the meal is done, the others drift off until it’s just me and Rian. All the boxes are empty now.

I meet his eyes, and for once, I don’t think about the tiny gears working behind them. I let myself drown in their clear, bright hazel.

“What are you thinking about?” Rian asks, his brow furrowing, disrupting my view.

“Just wondering how secure the freezer unit is, and if I can break into it with the tools I have, and if—no, when , I do, whether or not Magnusson will evac me through the hatch after I eat all the portions of ice cream.”

“Very secure, probably you can, and absolutely he will,” Rian says smoothly, standing. “Come with me.”

“No.” I settle my butt in the hard seat. “You promised me more food.”

“Come with me,” he repeats, a smile cracking his impatient look. “I have something better than what’s in the dispenser.”

I stand, and Rian leads me toward the corridor with the bunks. “Please don’t take this as an insult,” I say, “but if you intend to show me your bedroom and expect me to want...” I gesture at his body. “. . . more than ice cream, you are mistaken.”

“You said I was sexy,” Rian states flatly.

“Ice cream is sexier.”

Rian presses a button, and a door zips open, revealing a standard-issue bunk room similar to the one I was given. Larger, though. Two windows.

I step inside, Rian following. “I don’t have ice cream.”

I turn on my heel, heading out the door. Rian grabs my arm and tugs me back inside, laughing. “But I have something better.”

“Statistically impossible,” I say, pulling my elbow free and crossing my arms over my chest. “But I’m willing to test your theory.”

Rian goes over to a storage drawer. I look around his room. The bed’s unmade. I don’t know why I find that charming, but I do. Rian’s so orderly, every thought lined up inside his head like one of those old-style libraries, neat little categorized volumes of knowledge in a row. But his cover’s tossed to one side, a thin blanket twisted up, his pillow dented from where his head lay.

“Here.” Rian puts something soft and round and fuzzy in my hand.

I can smell it faintly. There’s an earthy scent to it as well as a sweetness. I turn it over in my palm. It’s not uniformly round; there’s a thin line from where a stem had been all the way to the barest hint of a point at the bottom.

“It’s a peach,” he says.

“No, it’s not. Peaches are slick.” I rub my fingers over the light grayish fuzz of this fruit. I think if I pressed hard, I’d break the skin. Part of me wants to.

“And orange in color?” Rian asks.

I nod.

“That’s a canned peach,” he says. “This is a fresh one.”

The tip of my pinky touches the hard spot at the indented top. I’ve seen pictures of fruit growing on trees; I know this is where the stem connected it to the branch, and the branch connected to a tree, and the tree grew roots into the soil. I’ve seen hardwoods and pines and spruces when I lived in America; I’ve seen citrus and olive and cypress in Malta.

I’ve never seen a peach tree. I’ve never seen a peach.

Not like this. Fresh.

Real.

“Do I just...” I lift the fruit to my mouth.

“Let me peel it first.” Rian plucks it from my fingers and turns to the little table between his two windows.

I was absolutely going to quip something smartass at him, but then I see the flash of a silver blade in his hand. With skill born from practice, Rian glides the knife between the fuzzy skin and the smooth, pinkish-red flesh of the peach, the bright inside a startling contrast against the dull outer layer.

“Peaches are orange,” I insist despite the evidence to the contrary, but I’m more than half-distracted by the way the fruit juices slick his fingers.

He cuts a slice and passes it to me. The shape is now familiar to me, but there are hard filaments on the inner edge where the stone had been. And the color...I twist the slice around, inspecting it.

Rian huffs a little laugh through his nose. “Canned peaches are orange,” he says. “This is a red vineyard peach. Try it.”

I almost don’t want to bite into it; it’s too much of a jewel. But when I do, a burst of flavors explodes on my tongue. While dinner tonight had been decadent and rich, this peach is light. It tastes like sunshine and joy. I close my eyes, mashing the fruit against my tongue, relishing not just the taste but the feel of it.

“I knew I could get you to savor something,” Rian says, his voice deep.

My eyes fly open, and I snatch the rest of the peach out of his hand, eating it so voraciously that juice dribbles down my chin. I suck my sticky fingers clean, and I would have eaten the stone that had been in the center of the peach had Rian not taken it and thrown it into the composter with the peelings. “Trust me,” he says, laughing, “you don’t want to eat that part.”

I hold my hand out. “More.”

“That’s the only one I have.”

I narrow my eyes. I can read him well enough to know he’s telling the truth. But I’m still tempted to tear apart his cabin and make sure. Instead, I sit down on the edge of his bed, deeply aware of the blanket, the way his legs probably tangled in it last night.

“My family are farmers on Rigel-Earth,” he says, and I can’t tell if his tone is rueful or if he’s just lost in memories. “That’s one of our best-selling crops.”

Rigel-Earth , I think. I fucking knew it.

Oh, well. No man’s perfect.

“You were saving that one, weren’t you?” I ask. “The peach. We all get a celebratory dinner, but you were saving that one for yourself.”

“I’m sure the others brought items from home with them. We all have an allocated trunk.”

Standard operation. But a fruit like that is perishable. Easily bruised and destroyed. This took care. I’d bet coin no one else on the Halifax packed something like this.

I should thank him. Instead, I say, “I had no idea Rigel-Earth made peaches like this.”

“Sol-Earth did it first,” Rian says.

My eyes go up in shock.

“It’s from a variety in midwestern Europe,” he continues. I keep my face placid; the man just gave me fresh fruit, I’m not going to mock him for not knowing “midwestern Europe” isn’t really a thing people say. It’s not like Germany is Minnesota. It’s a moot point, anyway. Neither of those exist anymore. Minnesota’s mostly underwater now, and Germany, like all the countries of Western Europe, is a part of the tourism board, no longer independent and individual nations.

“That’s what my family does,” Rian adds. “We’re heirloom farmers.”

See, there’s a difference between someone scratching the earth and hoping to feed their family and an heirloom farmer who spends a lot of money to sell produce at an up-charge based on where the seeds came from.

Only Rigel-Earth would come up with the concept of luxury food.

“You’re a long way from the field,” I say.

“Closer than you think,” he says, and now we’re both thinking of the cryptex drive and what’s on it.

Rian sits down beside me. The mattress dips, gravity pulling us a little closer. He turns to me, searching my eyes. “I didn’t mean for you to risk your life for the cryptex drive,” he says.

I shrug.

Rian shakes his head. “No. Don’t treat it like it was nothing. It wasn’t.”

Way to make things awkward. I look down at my hands in my lap, my jaw clenching.

Rian takes the hint. His gaze goes to the windows. “My sister’s a rover. On Sol-Earth.”

“Please don’t tell me I remind you of your sister, because that’s going to make seducing you later kind of gross,” I say.

Rian snorts. Being a rover is like being a looter. The difference is, a rover is a nomad explorer of the unprotected areas of Earth. This peach came from a variety originally found in Europe? There’s a pretty big landhopper network in Europe—tours that go down the Rhine valley, that meander through Paris, that cruise along the remains of the dikes in the flooded northwest, windmill sails peeking up over the flat water.

A rover wouldn’t see those areas, the ones protected with little pockets of bots and droids to keep the area clean and livable.

A rover goes into the other areas, the places where landhoppers cover their windows with vid screens to block tourists’ views so they don’t witness the way pollution has soiled the homeworld we all share if you go back far enough in all of our ancestry. Rovers risk the radiation sickness and the pollution and the mutated wildlife and everything else to find things to sell.

And nothing sells as well as viable plant life. Gold and diamonds are on every world, and some of the other planets have gemstones even rarer than the ones Earth has. A rock looks like a rock anywhere; some are just shinier than others.

But nothing I’ve ever tasted before tastes like the peach I just had.

Luxury food.

I’ve never been rich enough to consider that a possibility. I can barely wrap my head around it.

“I haven’t seen her in a long time,” Rian says, and it take a moment for my mind to go back to our conversation, to his sister, the rover. From his face, I can guess that maybe she went out on an expedition and didn’t come back. I don’t want to ask, though. It doesn’t feel right to take more than he’s giving right now.

But it’s a story I know well. Everyone on Earth knows someone who wanted something more, something better than the little bubbles of livable but inescapable life. Some of us, like me and Magnusson, go to space. Some, like Saraswati’s parents, emigrate.

But we all know someone who decided to risk it in the unprotected lands. And we all know someone who never came back from that.

“It’s not too late,” Rian tells me. “I...I can’t tell you more about what this mission is for, but you deserve to know that what you did today was important.”

He’s dropping clues so heavy, it’s like he’s begging me to guess the top-secret intel. “I know the drive I rescued is full of some sort of important data,” I say, giving him this much. “Now I’m thinking it’s linked to fixing up Earth?” I raise my eyebrows at him. Rian betrays no expression, his face perfectly blank—which is the answer I’m seeking.

“Oh,” I breathe. “Oh. That is clever.”

“What is?” he asks.

“It’s not just the data that’s important. It’s the ship’s path. Roundabout, I mean. It wasn’t just going on an out-of-the-way route—it was going to an out-of-the-way planet. And it’s not just data, is it?” I jump up and start pacing the room. Rian watches me as I take three strides, turn, take three more. I stop abruptly, staring at Rian and tapping my chin, considering.

He keeps the poker face, but his eyes are sparkling in anticipation.

“The Roundabout ’s path was going to take it to a world without atmosphere, one of the remote planets,” I continue, watching his face carefully for a flicker of acknowledgement that I’m right. “If this mission is linked to nature...you’re testing something that will clean up the pollution or purify the air or something like that for Earth, and you tried to send the drive to a manufacturing world that has no atmo so it could be tested...” I muse out loud, taking up the puzzle pieces Rian’s giving me and sifting them into the picture he wants me to see, the one he thinks I didn’t know about already.

“The other thing you’re looking for, the other piece, it’s not just the key to the cryptex drive. It’s...” He doesn’t flinch, so I have to pretend to guess. “A climate-cleaner of some sort. A prototype. Maybe a chemical combination or some sort of filtration system. I’ve heard of some companies working on things like that. No, it’d have to be smaller. Perhaps a new type of nanobot? And that data on the drive is needed to program it and test it in some off-world facility without a water cycle and atmosphere before releasing it on Earth...”

He’s good. He doesn’t even show an ounce of reaction.

But I know I’m right.

Rian rolls back his shoulders and stands. “Like I said, the work we’re doing here is important. For a lot of people.”

“But you’re not going to tell me what it is.”

Rian smiles; he knows I’ve guessed correctly. “I can’t. It’s a government secret.”

“And that’s why it’s doomed,” I snap back, the edge in my voice so sharp that even I’m surprised by it.

He stops, his expression slipping back into that placid mask. “Doomed?”

“You’re government. The Halifax isn’t, I guess you commandeered it, but you’re in the government. That’s why you’re in charge of the mission, not the captain. And if this whole operation is governmental . . .”

“I didn’t take you for an anarchist,” Rian says dryly.

“I’m not. I mean, the government’s fine , I don’t care, it’s just that...if you think the government can handle something as major as finding a solution to the environmental disaster that is Earth, you’re deluded.” I can’t help but laugh, even when his face darkens.

But surely, he has to acknowledge that the United Galactic System is too big to do anything worthwhile. Small-scale, a society needs rules to function. But the further from the community, the more tangled the lines of authority get. The more chances for corruption or, worse, apathy. It’s how Earth lost control of sovereign nations to global tourism boards. Used to be, laws came from one city that affected a whole country, then laws came from one planet that affected all the countries, and now things are coming from whole different worlds that affect all the rest. And the end result is a fucking mess by the time it trickles down. One government to oversee four worlds, each law passed down to increasingly distant micromanaging levels of rule before it goes into effect? Doesn’t take rocket science to figure that’s a game where only the law-makers get to win.

“It’s an expensive program,” he says. “And there are plenty of commercial outlets who would like to privatize the process and force the inhabitants of Earth to pay for clean air and water, but—”

“But the government is going to graciously step in and altruistically solve all the problems?”

“The system works,” Rian protests. “It can be slow sometimes, unwieldy, but it works.”

“For some people,” I counter. “Eventually.”

I like this, this fight. Because I can tell—he’s a real believer. He’s not so dumb as to think that any government is perfect, but he truly does think that by ticking the right boxes and going through the right protocols, he’s going to make a difference.

He thinks he can play by the rules and still win.

I suppose that’s been true for him all his life. But the rules were made for people like him.

Me? I know better than to believe in anyone else coming down to help, governmental or not. In the end, the only one fighting for your life is yourself, and trusting anyone to help without an angle of their own is what gets you killed. Nothing comes without cost. Every rescue mission comes with a bill.

Even this one.

“I fought to keep this project public,” Rian says, his voice soft. “There were private investors who wanted to bankrupt the people of Earth for a chance at livable climate. You have no idea the work so many people have done to keep this project available to directly benefit the citizens instead of line the pockets of rich businesses. Which is why it is so important to make sure the drive and the cryptex key, when we find it, don’t end up in the hands of the highest bidder.”

And suddenly, I don’t want to fight anymore.

How can he not see that the highest bidder is always the government that bids with power instead of coin?