“It’s all right,” Adam replies diplomatically. He gestures over his shoulder to where Phiri Dun-Ra is hooded and tied to a Skimmer. “I’m not the only Mog here, as you can see. But I am the friendliest.”

“Noted,” Mark replies.

Sarah starts to make the necessary introductions. I cut her off before she can really get started.

“I’m sorry, but where did you get this ship?” I ask, walking by her and up the ramp.

“Yeah, about that,” Sarah replies, motioning me onwards like I should keep exploring. “You’ll probably want to talk to her.”

“Who?”

Sarah gives me a look like I should quit asking questions and just go, so I do. This exchange raises Marina’s eyebrows too. She follows me up the ramp into the ship. A few steps inside, and I’m hit with major déjà vu. We’re in the passenger area. It’s a wide-open space, completely devoid of any furniture. The walls give off a gentle light indicating that the ship is still powered on. I have a vague memory of being lined up in here alongside the other Garde, our Cêpan pushing us through aerobic exercises and some light martial arts training.

I walk over to the closest wall and trace my fingers across the surface. The soft plastic material responds, shining brighter, the trail from my fingers lit up. The walls act as one big touch screen. I pull a command from my memory, quickly drawing a Loric symbol on the wall. The symbol flashes once to show it’s been accepted and then, with a hydraulic hiss, the floor opens up and a couple dozen cots rise into view. Marina has to hop backwards as one opens up right where she was standing.

“Six, is this . . . ?”

“It’s our ship,” I say. “The same one that brought us to Earth.”

“I always assumed that it was destroyed or . . .” Marina trails off, shaking her head in wonderment. She traces her fingers across the opposite wall, inputting another command. The entire wall turns into a big high-definition screen displaying a picture of a happy-looking beagle chasing down a tennis ball.

“In English, dog,” says a recorded voice with a noticeable Loric accent. “Dog. The dog runs. En español, perro. El perro corre . . .”

Earth language training. How many times did we have to sit through this video as we flew towards our new planet? I’d forgotten about it, or blocked it out, but all the boredom of my childhood came rushing back. A whole claustrophobic year spent in here, watching that dog run through a bright green field.

“Oof, turn it off,” I say to Marina.

“You don’t want to see what the dog does next?” she asks with a little smile. She swipes her hand across the wall and the program stops.

I walk over to one of the cots and crouch down next to it. The sheets smell musty and a little like the greasy inner workings of the ship. They’ve probably been stowed down there for the last decade. I push aside the blankets and the thin matress, inspecting the frame.

“Ha, look at this,” I say.

Marina leans in over my shoulder. There, carved into the metal frame by a bored little girl, is the number six.

“Vandal,” Marina laughs.

The low hum of the ship’s engine slowly decreases to silence and the touch-screen walls flicker and turn off. Someone has just powered down the ship.

“Just like you left it, right?”

Marina and I both turn in the direction of the voice and wind up facing a woman as she slowly emerges from the ship’s cockpit. My first reaction is that she’s breathtakingly beautiful. Her skin is a dark shade of brown, her cheekbones high and pronounced, hair dark and buzzed short. Even though she’s dressed in a baggy mechanic’s jumpsuit complete with fresh grease stains, the woman looks like she belongs on the cover of a fashion magazine. I quickly come to realize that what’s so stunning about her isn’t purely looks. It’s an indistinct quality most people on Earth wouldn’t be able to put their finger on but which I notice immediately.

This woman is Loric.

She looks almost nervous to see me and Marina. That’s probably why she took such a long time to power down the ship. Even now, the woman lingers in the cabin doorway, as uncertain of us as we are of her. There’s a jumpiness about her, like at any moment she might retreat into the cockpit and lock the door. I can tell she’s trying to psych herself up to keep talking to us.

“You must be Six and Seven,” she says after a moment of getting nothing but stunned looks from the two of us.

“You—you can call me Marina.”

“Noted, Marina,” the woman says with a gentle smile.

“Who are you?” I ask, finding my voice at last.

“My name is Lexa,” the woman answers. “I’ve been helping out your friend Mark under the name GUARD.”

“Are you one of our Cêpan?”

Lexa finally moves out of the doorway and takes a seat on one of the cots. Marina and I sit down across from her. “No, I’m not a Cêpan. My brother was Garde but he didn’t make it through training at the Lorien Defence Academy. I was enrolled there too, as an engineering student, when he . . . when he died. After that I kind of, ah, fell off the grid. As much as you could on Lorien. I didn’t exactly fit into one of their prescribed roles. I worked with computers a lot, sometimes not so legally. I was nobody special, basically.”

“But you ended up here,” Marina says, her head tilted.

“Yeah. Eventually, I got hired to retrofit an antique ship for a museum . . .”