“Joey belongs in an institution, Ms Traub,” said Doctor Houseplant.

Chelle cringed. She had heard the recommendation before, from three other physicians, and had balked. She balked again. Houseplant—his real name was Houseman—reminded her of a philodendron out of the sunlight for too long: wilted, and brown around the edges, and tilting toward retirement. He had no children; he could not possibly understand.

“How would placing him in an institution cure his headaches?” she asked.

She did not expect a sensible answer, for the question bordered on the rhetorical. But it did serve to redirect him toward the purpose of their visit. She glanced at Joey. Now almost eleven years old, he could just about feed himself without undue mess. He had dressed himself, after a fashion, with the zipper halfway up on his jeans, the belt notched one hole too loose, so that the jeans hung about his hips. One sock inside-out. She had bought shoes with Velcro fasteners because tying laces was beyond him. The tee-shirt—blue, his favorite color of the day—was on backwards; at least it wasn’t like the sock.

She had not adjusted his clothing; he needed a sense of accomplishment.

“Hurts,” he said, hands over his ears. “Not a fish.”

The headaches had started last week, and to judge by the increasing force of Joey’s complaint, had grown in intensity, to the point that he whimpered in his sleep. In a way, Chelle thought, autistic children were like pets: when they hurt, you had to do something about it, even if you didn’t know what it was. The problem was that Doctor Houseplant didn’t know, either.

“There is a facility right here in Southhaven,” he was saying, as he pulled a business card from his pocket. “The Mueller Institute. They’re new, but good.” He handed her the card. “You can at least hear what they have to say,” he went on. “They can develop programs that cater to individual needs—”

Chelle got to her feet. “Thank you, Doctor, but that’s not a solution for us.” She held out her hand for Joey. He ignored it.

“It will free you up to get a job,” Houseman pointed out—the advice unsolicited. “To support yourself better.”

The remark infuriated her, but she kept her composure. Her hand passed in front of Joey’s face, and he took it. Gently she pulled him up. He was so light, and yet so strong.

“Your prescription has been called into the pharmacy,” he went on, and watched while they departed, she striding in short steps, he shuffling along. She halfway expected to hear Houseman call out, “Next!”

Just before they reached the sliding glass doors, Joey aimed the first two fingers of his right hand and swept them to the right. The doors opened immediately. “Jedi fish,” he said.

On the way to the car, Chelle asked, “Joey, what day was August 13, 1809?”

“Sunday.”

She would confirm that when she got back to the apartment. But as with perhaps a hundred different dates before, he had never been wrong. It occurred to her that if he could be rewired, so that the neurons could connect at will, he would have invented a cure for everything within a year. But up to now he had demonstrated just the one talent. The quirky ability might get him on a late-night television show as a curiosity, but it was otherwise of little value.

Still, they could use the money. She hated welfare. She hated food stamps. No, that was not quite accurate. She hated having to beg for welfare and food stamps by filling out form after form after form. She wished she could find a job, one that had hours that fit in with Joey’s needs, or a day care for autistic children. She had searched. She had tried. But only institutionalization would free her. And she did not want that sort of emancipation. Joey was her son.

Joey almost ran into the car door. Chelle caught him in time. She got it open, got him into the seat belt, and he clapped his hands to his ears and began rocking back and forth. She wanted to cry.

Let’s just get home, she thought.

Making the choice between eating and medication, Chelle did not stop by the pharmacy for the Imitrex. Its cost was not covered by TennCare; so she had been told. She had thought otherwise, but apparently autism was regarded as a pre-existing condition. She had filed a protest three months ago, and was waiting. Waiting. The institute in Southhaven was not an option: being a resident of Tennessee, she did not qualify for Medicaid in Mississippi. Possibly Doctor Houseplant’s geography training was insufficient.

Joey whimpered. “Hurts. Not a fish.”

“I know, baby,” she sighed. “I know.”

Chelle had done the research. There were support groups. One even stood out…but it was for ages nine months to three years. Joey would turn eleven in another month. Another sounded interesting, and she had called them, only to find that there were forms to fill out and a long waiting list. A third already had over fifty in the group, and Chelle feared that Joey’s voice and hers would be lost in the crowd. But there was one group with an off-beat title: Grow with Jamie & Friends. She had phoned them as well. They met on Friday evenings at seven, and had extended an invitation. Today was Friday. Somewhere on or near Jefferson, she thought…she almost missed a stop sign, and managed to brake without disturbing Joey.

Tonight, she thought, breathing deeply. Tonight.

A horn from behind urged her on.

Liwei was halfway across the big central panes of the crop module when a soft beep sounded in his ear and a warning light flashed across his helmet display, crimson dawn blurring out the endless backdrop of stars.

Flat against the impregnable glass with his guide lines radiating from his suit, an outlandish and fragile spider traversing a bubble suspended in nothingness, he let training take over, freezing all movement. Blinked his suit gauges into the hud. His oxygen supply was low, and falling fast. Too fast to complete the walk as planned.

Somehow he must have sustained a puncture that his suit’s SmartSkin sensors had failed to pick up. A minor incident, easily stitched up with a sealant gun or a tube of hardcaulk, if only he’d detected it inside. Out here, with nothing but the thin scrim of atmosphere the suit contained, it could spell serious trouble. A death sentence, if he allowed his mind to drift that way and panic to take over. So he didn’t.

Instead, his free arm sought the tension of the tether holding him clipped to the agrifuge struts. Found nothing but slack. Liwei turned to the side, saw the other end of the line drifting away from the clip, unsecured. Tiny as the leak had to be, it was spinning him head over heels, propelling him into a slow, irretrievable tumble away from the glass, into the vacuum.

Letting himself roll into the spin always felt like suicide in training, but Liwei was an experienced spacewalker, had learned to override planetside-evolved instincts to preserve himself in space, where different rules applied. Death beckoned from the void, cold stars scintillating across an unimaginable gulf. Below him, then above him, the lights of the agrifuge shimmered, the artificial fields underlit by ultraviolet tubes, a swaying, rolling sea of green.

Liwei’s fingers found the safer controls, thumbed off the catches. He adjusted for the jet from the ruptured tank, which was pushing him sideways as well as away from the glass. One chance was all he would get. He waited for the spokes to roll into his viewfinder, for the hub to align between them, and fired the thrusters.

The airlock seemed tiny at this distance, his positioning graphics skewing wildly like they always did before the guiding program locked in. Liwei kept his breathing steady, his eyes on the vector: inside his gloves, his palms were steady and dry. If he missed the airlock, or overshot the station’s central module, he might have enough fuel to decelerate and make another pass. Xiao, the chief engineer, might have just enough time to pull on a suit and attempt to retrieve him. A trapeze act, like the ones he’d watched in the circus as a child, no less lethal for the absence of gravity. The station’s emergency manuals laid out the steps for a rescue protocol, but to Liwei’s knowledge one had never been attempted before.

All this passed through his head as the central module of Jùb?opén V surged in his visor, fist-sized at first, then growing to immense proportions, its pitted exterior lined with observation ports and extensions and maintenance walkways. He had time to register his angle of approach, the panicked voice jabbering in the suit’s audio feed, before his brain dredged up a warning: he was coming in too fast, the airlock yawning open like a great mouth, intent on swallowing him.

Galvanized beyond fear, Liwei shot his palm thrusters into reverse, sending a silent prayer into the eternal night. It went against his ideological conditioning, would go on his record if he’d spoken it loud enough for the suit to pick up, but he was well past caring. He felt the jolt of deceleration, felt his hands clench on the controls, fingers aching with effort. The horizon tilted, the vast edifice falling toward him slowed down. But the correction had thrown him off vector – a slight miscalculation, yet enough for the airlock door to dip under his feet.

Liwei whipped round and made a grab for a handrail, missed. Slammed into the wall and bounced, sending a burst of unintelligible alerts across his hud. Flailed around for a loose cable, a projection, anything to slow his agonizing slide over the edge of the station.

This was how you died in space, the lessons warned. There were hundreds of ways, but in most cases it started off as a small thing, innocuous at first, leading to another, and then the primate brain kicked in, reflexes acquired in an environment where up and down mattered, and you were truly lost. Blowouts and system failures were anticipated by the designers, with failsafes and multiple redundancies built in to mitigate the risk. A snapped line, or a moment’s inattention, killed with remorseless certainty.

Somehow he arrested his momentum, worked the thrusters with gentle taps, tiny jets nudging him backward, until his gloved fist closed around the airlock rail, pulled him inside.

Liwei lay on the floor, fighting the urge to throw up, as air pressure thrummed into the lock. He tore off his helmet, but could not get his shaking legs to hold him up, even in microgravity. The numbers on his suit gauges danced wildly in his vision. His oxygen gauge had maybe five minutes left. It was just his imagination, but he thought he could feel the sucking of the vacuum just outside the door, seeking a way in. Determined to get him next time.

The walls had been whispering for nearly two hours. Not whole words. At least, not yet.

It was a low-pitched wail, a cry for help, that beat against the paper-thin plaster of the townhouse and trickled through the air vents, the windows, the floorboards, the crawlspace that Diego used to hide in as a child, when his mother and father were still unhappily married. The more that he listened, the more that the voice gained substance in the quiet. Out. It wanted out. It begged for an escape. The walls were no place for the soul of a god.

“Mom!” yelled Diego. “Come up here, quick!”

Clothes hangers falling, the wham of a suitcase slamming on the floor. Then his mother’s voice as she crawled into the attic. “What is it?” she said.

Diego put a caramel finger to his lips. He tapped on the wall that they shared with their neighbors, and they knelt. Listened.

“Shit,” she whispered. “Another one, already? No wonder the Garcia’s left so quickly.

Just ignore it, Diego.”

“But it’s dying,” he said.

“And you think you can stop that? How about the Alvarez’s, could you have helped them? People separate from their god all the time, and we don’t want the DRP thinking it’s us.”

Diego reluctantly peeled from the wall. He let the god’s voice fade into the darkness, and he followed his mother down the ladder from the attic.

She fixed him with an eye that was as dark as his own. “Have you finished packing yet?”

He fumbled with a button that dangled from his shirt, that his mother had re-sewn a hundred times, rather than wasting any money on a tailor. Since his father had left, their budget had been tight. “I don’t want to go.”

“And I don’t want to send you.” His mother crossed her arms. “You think I want to fight in a war we didn’t start? I was done with the army. Ten years is enough.”

Diego shuffled back to the base of the ladder, his ear tilted up to the mutterings above. If they could hear Mrakau, or this piece of Mrakau, could the god hear them?

He lowered his eyes. “Can’t I come with you?”

“Mijo,” she said, cupping his chin. “I wish that you could, but the barracks aren’t a place for twelve-year-old boys.”

He already knew this. She had told him before. But the thought of leaving her—his heart, his home, the life that they had built from the ashes of the past—if only temporarily, felt decidedly wrong.

Diego’s face hardened. “Do I have to stay with him?”

She knew who he meant: the corruptor, the defiler, the twice god-killer. Diego had never had a chance to meet his step-father. And that was intentional. “They’ll take good care of you.”

Her bottom lip trembled as if it didn’t believe her. “Maybe I’ve kept you apart for too long.”

Diego tried to laugh, but it died in his throat. Five years was five too few, in his book.

His mother checked her watch. “Now, that’s enough moping. Your plane leaves tomorrow, and you haven’t even packed.” She shooed him into his bedroom.

The soul in the attic seemed to fester in her absence. It spoke to the soul that lived in his chest, the piece of Mrakau that he had been given at birth. What kind of a person would rip out their god-soul, stash it in the wall, and leave it there to die?

He thought he knew of one. And he would see him soon.

They went to the airport early the next morning. Norfolk International was already awake; the terminal was swarming with military personnel who had answered the call to defend their faith.

He and his mother said goodbye at the gate. She cupped his chin, and she whispered a prayer to her son and to Mrakau. She even made the sign of the cross on her chest, as if that could have made any difference anymore. Old habits died hard. “I love you, mijo.”

“I love you too, mom.”

And then, right before she watched him walk away, she grabbed his hand and squeezed three times. Once for strength. Once for luck. And once just in case she never came back.