I waved to old Mrs. Hong, who—instead of scowling at me—bowed her head and ducked into her apartment and closed the door. A quick glance in the window of our one-room apartment revealed that Gran-Gran wasn’t inside, but then I heard her humming to herself up on the roof. Still troubled by what Mother had said, I climbed the ladder onto the top of the box.
Gran-Gran sat with her head bowed, a small pile of beads spread out before her on a blanket. With her nearly blind eyes closed, she reached out with withered fingers and selected beads by touch, methodically stringing them to make jewelry. She hummed softly, her face resembling the furrows of the crumpled blanket before her.
“Ah,” she said as I hesitated on the ladder. “Sit, sit. I did need some help.”
“It’s me, Gran-Gran,” I said. “Spensa.”
“Of course it is. I felt you coming. Sit and sort these beads for me by color. I can’t seem to tell the green ones from the blue ones—they’re the same size!”
This was my first visit in months, and—like my mother—she immediately put me to work. Well, I had questions for her, but I probably wouldn’t be able to ask them until I was doing what she said.
“I’ll put the blue ones on your right,” I said, sitting. “Green to the left.”
“Good, good. Who do you want to hear about today, dear? Alexander, who conquered the world? Hervor, she who stole the sword of the dead? Maybe Beowulf? For old times’ sake?”
“I actually don’t want to hear stories today,” I said. “I’ve been talking to Mother, and—”
“Now, now,” Gran-Gran said. “No stories? What has happened to you? Surely they haven’t ruined you already, up there in flight school.”
I sighed. Then decided to approach this from a different direction. “Were any of them real, Gran-Gran?” I asked. “The heroes you talk about. Were they actually people? From Earth?”
“Perhaps. Is it important?”
“Of course it is,” I said, dropping beads into cups. “If they weren’t real, then it’s all just lies.”
“People need stories, child. They bring us hope, and that hope is real. If that’s the case, then what does it matter whether the people in them actually lived?”
“Because sometimes we perpetuate lies,” I said. “Like things the DDF says about my father, as opposed to the things we say about him. Two different stories. Two different effects.”
Both wrong.
I dropped another bead into its cup. “I’m tired of not knowing what is right. I’m tired of not knowing when to fight, not knowing if I hate him or love him, and . . . and . . .”
Gran-Gran stopped what she was doing and took my hand in hers, her skin old but soft. She held it and smiled at me, her eyes mostly closed.
“Gran-Gran,” I said, finally—at long last—finding a way to voice it. “I’ve seen something. It proves to me we’ve been wrong about my father. He . . . he did turn coward. Or worse.”
“Ah . . .,” Gran-Gran said.
“Mother doesn’t believe it. But I know the truth.”
“What have they told you, up above, in that flight school?”
I swallowed, feeling deeply fragile all of a sudden. “Gran-Gran, they say . . . they say Father had some kind of defect. A flaw deep inside him, that made him join with the Krell. Someone told me there was a mutiny on the Defiant. that some of our ancestors might have served the enemy too. So now, now they say I have it. And . . . I’m terrified that they might be right.”
“Hmmm . . .,” Gran-Gran said, stringing a bead. “Child, let me tell you a story of someone from the past.”
“It’s not the time for stories, Gran-Gran.”
“This one is about me.”
I shut my mouth. About her? She almost never talked about herself.
She started talking in her rambling, yet engaging way. “My father was a historian on the Defiant. He kept the stories of Old Earth, of the times before we traveled into space. Did you know that even then, with computers and libraries and all kinds of reminders, we found it easy to forget where we came from? Maybe because we had machines to do the remembering for us, we felt we could simply leave it to them.
“Well, that’s a different topic. We were nomads among the stars then. Five ships: the Defiant and four smaller vessels that attached to it to travel long distances. Well, and a complement of starfighters. We were a community made up of communities, traveling the stars together. Part mercenary fleet, part trade fleet. Our own people.”
“Grandfather was a historian?” I said. “I thought he was in engineering.”
“He worked in the engine room, helping my mother,” Gran-Gran said. “But his true duty was the stories. I remember sitting in the engine room, listening to the hum of the machinery as he talked, his voice echoing against the metal. But that’s not the story. The story is how we came to Detritus.
“You see, we didn’t start the war—but it found us nonetheless. Our little fleet of five ships and thirty fighters had no choice but to fight back. We didn’t know what the Krell were, even then. We hadn’t been part of the big war, and by that point communication with the planets and space stations was difficult and dangerous. Now, your great-grandmother, my mother, was ship’s engines.”
“You mean she worked the engines,” I said, still sorting beads.
“Yes, but in a way, she was the engines. She could make them travel the stars, one of the few who could. Without her, or someone like her, the Defiant would be stuck at slow speed. The distance between stars is vast, Spensa. And only someone with a specific ability could engage the engines. Something born into us, but something most considered to be very, very dangerous.”
I breathed out, surprised and awed, all at once. “The . . . defect?”
Gran-Gran leaned in. “They feared us, Spensa, though back then they called it the ‘deviation.’ We were a breed apart, the engineers. We were the first people into space, the brave explorers. The ordinary people always resented that we controlled the powers that let them travel the stars.
“But I told you this story was about me. I remember that day, the day we came to Detritus. I was with my father, in the engineering bay. A vast chamber full of pipes and grids that looks bigger in my memory than it probably was. It smelled of grease and of too-hot metal. But there was a window in a little alcove, which I could look out of and see the stars.
“That day, they surrounded us. The enemy, the Krell. I was terrified, in my little heart, because the ship kept shaking from their fire. We were in chaos. The bridge—I heard from someone shouting—had suffered an explosion. I stood in the alcove, watching the red lances of light, and could hear the stars screaming. A little frightened girl by a bubble of glass.
“The captain called down. He had a loud, angry voice. I was terrified to hear the pain, the panic, in someone who was normally so stern. I remember still, that tone as he screamed at my mother, giving orders. And she disagreed with them.”
I sat there, beads forgotten, rapt. Barely breathing. Why, in all the stories Gran-Gran had told me, had she never given me this one before?