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mildew, while he goes to the bridge. When we’re alone and buckled up, I can’t look my friends in the face. Somehow, seeing them will make the bodies on Elara real.
    Every House has a different outlook on death. We Cancrians send our dead into space, toward Helios, the gateway to the afterlife. We believe those who pass on with settled souls are at peace and gone for good, while the unsettled soul lives on in the stars as a new constellation.
    The hope is that one day, the unsettled soul can return to live again on Cancer.
    I picture the girl in the pink space suit. Where will her soul go?
    I chase the thought from my mind by trying to Wave Stanton and Dad, but there’s still no connection. I wonder if Dad even knows what happened. He doesn’t watch the news, and his Wave is so old he sometimes has to open and close it twice to get the holographic menus to pop out.
    G-forces press us down as we lift off Elara. The ship’s engines rumble, loud and ferocious, but I can already hear the ocean’s everlasting breath. Maybe Stanton wasn’t on Thebe. Maybe he’s home right now, waiting for me. The last time we spoke, he told me he was visiting Dad soon.
    The hull of the mining ship groans and creaks as we accelerate upward from the moon, leaving the past five years of our lives behind.
    “It’s okay, Nish,” says Deke, squeezing her hand. She gives him a weak smile, her eyes rimmed red and puffy.
    At last, the engines cut off, signaling our escape from Elara’s gravity, and in the sudden quiet, my ears tingle. Gripping my Wave, I unclasp my belt and float out of the hammock, weightless. So do the others.
    “I don’t understand why Mother Origene didn’t warn us,” says Kai, speaking his first words since waking. He tries Waving his parents, but there’s no connection. “The stars must have shown signs.”
    “To see a meteoroid that big, I doubt you’d even need an Ephemeris,” says Deke, scrolling through his Wave contacts, trying to get through to anyone on Cancer. “Any telescope should have caught it.”
    I’ve been wondering the same thing. The Guardian has two main duties: representing her House in the Galactic Senate and protecting her people by reading the future. So what happened?
    “Rho.”
    Nishi’s whisper is so frail, it’s the first thing about tonight that seems real. “The omen you saw during your test, the one you’ve been seeing when you read my future for fun, the one you won’t talk about”—she chokes back a sob, tiny weightless tears slipping from her amber eyes and scattering through the air—“could it be . . .
real
?”
    “No,” I say quickly. Her expression hardens with distrust, which hurts because Cancrians don’t use deceit. “It
can’t
be,” I insist, spilling my evidence: “When I saw the black mass today, at my retest, even Dean Lyll said it was nonsense. He made me use an Astralator, and it confirmed—”
    “
You saw it again today
,” says Nishi, like she hasn’t heard a word past that admission. “You’ve been seeing it for days, and then you saw it again today, and now
this
—Rho, take another look in the Ephemeris.”
    “Why don’t one of you look, you’re better with an Astralator—”
    “Because we didn’t see a dark mass in our readings.”
    “I failed and had to take the test twice, Nishi,” I argue, my volume rising. “My reading was
wrong
.”
    “Oh, really? So nothing bad happened tonight then?” Her voice breaks, and more tears slip into the air, like tiny diamonds.
    I look over at Deke, hoping he’ll disagree with her. After all, he’s always the first to dismiss my reads as silly stories.
    Only he’s not paying us attention. He’s just staring at his Wave blankly.
    He couldn’t get through to anyone.
    “Okay,” I whisper with a sigh. “I’ll do it.”
    I scroll through my Wave and find my copy of the Ephemeris. It’s just a tutorial version, so it doesn’t have all the detail of the Academy’s, but it still works.