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that?”
    “I’m going to steal something from a Satrap.”
    “Steal what?”
    “My memories,” you tell him.
    DeBrun grins. “Okay. We’ll take you.”
    “Just like that?”
    “You know who we are, what we’re planning to do?”
    You nod. “An exodus. To find a new world, free of the Satrapy.”
    “Not to find,” deBrun says. “We found it. We just need to get there again, with five ships. And having you distract the Satrap at our rally point . . . well, I like that. There are a lot of people hiding on that habitat, waiting to get loaded up while we fuel. The first people of a whole new world, a new society. You should join.”
    “The Satrap at your rally point has something I want.”
    “So I’ve heard. Okay. Jay, shut the locks, clear us out. Our last passenger is on board.”
    Jay and DeBrun could be brothers. Same smile. Though you’re not sure. You don’t look at people that much anymore. Not since Susan. You don’t care anymore. You can explore the fleshy side of what remains of you after you get the memories back.
    Because they will make you whole again.
    The ship’s cat adopts you. It hangs in the air just above the nape of your neck, and whenever the ship adjusts its flight patch claws dig into the nape of your neck.
    Claws, it seems, are a benefit in zero gravity.
    No matter how many times you toss the furball off down the corridor it finds its way back into your room.
    How many wormholes between Earth and Nova Terra? You lose track of the stomach-lurching transits as the cylindrical ship burns its way upstream through the network.
    You dream about the one memory you still have. The palm tree, sand in your toes.
    It could have been a vacation, that beach. But the aquamarine colors just inside the reef feel like home. It’s why, when you heard the shipboard accents you followed crew back to this ship and chose it. The oil-cooked johnny cakes, pate, curry, rice . . . muscle memory and habit leave you thinking you came from the islands.
    You don’t know them. But they are your people.
    At Nova Terra, slipping out via an airlock and a liberated spacesuit, you look back at the pockmarked outer shell of the ship. It’s nestled against the massive, goblet-shaped alien habitat orbiting Nova Terra’s purplish atmosphere, itself circling the gas giant Medea. The few hundred free humans who live here call the glass and steel cup-shaped orbital Hope’s End.
    You’re a long way from home now. Hundreds of wormholes away, each of them many lightyears of jumps. Each wormhole a transit point in a vast network that patch together the various worlds the Satrapy rules over.
    Too far to stop now. You only were able to come one way. This wasn’t a round-trip ticket. You’ll have to figure out how to get back home later.
    Once you have memories. Once you know exactly where that palm tree was, you’ll have something to actually go back for.
    The woman who sits at the table across from you a week later does so stiffly, and yet with such a sense of implied ownership that your back tenses. There’s something puppet-like, and you know the strings are digital. Hardware buried into this one’s neuro-cortex allow something else to ride shotgun.
    Something.
    She’s in full thrall, eyes glinting with an alien intelligence behind them. The Satrap of Hope’s End has noticed your arrival and walked one of his human ROVs out to have a chat. That it took it two days for it to notice you, when you’ve just been sitting out in the open all this time, demonstrates a level of amateurishness for its kind.
    Then again, Hope’s End is sort of the Satrapy’s equivalent of a dead-end position. A small assignment on a small habitat in orbit. The real players live down the gravity well, on the juicy planets.
    “I know who you are,” the woman says. Around you free humans in gray paper suits stream to work in the distant crevices of the station. Life is hard on Hope’s End, you can tell just by their posture. The