It’s only after they’ve loaded the moving truck halfway with boxes that the parents finally notice Parker’s gone. They spend three days yelling for him. Mom waits the longest, wanders the farthest into the forest in the dark. Her voice is a plea, an agonized howl, an echo of the day Eli closed his eyes and never opened them again. “Parker,” she cries, “Come on, be a good boy. Please.”

Her name, this time, is Marisol Lysium Brook. The media, long bored with the minutiae of her death, occupies itself by speculating which stars will grace the guest list at her reconstruction gala.

Witchcraft is a gift. Imelda would wave her steel spoon at Mercer and insist on this as he measured ingredients for her, whether she was boiling potions or a pot of farfalle pasta. Watch the salt, a teaspoon only, never pour too much. Don’t overheat the sauce. Bottle the hawks’ gizzards separate from the basilisks’. Never half-ass a gift, Mercy. Her perpetual imperative. Mercer is alone now. His hands are unsteady---they’ve shaken like a drunkard’s since they held Imelda as she passed---and he is no witch.

Don’t sell her. The thought rises like a tide in the back of Jeri’s mind, where she’s spent three Nikutan launch cycles struggling to contain it. It leaves her breathless, drowning in guilt, and trying to hide it from the krosuta-whitened stare of the Henza abbess. This is Cleo, not a load of ore. This will break her. And how could it not break her? She’s a lumbering old Juno-class cargo beast, poor Cleo, one of the earliest models.