"We met when he was twelve and I was thirteen and he had plans for the Bliss-- everyone else was scared and overwhelmed and grieving and he was like 'I have read both My Side of the Mountain and The Girl Who Owned A City, I'm ready for this'-- there were all kinds of older people, sixteen and seventeen, that thought they should be in charge of our crew, and then they'd talk to him and they'd want to do anything he said, because when he said he had something handled you couldn't help but believe him-- nobody disliked him, nobody--"

"He sounds like a great crew leader." He squeezes Asher's hand, lets go, takes Lev's. 

"He used to fidget by climbing with things and jumping off, or doing backflips. He liked to jump off things and twist so he landed on his feet at the very last minute so everyone would have heart attacks. And he was so smart, he taught himself physics while Eros was still a wandering crew because it was interesting, and because he was worried no one would know it."

"I'm glad you had him," Sasha says, because it's all he can think of to say. 

"Me too. --I've told him a lot of things about you but if you want to..."

"I don't know what to say." 

"That's okay." Lev kisses Asher's forehead. "See you tomorrow."

Sasha holds Lev's hand on the way back to Lev's room. 

It's a week and a half before Sasha's first mission. 

Lev assigns him the easier work: making lists of the requests, figuring out what's urgent and what isn't, what's heavy and what isn't, who should get what they want because they haven't asked for a thing for a while or they're a pilot or a nursing mother or they're depressed. (He tells him the last one.)

They cuddle and talk at night. Lev is reading again, books that Sasha tells him to read, and they're cuddling, and someone loves him, and he cries on Sasha's shoulder once or twice but not more than that. It's-- better to know that he can cry on someone, even if he doesn't want to.

Lev tries not to worry about Sasha anchoring. It's safer than it was when he was an anchor. They know more than they used to. Sasha can handle it.

Sasha doesn't do the work as well as Lev would, but he does all right and he gets better with practice. He's used to being a scavenger, but his old crew was only nine people; he's good at figuring out what's urgent and what's heavy, less good at remembering who to prioritize. 

They cuddle and talk at night. Sasha doesn't sleep alone, uses his room primarily as a place to go in the mornings. They talk about books and about feelings; Sasha tells him about Nova, and about before Nova, and about before the Bliss. 

He has more dreams than usual. Of being back at Nova, and having Damian look at him and ask why he's forgotten them — of being in school, and Gwen being the smart one and Natalie the sharp one and Moss-who-was-Emma-then the fast one and he, little Allie, the sweet one — of something that is like the dreamworld and not like it, vast and dim with no life but him and someone he used to know, who speaks only rarely and holds tight to his hand — he doesn't tell Lev about most of them, but he tells him about some. 

He — doesn't worry too much about being an anchor, he thinks. He worries. He's pretty sure he's worrying a reasonable amount but of course he would think that. It is what it is. 

"Your mission," Chris says, "is to go somewhere far from Eros and try singing to them. Music, they say, soothes the savage beast. We'll see."

Hopefully Marlo can actually sing, because Sasha cannot. 

Into the dream world. The detailing on Marlo's armor is different, if Sasha looks closely. Far away from Eros is probably not going to be doable by walking through the dream world, if the opposite of Japan is Mexico then the opposite of China is — Sasha's brain produces "Costa Rica" and he's not going to question it. 

Finding an alien takes some time. 

Marlo can, in fact, sing. He's not great at it, not compared to how he remembers recorded music being, but he's not bad. 

Sasha doesn't recognize the alien-- it must be someone Marlo knew-- but the sense of creeping horror is the same. 

The alien waits until Marlo is done, opens her mouth, recites the Gettysburg Address, and teleports them to a place that-- judging by the rainforest-- appears to be Costa Rica.

They can try again, with a different song this time! 

This time it's FDR's Pearl Harbor speech, and Mongolia.