‘Why?’
‘Because they don’t want to clean up their own messes.’
Jane thought about that. ‘Why don’t they just have the Mothers clean up instead?’
Owl’s eyes moved away from Jane. ‘Because making girls is cheaper, in the long run.’
‘What’s cheaper?’ Jane asked. She turned the bits of mushrooms so she could chop them smaller.
‘Cheaper is . . . it means it requires less materials. Machines like the Mothers take a lot of kinds of metal that people here don’t have much of. Girls are easier for them to make.’
Jane remembered her face smashing down red and hot against the treadmill, a metal hand on the back of her neck. ‘Are the other people on this planet bad?’
Owl was quiet. Jane looked up from her pile of mushrooms to the wall screen. ‘Yes,’ Owl said. ‘That’s not a nice thing of me to say. But yes, they’re bad people.’ She sighed. ‘That was why my last crew came here. They wanted to change them.’
‘Change them into what?’
Owl’s forehead crumpled up. ‘I’ll try to explain this as best as I can. My last crew were two men. Brothers. Yes, I’ll explain about brothers later. They were . . . they called themselves Gaiists, which are a type of people who – who believe Humans shouldn’t have left Earth. They go around the galaxy and try to convince Humans to come back to the Sol system.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they think they’re doing the right thing. It’s complicated. Can we save that question for later?’
Jane brushed the mushroom pile together real tight, then picked her knife back up. ‘Is it on your question list?’
‘I just added it.’
‘Okay.’
‘Anyway, the people here don’t want to change. The city people, anyway. Those brothers should’ve known better, but they were doing what they believed in.’ She shook her head. ‘They were kind people, but very foolish.’
‘What’s foolish?’
‘A foolish person would reach into a machine without turning off the power.’
Jane frowned. ‘That’s stupid.’
Owl laughed. ‘Yes, it is. Anyway, they were only with me a short time. They purchased the shuttle less than a standard before, but I mostly sat in the bay of their carrier ship. The carrier took them to the Han’foral tunnel, which is the closest one to here. Took about thirty-seven days to get from that tunnel to where we are now.’
Jane chopped the mushrooms smaller, smaller, smaller. The littler they were, the easier on her stomach. ‘When was that?’
‘About five years ago.’
Jane stopped chopping. She looked at the face in the wall. ‘You’ve been here for five years? In the scrap?’
‘Yes.’
Jane tried to think about how long ago five years was. She was ten now, so she was five when Owl had got to the planet. Jane couldn’t remember being five very well. And in five more years, she’d be fifteen! Five years was a lot. ‘Were you sad?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Yes, I was very sad.’ Owl smiled, but it was a weird kind of smile, like it was hard to do. ‘But we’re together now, and I’m not sad any more.’
Jane stared at the mushroom bits, all purple and white and chewy. ‘I’m still sad.’
‘I know, sweetheart. And that’s okay.’