Voyager Treks:

B'Elanna Torres

A/N: Spoilers for Picard and the Short Treks episode "Children of Mars." You've been warned. Don't blame me if you ignore me.

Utopia Planitia Ship Yards, Mars
Stardate 61289
April 3, 2385

B'Elanna Torres studied the progress from the night team on her PADD as she sipped her coffee, aware of but ignoring the usual morning chaos in the house. Tom was arguing with Aly about eating her breakfast, Joey seemed to be singing a song to himself, but none of his not-quite-12-months-old-yet words were intelligible, the dog was doing an honestly good job of cleaning the floor under Joey's highchair, and Miral was… Miral was nowhere to be seen, now that she allowed that awareness to enter her brain. "Miral?" she called out. "Are you almost ready? We have to leave in five minutes or you're going to miss the shuttle to school. Again."

"I'm coming!" Miral called out from upstairs, and a few seconds later, the house was filled with a lot more noise than one six-year-old should be making descending the stairs. She appeared in the kitchen in her blue and white school uniform, her dark curls tumbling down her back and held back from her face with a blue headband. It would be a tangled mess by the end of the day, but B'Elanna knew that some battles weren't worth fighting. Miral had started insisting on doing her own hair about six months prior, complaining that the two braids Tom had been tying her hair in every morning were 'too childish.'

She was six years old. B'Elanna hadn't thought she would have been one of those mothers who harped about how her kids were growing up too fast, but, well, here she was, wondering when her six-year-old had become concerned about being too childish.

Miral accepted her breakfast of peanut butter toast and hot chocolate—Kahless, that girl was such her father's daughter—from Tom before giving him a hug good-bye. "Bye, Dad. Love you. See you after school," she said, her standard morning farewell. She attempted to give her sister a hug as well, but while Aly allowed Miral to put her arms around her, she otherwise pretended her older sister didn't exist. B'Elanna gave Tom a confused look, and got a shrug in return. There was a strange mixture of love and animosity between them that both Tom and the Doctor claimed was normal for sisters, and there was never any saying what would set one girl off at any given time.

Joey, on the other hand, was more than happy to accept a hug and a kiss from his oldest sister. "Miwa!" he exclaimed, then broke into a fit of giggles. Miral smiled at the toddler and ruffled his hair, as dark and curly as her own, before she bent down to give her farewell to the dog, still lying in wait under Joey's high chair.

"Bye, Inja. Be good for Aly for Joey," she said, scratching the mess of a dog behind her ears.

"Miral, you're going to get fur all over your uniform," B'Elanna said with a sigh. She gave Tom a look, which he pretended to ignore.

"Martian poodles don't have fur, Mom," Miral said with impatience that she was much too young for. "They have hair."

"Well, you don't need Inja's hair all over you, either," B'Elanna replied. "Go put your shoes on."

B'Elanna gave her husband and younger two children her own kisses of farewell, refilled her coffee, and then she helped Miral with her jacket and backpack at the door before they headed out. Miral may have been grown up enough to want to do her own hair, but she was still young enough that she liked to hold her mother's hand as they were walking, and the two dark-haired, part-Klingons walked down the street toward the shuttle stop hand-in-hand, each holding their hot beverages in the other hand as they walked.

Miral eyed the girls in their secondary school uniforms as they approached the shuttle stop. She had a complicated relationship with the older students, the way that all little girls seem to have with slightly older girls, both fearing them and not wanting to wait to be them. She often talked excitedly about what it would be like to be in secondary school while Tom and B'Elanna listened with amusement, neither having the heart to shatter her dreams with the reality of the situation. And neither willing to resurrect the arguments they were already having about whether their kids would go to the secondary school at UP or if they would send them to Earth, either as boarders or living with Tom's parents.

"Semi!" Miral exclaimed as she saw her best friend approach, finally removing herself from her mother's grasp to run to greet the other child.

"Have a good day at school, Miral," B'Elanna called out after her, amused. Miral did have the good graces to turn to wave good-bye.

B'Elanna turned to Schruti, Semi's mother, and both smiled. Schruti was another engineer and team lead at UP and one of her closest friends. They watched together as their daughters boarded the shuttle before they turned and headed for work. "Are you working this weekend?" B'Elanna asked, and Schruti nodded.

"I volunteered my team to cover," she exclaimed, then laughed, "which has to make me the most unpopular engineer ever! First Contact Day is such a human holiday. I switched with Jacobi in order to get Iluidi New Year's off next month. I am sorry to miss Joey's birthday party, though."

"We're going to be on Earth," B'Elanna reminded her. "You hate Earth."

"I just don't get why everything—"

"Has to be so heavy there!" B'Elanna finished in unison with her friend, so familiar with Schruti's usual complaint about the gravity on Earth compared to Mars or Iluidion. Both women laughed.

"But seriously, that gravity is terrible," Schruti concluded. "You guys should come over sometime next week, and we'll have another party for Joey. Not that he'll know what's going on, because human children are completely clueless at 12 Earth months of age, but the rest of us will have fun."

"I'll check with Tom about his work schedule," B'Elanna promised as they entered the engineers' locker room.

"When are you guys leaving?" Schruti asked, stepping into her dark blue coveralls. Everyone was color coded at UP: engineers were in navy, mechanics in red, synths in orange. Schruti liked to joke about showing up in fuschia coveralls one day, just to see what would happen. B'Elanna was sure the entire station would shut down in the confusion.

"Tomorrow night after shift," B'Elanna replied, fastening her own coveralls closed. Both women swept their hair in buns before stepping out of the locker room.

"Want to go out for drinks after work today?" Schruti asked as they headed down the corridor. B'Elanna gave her a look.

"Are you kidding?" she asked. "We've been working so much overtime trying to get these tugs operational that I can't even remember the last time I was home in time for Miral's bedtime, much less Aly's or Joey's."

"Tom can handle it," Schruti teased.

"I know he can," B'Elanna replied. "But I sometimes like seeing my children. Once this whole Romulan thing is over, there will be plenty of time for drinks."

"I'm holding you to that, Torres," Schruti said warningly as they parted ways to their respective work areas.

B'Elanna received sign-out from Belarezo, the night team lead, confirming her suspicions from her readings over breakfast that they were behind schedule. "Your new mechanic has also arrived," Belarezo concluded, jerking a thumb behind him to where a very young and very intimidated looking woman was seemingly trying to make herself fade into the bulkhead. A difficult feat in those red coveralls.

"At least you didn't scare this one away before her first shift," B'Elanna commented.

"Not for lack of trying," he said cheerfully. "See you tomorrow, Torres. See if you can get us back on schedule."

She snorted. "Why, so you can just get us behind again?" She waved him off before turning her attention to her new mechanic. "I'm B'Elanna Torres, your engineer," she introduced. "I'll show you around and introduce you to the rest of the team."

"Katie Baker," the new mechanic replied. She looked impossibly young, even younger than she appeared at first glance, but B'Elanna tried not to judge her on that. After all, she had been 22 when she became the chief engineer of Starfleet's newest Intrepid-class ship.

As if knowing what she was thinking, Katie's eyes widened. "You were the chief engineer on Voyager!" she exclaimed.

"I was," B'Elanna replied, her tone measured even as she sighed inwardly.

"What are you doing here?" the new mechanic blurted out, and then she immediately reddened. "I mean, you could have your choice any engineering job!"

B'Elanna smiled slightly, not feeling like pointing out that she hadn't finished an engineering degree until after she returned to the Federation or that she had a criminal record, albeit one that had been pardoned. "It's important work," she said. "And we like it here. I get to work on fixing up old ships during the day and get to go home to my husband and kids at the end of it. Most days. And nobody is shooting at us or trying to assimilate us."

Katie's eyes were still wide, wide enough that B'Elanna wondered what this young mechanic, who had probably been barely a teenager—or even younger—when Voyager returned, could possibly thinking, but she didn't say anything as they headed down the corridor toward the lift. They were halfway to the worksite before she asked, "You have kids?"

"Three," B'Elanna said with a smile. "Miral will be seven next month, Aly is three, and Joey's first birthday is on Friday."

"Wow," Katie said, her eyes somehow even wider. "That's a lot."

"Well, only the second one was planned," B'Elanna deadpanned. "I'm joking," she added quickly at the surprised look on Katie's face, even though, honestly, she wasn't. Miral was a happy surprise, the result of both of them reversing their contraceptives to 'see what would happen,' and then she had been furious with Tom when she found out she was pregnant with Joey, even though she knew she was just as much to blame as he was.

And now, she couldn't imagine a life without her happy son or the chaos of having three small part-Klingon kids under one roof. Even though that was a lot of chaos.

Katie Baker did just fine on her first day, and when she came back for her second day, B'Elanna figured this one might actually stand a chance of surviving at UP. "Why are we doing this?" the young mechanic asked out of the blue.

"Flushing out the intermix chamber?" B'Elanna asked with a frown. That was covered in the mechanic certification courses and definitely emphasized on the exams; she didn't think she would have to explain something so rudimentary to a mechanic, no matter how young she was.

"No, I get that," Katie said quickly. "I mean, all of this. Converting all these decommissioned ships into tugs."

They were actually retrofitting the engines of decommissioned ships into engines for tugs, but B'Elanna doubted the young woman cared about the distinction. "The latest estimates from Starfleet are that they'll need 10,000 tugs to relocate the Romulans before their sun goes supernova," B'Elanna said. "All of the shipyards are working at maximum capacity. Most of the teams are building tugs, but there's no point in letting otherwise functioning warp engines from decommissioned ships go to waste when they could be retrofitted." She preferred this kind of work to building things from scratch. Making impossible repairs and turning the dysfunctional into a working product was what she had done for her entire career, from the Maquis to Voyager. She was good at it, and nothing beat the rush of satisfaction at seeing something that had once been little more than scrap turning into a functioning machine again.

"But… why?" Katie asked again. "I mean, why are we doing all of this for the Romulans?"

B'Elanna gave her a quick glance before returning her gaze to the intermix chamber. She didn't have time for racism on her team, if that was what Katie was implying. "Everyone deserves a chance to live," she said, her tones clipped. "The engines we're retrofitting would just be recycled if it wasn't for this project. Why not turn them into tugs? It may not seem like much, but each tug is capable of carrying a ferry that can hold a few thousand people. That's a lot of lives we're working to save." She had a history of taking other people's fights more personally than she needed to: the Maquis, the Pralor, the sentient holograms, even the way people treated the synths here on the Station, as if it was really that difficult to just treat them with a little bit of respect. Dr. Cook told her that it was a deflection, that she was so invested in the perceived underdogs because she viewed them as a proxy for herself as a kid when nobody was fighting her fights and that maybe now that she was an adult, she should focus a little bit more on her own fights and a little bit less on everyone else's.

Years of therapy, and she still couldn't stand her therapist. Nor did she listen to her. Even though she knew she was doing it, that knowledge didn't stop her from wanting to save all the Romulans herself any more than it stopped her from getting too invested whenever one of her own kids complained about some injustice—usually perceived—in her own life. Tom was constantly reminding her that not everything the kids complained about required a full defensive posture.

Katie's eyes were still fixed on the engine they were working on. "Would they do the same for us?" she asked after a pause. "Do you think they would work to build 10,000 new ships if we needed to relocate out of the Sol system?"

B'Elanna shook her head at the question. "Hopefully, we'll never need to know," she replied. "Listen," she said, her tone softening, as if she was talking to one of her own kids. "What others do or don't do to help us says something about them. What we do or don't do to help others says something about us. And the Federation… we're better than that. We have to be better than that." She needed the Federation to be better than that.

Katie lapsed into silence, and when she spoke again, it was like the whole conversation about the Romulans didn't happen. "Are we off tomorrow? For First Contact Day?"

"We are," B'Elanna confirmed. "Do you have plans?"

Katie shook her head. "I'm sticking around here," she said. "I still need to unpack my apartment. Not that there's much to unpack."

"There's a lot to do on Mars," B'Elanna said, her excitement growing. Tom was always teasing her about how completely she had embraced their new home. "If you're into outdoor activities, there's some great hiking, mountain biking, rock climbing, just about anything you can think of. My husband is really into these little ground vehicles in the hills—he calls them 'dune buggies.'"

"I really like hiking," Katie said, as if afraid that wasn't the right answer. B'Elanna chuckled softly.

"Remind me to show you some of my favorite hikes when we're done here," she said. "I've been limited to short, easy paths that a six-year-old and three-year-old can handle for a while now, but there are some that are much more challenging and have much better views. Don't forget a hydration pack. Once you leave the cities, it gets colder, but it's dry and deceptive."

"I grew up in Arizona," Katie said with a smile. "I understand dry and deceptive."

"I'll defer to your expertise, then," B'Elanna joked. "Are you ready to install the chamber?"

"We're good at this end," Katie confirmed.

Several hours later, after they finished with the engine—it had been an easy one; the ship it been in had been in bad shape, but the warp core itself had been stable—and after B'Elanna had sent her database of Martian hikes to Katie and wished her team a good holiday, the Paris-Torres family was in their shuttle, getting ready for the trip to Earth. B'Elanna had strapped Aly and Joey in—Miral knew to keep seated until they left the atmosphere; Aly should have, but the pre-schooler was stubborn in her fearlessness—answered Aly's question for the fifth time about why the dog wasn't go to Earth with them—Inja didn't do well in space, and it was easier to just have the neighbor come by a few times a day to play with her during a short trip than deal with that—and returned to the front to take her seat at the co-pilot controls. Tom was in the left seat, going through his pre-flight checks. B'Elanna briefly powered up her console on the right out of habit, and then remembered that she didn't need to and decided she didn't want to. She deactivated the console again, leaning back in her chair with a heavy sigh. Kahless, this project was exhausting, and for a brief moment, she entertained herself with thoughts of where they could take a vacation when it was over. Sam was always inviting them to visit Ktaris, or they hadn't seen Chakotay in six years. Hell, at this point, even visiting Tuvok on Vulcan or a random trip to Qo'noS didn't seem so bad.

She smiled at thought, absently gathering her hair to resecure it. Her hair was getting long again, and like she did every day, she entertained the notion of cutting it to the length she wore for most of her adult life, now that Joey was out of the "grabbing hair" stage of childhood. But Tom had liked it when she started growing it out, and she liked that he liked it; it was the same reason why she knew that he wouldn't shave his beard, even though he was constantly complaining about how gray it was.

Tom's attention was down on his console, a small, contented smile on his face. There was a nostalgia there, for both of them, him being in the pilot's seat. He didn't fly very often anymore, but she knew he was still comfortable here, as comfortable as he was when he was in his programming lab at home.

It had taken them a while to get to that level of comfort. They had gone from newlyweds to parents so quickly; from respected senior staff officers to civilians with criminal records—pardoned records, Owen Paris liked to emphasize—even faster. They had immediately gone on parental leave when Voyager returned to Earth, and when they came back on active duty four months later, they found that the uniforms just didn't fit them anymore. In the seven years that they were on Voyager, B'Elanna had forgotten that she had left Starfleet Academy for a reason, and in those years in the Delta quadrant, it was never Starfleet that she had felt a part of; it was Voyager. Tom, likewise, had seemed to forget the distaste he had had for Starfleet since he had been kicked out. And Starfleet had changed, to, the result of years of war with the Dominion.

And so, despite the pardons and the promotions, after less than two weeks of being Starfleet officers again, Lt. Commander B'Elanna Torres and Lt. Tom Paris had added their names to the growing list of Voyager crew members, Starfleet and Maquis alike, who had resigned their commissions.

They just hadn't realized how hard that would be.

Despite her work history as Voyager's chief engineer, nobody was willing to hire B'Elanna without an engineering degree and certification, and that meant going back to college. At 30. With an infant. And that was just not going to happen. She took her mechanic certification exam instead, which she had aced without even trying and without sleeping the night before.

And then Kathryn Janeway had said that there was no way her former chief engineer was going to be working as a mechanic, and despite everything, B'Elanna still couldn't let her former captain down.

She hated it as much the second time around.

It was an accelerated BS in engineering, geared toward "adult learners" who had extensive experience as mechanics, but even that fact provided little relief. While she was dealing with writing essays and reading 'literature,' because apparently somebody thought that engineers needed a solid understanding of the humanities, Tom had gotten a job with a test pilot group in Australia. The hours were long, the ships usually had too many bugs and were clunky to fly, the designers and engineers seeming to have little time for his recommendations to fix said bugs and clunks, and between his frustrations at work and her frustrations with school and both of their frustrations at trying to figure out the whole parenting thing, they did nothing but fight all the time, until in one fit of rage, she asked him why he was still flying if he hated it so much and why he was still there if he hated her so much.

The next day, he quit his job and enrolled in a master's program in holoprogramming. Two months later, she graduated and was offered an apprenticeship at Utopia Planitia in order to work toward her Professional Engineering certification.

Turned out, a new planet was exactly the solution to all—well, most—of their problems, even the ones they hadn't realized they had. Tom did much better when he was working for himself and setting his own hours, and took to being the primary caregiver of the kids in a way that she had never been able to comprehend.

"You're staring," Tom said. His eyes were still down on his console, but his smile had widened into that full smirk he had.

"I love you," she said matter-of-factly. His smile widened as he finally looked up and at her.

"I love you, too," he said, leaning over to kiss her.

"Can you two stop kissing so we can go?" Miral asked from the back, exasperated. Both Tom and B'Elanna chucked.

"Yeah," Aly chimed in, her attention still down on her PADD. "Let's go."

"Go go go go go!" Joey chimed in.

"I guess the masses have spoken," Tom observed.

"Kahless, we have bossy kids."

"Don't tell me you're surprised," Tom teased. He gave her another kiss before radioing to control that they were ready for departure, and then they were off.

B'Elanna didn't like San Francisco. It reminded her too much of everything she hadn't liked about Starfleet when they returned, and it was where Tom's family was. He was different when around them, in ways he didn't even realize. His relationship with his father was light years from what it had been when he was conditionally released from prison before Voyager departed, but he was still the son trying desperately for approval and not realizing that he already had it. The kids were different on Earth, too. They were crankier as they adjusted to the different gravity and noises and people, and none of them really knew how to act around grandparents and random other family members who sometimes hung around the Paris house. They seemed to know that their parents were different here as well and over compensated for that: Miral grew even more serious, Aly even more hyper and silly, Joey even more in his weird not-an-infant-not-a-toddler-always-an-asshole-but-cute-while-doing-it stage.

In the midmorning of Joey's birthday, the now-12-month-old was down for a nap, Tom was off with Miral somewhere, and B'Elanna was listening to Aly pretending to read a story from her PADD, but really making up her own story to fit whatever pictures she saw there. She had woken that morning crying about her head hurting, and if there was one kid who could ruin the day when she wasn't feeling well, it was Aly. Fortunately, after an analgesic and a few hours of undivided attention, she seemed to be close to her usual hyper and sassy self.

Aly stopped talking abruptly at the sound of the front door opening, her green eyes going wide at the sight of Dr. Laura Paris in the doorway. "Hey, demon child," Tom's sister greeted. B'Elanna clenched her jaw; she hated the nickname that Laura had given Aly, but when she complained about it to Tom, he assured her it had nothing to do with her being part-Klingon and everything to do with the fact that she was the polar opposite of Miral in terms of how easy of a baby and toddler she had been. Aly was actually Laura's favorite of her nieces and nephews and made no effort to hide it; they were not only both the middle children, but she also saw the sass and stubbornness that she herself had had as a kid in Aly.

Aly raised her arms for Laura to pick her up, and the public health physician was happy to oblige, lifting her to her hip and allowing Aly to nuzzle her head in her neck. "Good morning, Alyah," Laura said, smoothing back those sandy curls. "How are you today?"

"She had a gravity headache this morning but seems to be doing better now," B'Elanna answered for her. Laura looked sympathetic.

"Gravity is rough," she agreed. "Where are your sister and brother?"

"Joey's sleeping," Aly informed her.

"Again, gravity's rough," Laura said with a laugh. She shifted Aly slightly and glanced over at B'Elanna. "I talked to your friend Chakotay a few days ago," she said. "He told me to say hi. And to wish Joey a happy birthday."

B'Elanna felt a rush of guilt; she had regularly written to Chakotay after he moved out to the Omicron sector, but with how busy she had been at work, her correspondence had been slipping. "How is he?" she asked.

"Same as always," Laura replied. "Governors gonna govern. I have a visit out that way scheduled." Laura was some sort of director in Refugee Health at the Federation Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and if B'Elanna thought things were busy in her life, she had nothing on her sister-in-law, who was constantly traveling somewhere to either assess a planet for settlement by the Romulans or check in on an existing settlement. "I'll bring you back some bourbon. Assuming I don't drink it all first."

"On a trip that long, I can't say I'd blame you." Odd that she now thought of a trip that was measured in months as long, given that they had been on Voyager for almost seven years.

"Eight months, round trip," Laura confirmed with a sigh. "I'm going to miss this little face," she said to Aly, who giggled and again buried her head in Laura's neck.

"I take it things are busy at work."

Laura rolled her eyes. "You have no idea," she said, then amended, "Actually, you probably do. Hey, baby girl, you've gotten heavy or I've gotten weak," she said, depositing Aly back on the couch to a fit of giggles, and then returning her attention to B'Elanna with a shake of her head. "I don't know why we're doing all this," she said. "The Romulans have a very robust public health system of their own. There's no reason for us to have taken over resettlement, and I don't know why Admiral Picard thought we would be better than them to do it or why the Romulan Senate agreed. Sure, we should have offered them any assistance they needed, especially in terms of ships and tugs, but I feel like we've swooped in on full 'human-savior' mode, and there is no reason for that." She took a deep breath and gave a short shake of her head. "I'll get off my soapbox," she said apologetically. "Are my parents around? Or Jenn?" She said the last name with a touch of dread; their older sister. Tom and Laura had always been close as kids, but both viewed time with the oldest sister as a chore.

"Your parents are around somewhere. Tom and Miral are out back. Jenn and her family haven't come yet."

"That's probably for the best," Laura said. "It'll give me some time to get a little bit tipsy before that happens." With that, she headed deeper into the house in search of other people, and Aly went back to narrating the nonsensical story.

Until Laura came back in, and without a word, picked up Aly and carried her outside, her voice ringing with that false cheer Tom used when he was trying to pretend everything was all right when nothing was. B'Elanna opened her mouth to question her, but closed it when she saw Tom and Owen following closely behind.

She hadn't seen such a look of fear on Tom's face since they were on Voyager.

The monitor on the wall came alive with images of ships firing and a planet burning. B'Elanna opened her mouth again to ask what they were watching, but no sound came out when it registered.

They were watching the news. And the planet burning was Mars.

Her body went rigid, unable to look away from what she was seeing, unable to stop the assault on her senses that was happening, knowing that these images would haunt her nightmares forever.

Every time she had felt at home, it was taken away from her. Any feelings of home she had as a kid ended when her father walked out when she was five. The Academy had never stuck, but she had found a sense of belonging that she had never before had in the Maquis—until they were all brutally killed. She had found a new family on Voyager, a sense of purpose and a sense of belonging—and as soon as they accomplished their goal, as soon as they re-entered Federation space, the 150 people she thought she would spend her life surrounded by scattered throughout the galaxy. She and Tom and Miral had started over again on Mars, her own little family the only thing she had left from Voyager.

And now Mars was on fire.

"That's enough," Tom said forcefully, raising his hand to close the broadcast.

"No!" B'Elanna exclaimed. She had only lasted 47 seconds the first time she had tried to watch the battle that ended the Maquis fight. She owed it to her friends, her colleagues, to pay them more respect.

She lasted a minute and 20 seconds.

She buried her face in Tom's chest, her right hand trying to cover her ear, trying to block out of the sounds of the destruction and the journalists narrating it. Tom held her tight, repeating it's okay, it's okay over and over into her left ear until the words had lost their meaning for both of them. She was sobbing, and in the one part of her brain that wasn't paralyzed by the news, she was aware that his chest was also shaking, hot tears falling into her hair.

Schruti. Semi. Katie Baker, her new mechanic. Dev Johnson, the kid next door who watched Inja when they were gone and wanted to be a veterinarian someday. Inja, that obnoxious fluffy Martian poodle that Tom had shown up with one day. Her team, the teams working over the holiday, kids in Miral's and Aly's classes, infants in Joey's play group. How many people had stayed on Mars, had decided that a three-day weekend wasn't worth the trip to Earth or anywhere else?

Their house. The kitchen table where countless meals had been eaten. The couch where hours had been spent holding babies, then children. The marks on the wall to show each child's growth. The new mark they had placed for Joey the day before, because Miral had insisted that it was better to be one day early than two days late. The hololab where Tom had worked on his clients' programs, where he had written his own, where they had played games of Velocity and practiced with bat'leths, where they got a communications link stable enough to talk to Neelix in the Delta quadrant, where the kids had been exposed to worlds far away from their own. The bedrooms where they had tucked in their children. The stuffed animals that had watched over the dreams of those kids. The bat'leth that Kohlar had given to his Kuvah'magh.

Schruti. Semi. Katie. Dev.

And those were just the ones she knew of for sure who were on the planet. How many else would there be? There were almost 200,000 people who called Mars their home, either part-time or full. How many were still alive?

She held tight to Tom. Her family, her home. He was all the family and home she had left now, he and those three children they had made. She couldn't let him go.

She couldn't lose the last family she had left.