"As you wish, Zoë," Hickory said.

"Dickory too," I said.

"We will both answer truthfully," Hickory said.

"Thank you," Dad said, and then turned back to me. "You can go back to bed now, sweetie."

This annoyed me. I was a human being, not a truth serum. "I want to know what's going on," I said.

"It's not something you need to worry about," Dad said.

"You order me to have these two tell you the truth, and you want me to believe it's not something I need to worry about?" I asked. The sleep toxins were taking their time leaving my system, because even as I was saying this I realized it came out showing a little more attitude to my parents than was entirely warranted at the moment.

As if to confirm this, Jane straightened herself up a bit. "Zoë," she said.

I recalibrated. "Besides, if I leave there's no guarantee they won't lie to you," I said, trying to sound a bit more reasonable. "They're emotionally equipped to lie to you, because they don't care about disappointing you. But they don't want to disappoint me." I didn't know if this was actually true or not. But I was guessing it was.

Dad turned to Hickory. "Is this true?"

"We would lie to you if we felt it was necessary," Hickory said. "We would not lie to Zoë."

There was a really interesting question here of whether Hickory was saying this because it was actually true, or whether it was saying it in order to back me up on what I said, and if the latter, what the actual truth value of the statement was. If I were more awake, I think I would have thought about it more at the time. But as it was, I just nodded and said, "There you go," to my dad.

"Breathe a word of this to anyone and you're spending the next year in the horse stall," Dad said.

"My lips are sealed," I said, and almost made a lip-locking motion, but thought better of it at the last second.

And a good thing, too, because suddenly Jane came up and loomed over me, bearing her I am as serious as death expression. "No," she said. "I need you to understand that what you're hearing here you absolutely cannot share with anyone else. Not Gretchen. Not any of your other friends. Not anyone. It's not a game and it's not a fun secret. This is dead serious business, Zoë. If you're not ready to accept that, you need to leave this room right now. I'll take my chances with Hickory and Dickory lying to us, but not you. So do you understand that when we tell you not to share this with anyone, that you cannot share it with anyone else? Yes or no."

Several thoughts entered my mind at that moment.

The first is that it was times like this when I had the smallest inkling of how terrifying Jane must have been as a soldier. She was the best mom a girl could ever have, make no mistake about it, but when she got like this, she was as hard and cold and direct as any person could be. She was, to use a word, intimidating. And this was just with words. I tried to imagine her stalking across a battlefield with the same expression on her face she had now, and standard-issue Defense Forces rifle. I think I actually felt at least three of my internal organs contract at the thought.

The second is I wondered what she would think of my ability to keep a secret if she had known what I had just done with my evening.

The third was maybe she did, and that was what this was about.

I felt several other of my internal organs contract at that thought.

Jane was still looking at me, cold like stone, waiting for my answer.

"Yes," I said. "I understand, Jane. Not a word."

"Thank you, Zoë," Jane said. Then she bent down and kissed the top of my head. Just like that, she was my mom again. Which in its way made her even more terrifying, if you ask me.

That settled, Dad started asking Hickory about the Conclave and what it and Dickory knew about that group. Since we had made the jump to Roanoke, we had been waiting for the Conclave to find us, and when they found us, to destroy us, like they had destroyed the Whaid colony in the video the Colonial Union had given us. Dad wanted to know if what Hickory knew about the Conclave was different than what we knew.

Hickory said yes, basically. They knew quite a bit about the Conclave, based on the Obin government's own files on them—and that their own files, contrary to what we had been told by the Colonial Union, showed that when it came to colonies, the Conclave much preferred to evacuate the colonies they confronted, rather than destroying them.

Dad asked Hickory why, if they had different information, they had not shared it earlier. Hickory said because they had been ordered not to by their government; neither Hickory nor Dickory would have lied about having the information if Dad had asked them, but he had never asked them about it before. I think this struck Dad as a bit weaselly on the part of Hickory and Dickory, but he let it go.

Dad asked Hickory if it'd seen the video the Colonial Union had given us, of the Conclave destroying the Whaid colony. Hickory said that it and Dickory had their own version. Dad asked if their version was different; Hickory said it was—it was longer and showed General Gau, who had ordered the destruction of the Whaid colony, trying to convince the Whaidi colony leader to let the Conclave evacuate the colonists, only to have the Whaid refuse to leave before the destruction of their colony. Hickory said that other times, on other colony worlds, colonists did ask to be evacuated, and the Conclave carried them off the planet, and sent them back to their homeworlds or allowed them to join the Conclave as citizens.

Jane asked for numbers. Hickory said they knew of seventeen colony removals by the Conclave. Ten of those had the Conclave returning colonists to their former homes. Four of those had the colonists joining the Conclave. Only three involved the destruction of the colonies, after the colonists refused to move. The Conclave was dead serious about not allowing anyone else to start new colonies, but—unlike what we were told by the Colonial Union—didn't insist on killing everyone on those new colonies to make the point.

This was fascinating stuff—and disturbing. Because if what Hickory was saying was true—and it was, because Hickory would not lie to me, or to my parents against my will—then it meant that either the Colonial Union had been wildly wrong about the Conclave, and its leader General Gau, or that the CU had lied to us when it told us what would happen if the Conclave found us. The first of these was certainly possible, I suppose; the Colonial Union was in a state of active hostility with almost every other alien race that we knew about, which I would guess would make intelligence gathering harder than it might be if we had more friends. But it was really more likely that the second of these was the truth: Our government lied to us.

But if the Colonial Union lied to us, why did it do it? What did it get from lying to us, punting us to who knows where in the universe, and making us live in fear of being discovered—and putting all of us in danger?

What was our own government up to?

And what would the Conclave really do to us if it found us?

This was such an interesting thing to think about that I almost missed the part where Hickory explained the reason why it and Dickory actually had detailed files about the Conclave's other colony removals: in order to convince Mom and Dad, should the Conclave come knocking, to surrender our colony rather than to let it be destroyed. And why would they want to convince Mom and Dad of this?

"Because of Zoë?" Dad asked Hickory.

"Yes," Hickory said.

"Wow," I said. This was news.

"Quiet, sweetheart," Dad said, and then gave his attention back to Hickory. "What would happen if Jane and I chose not to surrender the colony?" he asked.

"We would prefer not to say," Hickory said.