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Her sister scoffed. “That is so closed-minded of you.”

Better that than to have your brain fall out, Cora thought, but again, light touch, light touch. “All right, then, convince me,” she said. “What’d you talk about, last time you went?”

Twig scrunched her mouth defensively. “You’ll just make fun.”

“I won’t,” Cora said, putting her hand on her heart. “I’m listening, okay? For reals. I’m all ears.”

It took Twig a moment to swallow both that and her last bite of sandwich. She balled up the wrapper, tossed it onto Cora’s desk, and opened her bag of chips. “There was this guy who gave this really good presentation—seriously, it was really good—”

“I’m listening!”

“—about the Second Lander.”

Cora steeled herself for the direction this was going to go in, because the possible angles were a real dice roll. The Second Lander was one of those things where something had actually happened, but the questions surrounding it were so messy and unanswerable that people could paint whatever sort of wild bullshit they wanted into the gaps. At the start of Fortune’s colonization, there had been two landing craft, each filled with kincrete printers and human embryos and friendly robots, the whole shebang. The first one made it to the surface, but the second one crashed, and none of the stuff inside ever popped off like it was supposed to. (That was the point of having two, after all. You gotta have a fail-safe.) The first batch of people to leave the first lander intended to go retrieve all the stuff from the second, but they couldn’t even manage to keep a town going on Fortune’s surface, let alone organize some kind of retrieval mission. They ditched the first town, salvaged everything they could from their lander, and then went off on the Long March, which every kid in every schoolroom in the Berth had slept through endless videos about. The survivors who made it up into the crater founded the Berth, and ta-da, so it went. But it didn’t take long for the stories about the second lander to morph into urban legends about the Second Lander, as it were. A few decades back, before Cora was born, a small group of idiots left the Berth—a move the city government did not stop but also strongly advised against—to go find the lost spacecraft.

Not only did they find it, but they managed to launch the fucking thing. After that, nobody heard from them ever again.

Depending on who you asked, the Second Lander had disintegrated in flight somewhere beyond Big Quarry, or, it had been sabotaged by the city government to self-destruct once off-planet, or, the Second Lander had been full of first-generation people, and they’d all gone insane—or maybe the child-rearing robots went insane, choose your flavor—and they killed the expedition and took their stuff and made a run for it. Or, the Second Lander had made it to the Mothership, and all those lucky bastards hopped away to Earth and got super rich with OCTA. Or, the launch grabbed the attention of a hyperintelligent species of humanlike aliens who happened to be passing through the system at that exact moment and now the descendants of those people were super sexy alien hybrids kicking it in some intergalactic vacation paradise where no one ever went hungry and no one had to wear pants.

Cora braced for whatever version of the story Twig was about to crack open.

“So this guy said that he doesn’t think the Second Lander blew up because anybody working the Quarries would still be able to see the debris,” Twig said.

“That is true,” Cora said with a nod, “and I agree.”

Twig perked up a little. “Really?”

“Really, yeah. I’m out there all the time, and it doesn’t matter where we are in orbit, I’ve never seen that kind of space junk.”

Encouraged, Twig began to pick up speed. “He also said there’s no evidence either for or against humanlike aliens—which made someone else mad and they walked out—”

“Good riddance,” Cora said.

“So, he thinks the Second Lander made it all the way to the Mothership.” (Cora found this unlikely, but she did not interrupt). “He had some charts and numbers to back it all up. He thinks that given the, um—I don’t know the technical words, but like, how much fuel the landers could carry—”

“Fuel tank capacity,” Cora said.

“Yeah, sure. He says the landers were designed to be flown around by colonists if they needed to pick a different spot on the planet to settle down, and while they weren’t really meant to go all the way back to the Mothership, you could make some, like, tweaks and stuff to make it work.”

Cora was pleasantly surprised. This was far less screwball than she’d expected. “I mean, maybe. In theory.” It was more plausible than fuckable aliens, anyway.

Twig was fizzing over by now. “He said that that’s why we shouldn’t write off recycled-component spaceflight as too risky to work, because all spaceflight is dangerous—”

Cora’s pleasant surprise began to evaporate. “Hang on,” she said. “We shouldn’t write off what?”

“Recycled-component spaceflight,” Twig repeated.

Cora blinked, hoping she was about to guess wrong as to what that phrase meant. “Do you mean like Sucker’s Luck?”

Twig frowned. “He said that name was intentionally put into use to discredit—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Cora let her head fall against the wall. “Come on, Twig.”

“What?”

“You are smarter than that. That is so dumb. That is dumber than dealing spike. That is so much worse.” And it was, it really was. Sucker’s Luck was the spot where the First Lander had touched down. It still held a decent amount of scrap, and maybe once or twice a year, there was a story in the news about how some people had gone out there, cobbled a rocket together from the leftovers and whatever other junk they brought along, and subsequently blew themselves up. That is, if the hike across the surface hadn’t killed them first.

Twig gestured aggressively with her bag of chips. “How is it dumb? How is it any dumber than sitting here waiting for . . . what, exactly? Some big technological rapture”—oh, she’d definitely picked that one up from somebody—“where we all jump in our shiny new spaceships and go back to Earth? Is Earth even real? We don’t know. The Primer says so, but can we trust that? That’s the only source we have, and it’s not like it got us anywhere good.”