Maya glared across the table at her mother. "I don't see Why I can't go to Callan Prime to join up like anyone else. It's my Right as a Citizen. All of my friends have gone. The only one who hasn't gone is Eli." She stopped at her mother's pointed look. "What?" she asked impatiently.
"Did you not think maybe there was a very good reason for your brother's not joining the Corps? Especially after it had been all he's ever talked of wanting to do?" A look of sadness flitted behind her eyes at that before disappearing behind an even stare.
"Well, if you'd just tell me... Just give me one good reason why..."
"I'd like to wait for your father, Maya. It's more his story to tell than mine."
Her mother's stoic calm was like pouring fuel on her inner fires. "I'm not waiting three more days until his ship gets back! If I do, everyone else from home will have gone, and I'll be alone in the next grouping with strangers! If you can't give me one good reason to stay... Tonight... then I'm leaving at first light, and there isn't a single thing you can do to stop it!" There. She'd thrown down the gauntlet. Let her mother stay calm and mysterious in the face of that.
Finally breaking her cool reserve, she sighed loudly in exasperation and raked her fingers through her dark hair faintly streaked with the first signs of grey. She sat quietly for some minutes, debating.
"Fine. But you have to promise to hear me all of the way out before you do any storming out of the house. What I have to say won't be easy for you to hear." Maya looked at her mother expectantly, impatiently. "Your father is a wanted man on Callan Prime. He has one of the highest bounties in four systems on his head..."
Her daughter scoffed, "Daddy?! You must be joking..."
"You promised to listen, Maya Rose," she was gently reminded.
Seeing the seriousness in her mother's face, hearing it in her voice, she slowly sat back down across the table from where she'd risen to stand beside it in disbelief. "What could daddy have possibly done? I've never seen him violate the tiniest of laws..." she trailed off.
Her mother took a deep breath. "He's wanted," she paused briefly, seemingly to gather her courage, before meeting her daughter's eyes with her own, unblinking. "He's wanted for high treason against the Corporation... for murder... and for theft."
Maya couldn't have been more shell-shocked if she'd been told her father was a destroyer of worlds. "But-"
"I don't want you to worry about the charge of murder. That one is just something they trumped up to make people not question the others too closely. The other two are tied together. But because of the price on his head, the second they ran your DNA during intake, the Corporation would descend upon you and do everything they could to use you as leverage to get to him. To Us," she corrected herself.
"But what could he have stolen to make them want him so badly?" she asked pale-faced and somewhat weakly.
Her mother tilted her chin and caught her gaze once again with her own, before saying simply, "Me."
Not allowing her daughter much time for that to sink in, she posed a question of her own, "Have you ever heard the story of the Girl on the Moon?" It was there the explanation truly began.
