Anne Wender (Human, the eldest survivor)

Eden came up slowly, and then all at once — a ring of lights first, and then a ring of country: green, actual green, turning in its own weather with the sun let in along one long window of it. The children crowded the port. Anne stood behind them and watched the green go by underneath and understood that she was looking at the first thing in twenty days that was bigger than what had happened to them.

Lumbarian did not come inside; there was no inside for him. He rode the last stretch in the open hold, and the children were brought down to see him — this was Lucene's doing, Anne understood — the shape that had walked on the outside of the world, far too large for any door they had ever walked through. He lowered one manipulator until it rested flat on the deck and held it there, perfectly still, while the smallest survivors patted it. Something that size being that still is a language of its own, and the children understood it at once, the way they understood animals.

Eden's intake hall was full of morning. The forms were kind the way good forms are kind: short, and in order, and asking nothing twice. The children went through in small groups; Anne went through with Karla asleep on her shoulder and Andrew beside her, smelling of machine oil. The officer took her name, and she gave it — "Wender. Anne Wender" — and her sister's after it. Then the form reached the line that asked how they were to be housed, and the officer looked up at the three of them, and started to ask.

"Together," Anne said, before the question finished.

The officer looked a moment longer — at Karla asleep, at Andrew's oil-marked hands, at Anne's face doing what her face had learned to do — and wrote it down. It went into the record as plainly as that, and the record, the way records do, set about making it true: one word, holding three people.

Lucene came down the ramp with them, and kept coming — through the intake hall and past it, into the weeks on the other side, until the escorting had turned into something no form had a line for, and Anne had stopped, at some point, expecting her to leave. "Thank you, Lucene," Anne said at the foot of the ramp: the name whole and correct, as she always said it, then and after.

It was a small word, together. Anne had thought so even as she said it. But she had lately watched a smaller one hold — said once, on purpose, by a child with almost nothing left, and holding still — and she was beginning to understand how it worked. At the start, a family is a small word said on purpose. Everything after it is the keeping.