Cas paused and I heard a quiet chuckle. I wanted to get up and go make sure he was alright but I couldn’t move. Tension settled heavily around the room.

You okay? I thought desperately as Orion slid a screen towards me that showed a feed from the cameras that were pointing at Cas.

He was staring at his notes on the screen, his eyebrows furrowed deeply.

Yeah, I just have no clue what to say next, he replied, fiddling with the controls and scrolling up and down. Do I go straight into why I joined Freo or do I have to talk about everything that also led to it?

Go chronologically, Peggy suggested. I think it’ll make more sense if you start at the beginning because then, by the time you get to why you joined, you won’t need to explain anything else.

On the screen, Cas nodded.

“Is everything alright, Cas?” Andy asked gently.

“Yeah, sorry. Just trying to work out what to say,” he replied with a slight smile. “I think I got it though.”

His shoulders rose and fell as he took a deep breath, forcing himself to stay calm and gathering his strength.

Fear bubbled within me. I know it’s selfish but part of me wanted to leave. He’d told me so much about his father before and it always made me so furious. If I heard much more, I knew that the next time I came face to face with Harvey, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from attacking him.

Maybe I should have left.

“I was four the first time my dad put me in hospital. Well, it was a joint effort between him and my mom. I don’t remember what happened to cause the beating but they were furious.” He fell silent suddenly, his eyes fixed on the screen and flicking back and forth quickly.

I tore my eyes away from his image on my screen and looked up.

His medical report was on the main screen, listing his injures in straightforward, clinical language. A chill went through me as I read quickly.

“My injuries were so bad that they said I had been playing outside and my mom had accidentally hit me when her car,” he said quietly. “I don’t really remember what happened but the report you can probably see on the screen now has helped fill in some of the blanks. They refused to take me to the hospital straight away, I don’t know why. I think part of it is because they didn’t believe how much pain I was in. Even back then, they used to say I was a liar.”

He swallowed audibly and I felt my heart sink.

“I wasn’t, obviously, but they liked to say that I was. I think it made them feel better for how they treated me. At least, if they had an excuse, they could argue that it was justified.” He paused again, clearly trapped in his thoughts.

I stared at the report, the words starting to swim in my vision as nausea washed through me. My eyes kept going back to the words ‘Broken ribs’ and ‘internal bleeding’.

I knew that he’d had it bad, he’s told me about it and most (if not all) kids on Nova had pretty shitty childhoods as far as I was aware, but this was worse than I ever thought. He never went into the details, brushing off any questions about his scars and changing the topic.

“They fixed me up, didn’t ask too many questions and sent me back home to my parents again. I don’t think anything too bad happened after that until I started going to school. I loved school, especially at first. I’ve always loved learning and being away from my family was great. They expected me to do well, my parents. They said I needed to set a good example for my siblings. I didn’t mind it too much, I liked learning so I wanted to do well.” Cas paused, glancing at the wall that separated us. “Actually, can you cut that bit out? I don’t want to talk about them.”

It’s not my story to tell. They still live with them, I don’t want them to get in trouble because of me, he explained quickly.

It’s cut, Peg replied, making a note on her screen. I won’t let them include anything you don’t want them to.

“Of course, it’s gone. Orion, did you manage to find any of Cas’ elementary school reports?” Andy asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure I did…” Orion typed furiously on his screen, pulling up a few different documents before Cas’ report appeared. “There. This is the first one we could get, it’s from year two. I think you would have been six then?”

Cas nodded hesitantly as he motioned to scroll through the report.

“Oh yeah, I remember some of those teachers. Mrs Reign was the best. She used to sneak me sandwiches every day,” he reminisced fondly.

“Do you want to talk about why she had to do that?” Aquila asked, her tone strangely soft.

“Yeah, sure. If I’m doing things chronologically like Peg said, I need to go further back though?” he said, fiddling with his uniform collar.

“Of course.”

“Um, so school went pretty well. I did well in my early testings and the teachers didn’t have too much to say about me. I don’t really remember anything that happened at home during that time though. I think Dad started to consider running for Council pretty soon after that. I mean, he was already a big deal. He’d married a Councillor’s daughter and after he retired from a pretty unremarkable stint in the Corps, he owned a bunch of companies but I’m not sure if any of you have done any research into them?”

Cas looked up, a bit of a smile playing on his face.

“He didn’t start any of the companies or really play a big role in them. He bought them or was handed them. Even now, he still owns a bunch of them. Or at least, he still owns some. He ran many of them into the ground. But that power and control was instrumental in the fight to get him into the Council. When it first started, when he first started campaigning, things were okay. Oh…”

My head whipped up as Cas trailed off and he stared at the screen.

There was a picture of him, when he was a kid, and his family, all waving and smiling happily at the screen. He looked so young, he couldn’t have been more than five or six.

It was the year before they put him in the orphanage for causing trouble.

Cas breathed heavily as he stared at the picture, unable to form words for a moment.

“Do you want us to take the photo down?” Andy asked, looking at Cas on his screen.

“No,” Cas said, his voice hoarse. “You can leave it up. I’ve not seen this picture before. It’s from the first press conference, isn’t it? I remember that day. We were allowed breakfast for once and he even let us skip school so that we could go shopping for suits. I… I…”

He looked down, blinking back tears.

My heart clenched and I pushed a hand against my mouth to muffle any of my own sobs. It was heartbreaking seeing him go through it.

“I’m sorry. I just… I didn’t expect it to hit me so hard,” he said, his voice soft.

“That’s okay. Do you need to take a break?” Andy asked.

Cas shook his head and clenched his hands into fists.

“I can keep going,” he said before lifting his chin again, his eyes no longer glistening. “At first, things were good. He was doing well and both he and my mom were enjoying the race because it was so easy… People were dropping out rather than standing against him and then… that guy from Rhoms joined the race.” Cas stopped and laughed. “I don’t even remember his name and he’s the reason that all this happened to me.”

He laughed for a little longer but it was a strangely bitter noise that made me want to tell Orion to pull the photo off the screen. My hands shook and tears swam in my eyes but Cas started talking before I could say anything.

“Well, whatever his name, once he joined, things changed. I remember thinking, even at the time, that he seemed like a genuinely good person who actually wanted to help people. My dad didn’t like that though. He got angry. Angry like he’d never been before. He started pushing us to do better, to do more. He would make us spend all night on the simulators from right when we finished school until whenever it was we did well enough to deserve to sleep.”

A shiver of hatred went through me but it was edged with admiration for Cas. I still find it incredible that he went through all that but never lost his love of flying. I would have done.

“But that wasn’t enough for Dad. He always wanted us to follow in his footsteps and join the Corps once we graduated and he would only set for us being primary pilots. He lied to us for years and said that he was a primary but I’ve seen his mission reports. He was only ever actually primary in name. He didn’t fly a single mission the entire time.”

Mission reports popped up on the screen and my eyes started moving frantically to try and read them before they were replaced with another. Each time, Harvey’s name was listed as primary but it was a different name who was in control of the ship and the flight plans. Sometimes he wasn’t even in the cockpit.

“He decided that learning to fly wasn’t enough. We needed to be the complete packages which meant we needed to have all of the skills that he thought we were lacking. He was more focused on that than he was on being elected to the Council, really. Mom did most of the hard word for that while he did the public appearances and tried to whip us into shape. Sometimes, literally.”

Cas fiddled with the remote built into the arm of the chair until he pulled up his school report again.

“His main fear with us was decision making. He called me weak and said I’d never be able to make the kind of decisions that one needed to be able to do to be primary so he came up with a solution. Each night, he’d have me, my brother and sister argue over who got to eat dinner. The cook was only allowed to make enough for four people so one of us would have to go hungry. I was the eldest and… it hurt me to see the other two suffer so, I’d always argue that I didn’t deserve to eat.”

He paused, flicking through the pages of the report.

“My teachers started noticing it before too long. I think that Mrs Reign was the first to work it out after I passed out a few times and she started slipping me sandwiches and high-cal drinks but Mom got worried. She thought that if I kept passing out at school, it would look like some form of medical negligence. Like, there was something wrong with me and they weren’t doing anything about it because no one would suspect that they weren’t feeding me, apparently. So, he changed his technique.”

Cas paused, his hand going to the scar that I knew travelled the length of his neck.

“We were allowed to eat again but instead, he made us choose who deserved to be beaten. Again, I was stupid and wanted to protect my younger siblings so I generally volunteered. Mom normally stopped him before he caused damage that was too permanent anyway.”

Even more medical reports appeared on the screen and the ‘reason for visit’ section was always different. It never mentioned Harvey or Cas’ mom, it always said something that sounded innocent and plausible enough.

“Twice, I was sent for neurological examinations and I remember a doctor telling me that no kid could possibly fall down the stairs that many times without there being something wrong with them. I know that people are probably wondering why I didn’t tell anyone that my parents were beating me. It’s an understandable question.”

Cas paused again and my heart clenched sadly.

I hated Harvey. I hated Cas’ mom. I even hated his siblings a bit even though I knew it wasn’t their fault.

“I did once. I told a doctor that it had been my dad who had done it but…” He swallowed audibly. “He told me it was probably a mistake and that my dad wouldn’t do something like that. That he was a fine member of society, not a child abuser. My parents came in pretty quickly after that and I remember them laughing with the doctor about it and calling me a liar.”

Fury shot through me. I wanted to find the name of that doctor. I would have killed them. Thrust the other medical reports in his face and beat him until he saw sense.

“I think it helped, in a way, that my dad only really picked on me. If it were the other two as well, then it would have been more suspicious but it was just me so that could call me a liar or clumsy or whatever else and make it seem more realistic,” he mused, clearly voicing something he’d been considering for a while.

I tore my eyes away from the screen and glanced around the room. Everyone was staring at him, completely rapt. Both Peggy and Orion’s eyes shone with tears and Andy looked broken-hearted but it was Aquila’s expression that surprised me the most.

She was furious.

“Not long after that, I made a mistake. A pretty big one. We had an interview for some ridiculous talk show that went out to all of Nova. They made me and my siblings go on too and sit, quietly playing, whilst he and my mom were interviewed. I don’t think anyone expected the interviewer to even look at me, much less talk to me.”

Cas was cut off by a loud, blaring noise on the screen and I jumped, my eyes snapping up to stare at the interview playing on the screen.

Harvey and Cas’ mom sat side by side in armchairs on the screen, an interviewer sat across from them, all laughing easily at something that had been said. At first, I couldn’t take my eyes off Harvey. He looked so different. His skin was unlined, his hair not speckled with white but there was still that same cold look in his eyes. Even as he laughed, his eyes were flat and calculating.

A quiet giggle made me tear my eyes away from him and look at the three kids playing on the floor in the centre of the screen. I recognised Cas immediately.

He was smiling as he held a toy spaceship out to his sister, Katie, who took it with a gappy smile.

But I could sense that disaster was coming. The interviewer looked away from Cas’ parents and focused on him.

He looked up at the wrong time.

“What do you think?” she asked in a smooth Nova accent. “Do you think your dad is going to win the race to become the next Councillor?”

From her tone, I could tell that she just wanted Cas to say yes but he hesitated, thinking about it.

Fear started to build in my stomach again.

“I don’t know,” the younger Cas said honestly.

The interviewer looked confused for a second before they excitedly jumped on his words.

“Oh? Do you not think that he’ll make a good Councillor?”

Cas’ eyes widened, clearly sensing the trap and he glanced at his parents uncertainly.

“I… I don’t know,” he said finally.

“That’s interesting. What do you think makes a good Councillor?” the woman asked, leaning towards Cas.

Cas’ face looked panicked and I could see the fear creeping into his parent’s faces. Clearly, they had not expected anyone to speak to him.

He was only a kid.

“I don’t know. I guess just someone who wants what’s best for people,” he said quietly.

“And, you don’t think your dad wants what’s best for people?”

The screen went blank suddenly and no one spoke for a moment until Cas broke the silence.

“Well, that interview happened not long before my parents surrendered me to the orphanage,” he said, his voice flat. “The official reason, and the reason they gave me, was to look better for the press and to combat that guy from Rhoms who adopted two kids. Apparently, there were some rumours going around about how bad our orphanages were after his kids started talking about how great theirs was. He was using that as a campaign argument. You know, arguing that kids without parents deserved more, which is something my dad pointedly ignored. Well… he did until he didn’t. One day, they realised he could solve two problems with one solution.”

He took a deep breath as pictures of him popped up on the screen dressed in a small fitted suit, carrying a suitcase, and standing on a stage with Harvey who addressed the crowd with a smile.

I glanced down at my screen again, watching Cas worriedly as he stared at Harvey’s face on the screen. His hands slowly clenched into fists and anger crept over his expression as the clip started.

There was no audio, thankfully, but I saw Harvey’s lips move before he gestured towards a harsh looking man who stepped onto the stage and laid a heavy hand on Cas’ shoulders. Cas flinched slightly but didn’t react in any other way, standing silently until Harvey gestured towards him once more. He turned and followed the man into the orphanage without a look back.

Even as a kid, I could tell that he knew it was a one-way ticket into the orphanage. He knew he wasn’t going back out with his dad.

“And that is how I helped my father win a seat on the Council.”