Sophia Lestari was a bit of an enigma to her colleagues on Alliance Base 17.

She was a very genuine person, though eccentric and a bit scatterbrained. She always had a smile on her face, and could generate enthusiasm for just about anything. She was easily distracted and rarely got caught up in any workplace drama simply because she seemed incapable of recognising when there was any tension. She had a plethora of unexplained skills and knowledge, from her random store of fun facts about planets on the very edges of the known universe to her ability to make random gadgets out of spare parts.

The galaxy was a diverse place. Even among humans, as Sophie’s species was known, there was not an easily defined normal, yet everyone agreed that Sophie was decidedly abnormal. She didn’t open up much about her past, and she was very rarely asked, but there were many signs that she wasn’t exactly all that she seemed to be.

It should perhaps have been most obvious to Beth, who was half human and thus had the most exposure to human culture. Beth had met Sophie when they’d both been in training to join the Alliance and from the get go Sophie had offhandedly mentioned multiple things that should have alerted Beth, including that Sophie had never attained a high school diploma, despite the fact that on Earth it was considered an essential human right that all people received a formal education through to adulthood, and there were few barriers to this. It was very weird for Sophie not to have attended throughout her teenage years.

Honestly, though Beth was quite intelligent and good at analysing data, they hadn’t put that much thought into Sophie or her elusive past. She was their friend and she was fun and wacky and that’s all that mattered to them. If the topic of Sophie dropping out of high school ever came up, which happened with relative frequency, they simply figured that Sophie had been homeschooled. Maybe her family had to travel for work, so Sophie was never in one place long enough to attend school. That would explain a lot of her references to having visited random planets as well. It made perfect sense to Beth, and they never bothered clarifying this with Sophie because, again, it didn’t matter to them beyond a sense of curiosity.

Mickey probably knew Sophie the best out of anyone on the team. The two of them had bonded very quickly and easily upon meeting due to their shared wonder at the universe and general goodness. Mickey was a very genuine guy, like Sophie, and cared deeply about people. Out of all of them, he was the easiest to open up to. She’d told him more about her past than any of the others, though even that was limited. He knew that she had two younger siblings back home on Earth who she visited occasionally. He knew about her best friend Abigail, and about the dramatic circumstances surrounding their meeting. He knew about some of her most treasured gadgets – the friction stabiliser, her teleport watch – and he’d guessed that these were linked to some of her exploits across the galaxy. He knew she’d been involved in resettling refugees with the Alliance not long before she joined the organisation, having stumbled upon a settlement of people who’d been kept as slaves by a band of space pirates on a random planet. He admired her strength and compassion and loved working alongside somebody who had so much knowledge and experience of the world at large. Mickey never realised quite how unusual Sophie’s experiences were, being an alien from the planet Ranigrous who, despite his interest in other cultures, didn’t understand enough about humans to know that Sophie’s stories of travelling and complete detachment from a home planet or her family were abnormal or concerning in any way. Mostly, he respected her privacy, because she was his friend, and he was simply happy that she was willing to open up to him at all.

Robyn knew the most about Sophie’s past, though only in a professional, removed way. As the team leader of their little relief team, she had access to all of their files, and Sophie’s contained a lot of information that she didn’t generally bring up in conversation. Robyn knew that Sophie was an orphan, that her mother had died when she was thirteen and her father had been missing in action for six years before officially being declared dead when Sophie was eighteen. She knew about all of Sophie’s previous involvement with the Alliance, with the space pirates and also with an altercation on the planet Matraxa, the file stating that Sophie had appeared there out of the blue and, upon seeing the mistreatment of the Matraxans and the aid the Alliance was hoping to provide, had offered her help. Robyn knew that, pre-Alliance, Sophie had worked with an Earth based centre known as the Science Institution, and had been involved in the testing of a cross-spatial particle transmitter, or teleport watch (though Robyn didn’t accept Sophie’s nickname for the device as at all appropriate). Though Robyn was not without sympathy for Sophie’s somewhat troubled past, she couldn’t help but hold some derision for the girl. In Robyn’s eyes, Sophie was absurdly talented and privileged, having bewilderingly gotten easy access to admirable positions at a young age, and never seeming to have worked that hard to achieve any of it. Her general obliviousness drove Robyn, who had been tirelessly working her whole life to achieve what she had, completely mad. Because of this, she’d never put much more consideration into Sophie’s past.

Steve knew barely anything about Sophie. He liked her, sure, but she scared him a little. She didn’t seem to be afraid of anything, or care much about social conventions, very much the opposite to him. She knew a lot about machines and knew that he did too, so she tended to ask his opinion on a lot of her ventures. He never had the courage to admit that most of the stuff she showed him was too complicated and random for him to understand. He couldn’t figure out how she had learnt so much about technology. He definitely didn’t get why she was like that; always so high energy and upbeat and up for anything, the crazier the better. Sometimes he felt like while he was an ordinary working man, Sophie was the protagonist of an action movie, and by interacting with her he was encountering a fanciful world of good vs evil, where she could do anything and knew everything and every trouble in life was merely an obstacle for her to overcome to get to a happy ending. He never thought about her past because to him Sophie was a character who had appeared in the world fully formed with personality and skills and a wild look in her eyes. However, if he ever really thought about the sorts of characters he associated with Sophie, he had to admit that whatever backstory they had was usually very, very tragic.

None of them could have expected the real truth.

The members of the Assistance Impressing formed one of the Alliance’s many relief teams. Their work involved surveying and assisting the projects run by the Alliance; assessing and sending aid to refugee camps, responding to natural disasters, promoting the preservation of endangered planetary environments, diplomatic missions, and lots of paperwork to keep those projects running. It could be an intense job, and it often brought the team face to face with devastating situations. None of them were unaware of suffering or death, but for the first year of their relief work they’d been lucky to not witness any death directly.

This couldn’t have lasted forever. On one particular mission, as the team were helping rescue survivors from the wreckage caused by a warp gate backfire on the planet Thoo, they were evacuating an area when they came across a section which had already caved in, with a few people trapped inside, crying out for help. A gas pipe had burst and so they went into a frenzy trying to clear an opening for people to escape through. But they weren’t fast enough; by the time they’d broken through bodies littered the floor and though Mickey went into a flurry performing emergency first aid no one survived. It was unfortunate but they still had a job to do, so they continued with the evacuation and providing first aid to survivors, and then they went back to their ship.

The trip back to the base was very quiet. Everyone was in shock from the experience. Beth was chewing anxiously on their comms, staring off into nothing. Mickey’s eyes kept welling up with tears and he hid his face in his graspers. Steve put his music on louder than normal so he could drown out his thoughts; more than anything he needed to focus on not crashing the ship. Robyn maintained her professional air, determined to keep it together as a team leader should, but anyone who knew her well would be able to tell that she was rattled. She was dreading having to write the incident report for the day’s events; a strange occurrence for her, she loved filling out forms. Sophie was quiet herself, her eyes roving between her teammates, taking in their states of distress. If anyone had caught her gaze they would have seen a darkness there that would have concerned them and realised that this grief that they were experiencing was all too familiar to her. But no one noticed just yet.

Back at their desks, they each finished all the necessary paperwork for the day and started packing up. Before they could leave Robyn cleared her throat to get their attention. The others looked over tiredly.

“Don’t worry, I won’t take up too much of your time. I just wanted to say that I understand that it has been a trying day for all of us, and accordingly I am arranging sessions with the base’s counselling team so that everyone has the opportunity to work through this traumatic experience.” She levelled her gaze professionally between her teammates, despite her greatest effort unable to hide her fondness for each of them. “I wouldn’t want any of you to be working at anything less than maximum efficiency.”

Sophie, who had been nothing but pleasantly puzzled since they’d returned to base, now frowned in confusion. “Robyn, why would we need to go to counselling? We help people in danger all the time.”

“Yes, Sophie, however witnessing death is generally considered to be more harrowing, and we have been quite fortunate until now that there have been no deaths on any of the projects we’ve worked on, and it is important to address emotionally distressing incidents. I won’t force you to attend therapy but I would strongly reccome-”

“Wait, have none of you guys seen someone die before?” Sophie blurted out suddenly, eyes wide.

An awkward silence fell. Beth raised their eyebrows. Steve eyed Sophie warily. Mickey put a grasper on her shoulder.

“Me neither.” Beth muttered.

“Yeah like I’ve had relatives die but what happened today was on a whole nother level!” Steve said, getting worked up as he spoke. “Like gawd you know that death is a normal part of life but to watch people die like that… it was messed up. I definitely need to go to counselling, I don’t know how I’m ever going to recover. This has been the worst day of my entire career. Sophie I’ve got no idea how you could be there today and not lose your mind like the rest of us.”

“Take some deep breaths Steve.” Robyn said sharply. “Let’s not forget that we all have different experiences. I’m sorry Sophie, it had slipped my mind but as both of your parents are deceased; of course you have witnessed death in a way that none of the rest of us have, so you would be far more desensitised than the rest of us.”

Sophie blinked rapidly. “Oh right my parents! I didn’t even think of them to be honest, that’s wild.”

Steve gaped openly at her now. There was a long pause before anyone spoke. “Sophie… how many people have you seen die?” Beth asked tentatively.

Sophie shifted awkwardly. “Uhhhhh… I’m not sure honestly. Like, if we’re talking people I knew then not that many, maybe three? But when I was on Flauraan I saw this Weraynian kill a lot of people, like this one guy who he shot through the head while he was trying to make a distress call. I was tied up there with Abigail and my arm was broken and oh my god it was so horrifying there was blood and he just died and I honestly thought the Weraynian was going to kill me too.”

A ripple of shock passed through her friends as they processed what she was saying. Robyn was frozen, mind racing, horrified at how casually Sophie was unloading such an awful traumatic thing.

Mickey blinked back tears and gripped Sophie’s hand tightly. “Sophie that’s so- so terrible! Was this when you first met Abigail? On the Eridanus spaceship?”

Sophie nodded, causing Robyn to explode. “The Eridanus? A spaceship? How the hell did you end up in a hostage situation?”

“Well you see, uh, it’s a bit of a complicated story but uh, well, I was on Flauraan in the first place because-”

“Wait.” Beth suddenly interrupted and held up their hand. “If you’re gonna tell a story let’s not just stand around.” They walked over to their desk, rifled around underneath and finally pulled out three bean bags. They placed one down and patted it, looking meaningfully at Sophie. “Come sit down and tell us everything.”

Sophie shrugged and obliged. Beth spread the other bean bags around her and they all settled down to listen. Steve nestled on Mickey’s shoulder and sat tensely. Robyn perched on the edge of the bean bag Beth sprawled themself on. Sophie glanced around at her colleagues, her friends; she was amazed at the concern they were taking into her life. She wasn’t sure she wanted this attention on her. Her past wasn’t something she dwelt on often. She was aware that her life had been different to most people, but sometimes it was hard to recognise what was normal and what wasn’t. She definitely hadn’t expected the horrified reactions to the fact that she had experienced death. It wasn’t as if she was happy that she’d seen so many people die in her life, it’s just that it was the nature of how things were. There was a lot of messed up stuff in the galaxy and she’d gone right around it. Bad things had happened. She moved on. She tried not to think about that stuff. It sucked but it was normal. Part of life. She never thought about it long enough to elicit any emotional response. She started to feel a twisting knot of dread in her stomach – she’d felt this feeling from afar before and she’d always run from it. But looking at a circle of people who cared about her and wanted her to open up, she wanted to unknot it. For them.

So Sophie began her tale.

“Ok so I grew up on Earth right? My parents were both scientists. But when I was like 8 my mum got diagnosed with this rare cell blasting disease and there wasn’t a cure so she had to stop working, and then the company my dad worked for had built a ship and were planning on going on a scientific expedition, and my dad went with it, cos he was an engineer. They came back once when I was eleven, and I thought that it was over, but they ended up leaving again. It was the first expedition by humans to learn about other planets and it was really successful. They wanted more data to study I guess. But yeah so he left again, and then a few years later my mum died. These social workers turned up to take my siblings away – they said we had to go to separate homes. So I ran away, and even though they were acting as if I was an orphan I actually wasn’t so I went to my dad’s old work. I figured I could just hang out until they came back; they had to check in with their research at some point right? And then my dad would realise his kids needed him and we’d be a family again…” Sophie turned her head, quiet for a moment as she thought of what could have been.

Robyn leaned forward to clarify something that had been bothering her. “Did those social workers not look for you? You would have been, what, thirteen at the time? They should not have been allowed to let a teenage girl potentially live on the streets.”

Sophie tilted her head and shrugged. “Earth’s kind of a mess. If a kid runs away on them it’s not their responsibility anymore. I was just one less person they have to put the work in to rehome I guess. That’s just how it is.”

Robyn’s expression was tight, her processors ticking over as she began to realise just how poorly she’d thought of Sophie in the past, and how wrong she’d been. That she could continue to speak so nonchalantly of a traumatic childhood where she was failed by so many, her father, the foster system, made Robyn’s heart ache. And this was only the beginning of her story. What else could have happened to her?

“Anyway, so when I got to the Science Institution – that was the name of my dad’s work – they told me that the expedition had gone missing, which uh, kinda sucked to hear considering everything going on. But they did offer me a job working with them! And one of the scientists, Louise, took me in. Which was nice. So I was basically like, an assistant scientist. My parents had taught me some basics on machines so I was pretty handy, if I do say so myself. I learnt as much about the expedition as I could, and then one day my friend Aldred showed me these teleport watches that the Science Institution was developing and they needed testing so I was like hey why don’t we test it by looking for the expedition and Aldred thought that was a really good idea so we suggested it to the board and they thought it was a really good idea and there was a bit of back and forth about who should go and who could be spared and it ended up being me and Aldred; we started at the last place we knew the expedition had landed and we worked from there, taking notes on everywhere we visited.”

Mickey scratched his head. “What does this have to do with the hostage situation on Flauraan?”

Sophie paused and her eyes flicked upwards, as if she’d forgotten the point of the story she was telling. “Uh, I’m getting to that.”

“Hang about, how old was this Aldred guy?” Steve asked suddenly.

“Um, twenty-five I think.”

Beth screwed up their face. “Wait, they let a teenage girl and a man ten years older than her travel alone together? That’s so messed up.”

Sophie blinked rapidly and sat up, blurting out defensively. “What! He was my friend! What’s wrong with that?”

Beth and Steve exchanged a glance and then Beth shook their head. “Sorry Sophie, never mind. Go on with the story.”

“Right, so… everything was great for a while… and then we went to Shalron. There were monsters there…” Beth frowned at this, a memory pricking at the edge of their mind. Sophie’s expression darkened, and this time everybody saw. She took a deep breath, wondering why this was taking so much out of her; and then she realised. She’d never properly talked to anyone about Aldred’s death since it happened. Not even Abigail. It was like an awful secret festering inside her. It didn’t have to be like that though… Finally she spat it out. “Aldred died. I saw him get ripped apart and I was lucky not to die myself. It was… one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh my god. Sophie…” Beth said, hands over their mouth, tears in their eyes. Sophie pressed on.

“Since we were talking about like, me witnessing death, Aldred technically counts as the first I personally saw. Cos I wasn’t physically there when my mum died. But like, yeah… It took me a bit to recover after that happened but I ended up getting back out there after a few weeks and continuing searching for the ship, but this time it was just me.”

Robyn shook her head. “I can’t believe this. You’re telling me the Science Institution just let a fourteen year old girl who’d witnessed a friend die continue a dangerous quest through space? That is unbelievably irresponsible of them.”

“Well they did tell me how valuable the research we’d been doing had been for the company. Ronan wasn’t happy that I’d stopped for so long after Aldred died. And he threatened to take away the teleport watch if I didn’t keep going. So I didn’t have a choice really. I had to find my dad.”

Robyn’s lenses darkened. She burned with a fury usually reserved for such awful things as threats to her career, or Max Jones. She spat out, “Who is this Ronan you speak of?”

“Ronan Schofer.” Sophie replied casually. “He was the head scientist of-"

“I am going to kill Ronan Schofer.” Robyn hissed, her tone so cold that the others glanced at her with worry.

Sophie giggled nervously. “Hey, Robyn, it’s okay, you know. He was just doing his job, and I wanted to do it!”

“Sophie, you were a child. I can’t believe you were treated like this… Even now you’re so young, and any reasonable adult would do anything in their power to make sure you had a safe environment to cope with the trauma you never should have experienced in the first place! They definitely wouldn’t send you back out into space. Alone.”

“Yeah Sophie that’s all kinds of screwed up.” Steve chimed in.

Sophie looked around at her friends, taking in their concerned faces. She didn’t know how to feel about their reactions to her life story, things she’d never given a second thought. Maybe she should. She shrugged. “Well uh, maybe I shouldn’t have gone out there but I did, and this is where Flauraan comes in because in this random outpost on the edge of the galaxy I found out that the Eridanus, my dads ship, had passed through there. I tracked its signal and it was in this uncharted system so I locked onto the planet it was landing on and teleported there. Knocked Abigail over in the process. An iconic way to meet. We quickly realised that the humans were not from my dads ship and they were invading flauraan for some reason, and we infiltrated the ship and found out that they’d been told that Abigails people’s were monsters who’d kidnapped another human ship and they were there to rescue them, except that it didn’t exist because they’d been lied to so that these people called the Weraynians could cause a distraction so they could escape their planet and attack Flauraan in the process. There was one Weraynian hiding on the ship, and just when it looked like the humans and paladanians were going to be friends he hijacked the ship and I went in there to stop him. And that’s when all that screwed up stuff happened. When I was trying to fix a part of the ship the Weraynian beat me up, broke my arm, he killed a whole bunch of other people, then he fixed my arm which was kinda weird but then he tied me and Abigail up and carried us around the ship and killed a few people while we watched. It was very messed up. After that all was over I stayed with Abigail’s family a bit and I thought hey I wanna take Abi on a trip so I planned a little holiday to the closest planet, Halapatov, and it was fun for a bit but uh, things went bad really quick. My teleport watch malfunctioned, and we started hearing about all these ghost things that were killing people, and it turned out they were from another dimension that my teleport watch had helped open a little wider or something. Oh also they weren’t killing people exactly. They were trying to change them into ghosts, because they said that it was better in their world. Everything about them messed with our minds. We teamed up with this reporter…” Sophie paused for a moment, distressed. “Riowyn. She’d been researching the ghosts. We tracked them to where they were being brought through to our world so that we could stop it somehow but when we got there… well…”

“Yeah?” Beth asked quietly. They were all watching Sophie, riveted.

Sophie bit her lip and her eyes had a crazed look for them for a moment. She shook her head. “I was an idiot. I was thinking about Aldred dying and about how the ghosts being here was my fault because I brought the teleport watch there and I hated myself so much that I let the ghosts get to me. They pulled me into their world. Even worse, Abigail came with me! So of course Riowyn freaked out and she built up this huge pressure of staar matter which severed the ghosts connection to our world and so me and Abi were saved, and the ghosts were gone. But Riowyn died saving us. I’ve blamed myself for that for a long time…” Sophie ducked her head to hide the tears starting to form in the corners of her eyes.

There was silence for a while, punctuated by occasional sniffs.

Sophie raised her head and forced herself to continue. “I didn’t really know what to do after that so I dropped Abi back on Flauraan and threw myself back into the search for the expedition. A lot of stuff happened, I reunited with my siblings cos I hadn’t seen them for years, I accidentally teleported into the middle of a conflict on Matraxa and got involved with the Alliance, then I started backtracking through some border planets I’d visited with Aldred at the start and I stumbled upon this settlement, all broken and under fire. Turns out there had been these criminals who’d set up a base on a nearby planet and captured any ships that came into that region of space, used the people as slaves, you know, fun stuff. Then there’d been this big breakout and they’d stolen ships and gone off in two directions and one ship had crashed on this place and they were under fire from pirates. I went looking for the other ship and after a bit I found it; it was in pieces and full of corpses.”

“Oh no…” Mickey covered his face with his graspers.

“Yeah… I finally found the expedition and nearly everyone was dead. My dad was dead.” She stared fiercely into space for a moment. “It was okay though, honestly, I’d been expecting it for a while… deep down. But still… to be surrounded by so many dead people… Anyway, that was the last time I saw dead people… until today.” Sophie’s expression was pained. “I’m sorry. I probably seemed really insensitive before, I just kind of blurt things out. I’m so used to not thinking about any of the bad stuff that happens and that makes me seem like a jerk.”

“No no, Sophie, it’s okay.” Mickey swept Sophie up in a hug. She hid her face against his bulk. “I just can’t believe everything you’ve been through.”

Robyn shook her head. For the latter half of Sophie’s story, she’d become agitated, and had stood up and began pacing their office space while listening. “He’s right. You experienced more trauma than a person should ever have to, and you were being exploited the entire time.”

“Well I wouldn’t say…” Sophie began not to say but Robyn cut her off.

“So you were working for the Science Institution all those years; did you get paid at all?”

“Paid?” Sophie said. “I mean, I didn’t need money. Louise let me stay in her house and I was always able to get food and everything I needed. So, yeah I didn’t need to be paid.”

Robyn threw up her hands and went back into pacing. The others stared at her as she muttered to herself, picking up fragments – “Blatant violation of human rights!” “Utterly despicable.” “Who can I report this to?”

Sophie turned nervously to the rest of her colleagues. “Why is she so upset about this?”

“Because you should’ve been paid, Sophie!” Steve exclaimed. “You said yourself they were testing that teleport thing, and that they got you to do research, and you did it for free? That should’ve been the paid job of somebody else, like, an adult.”

“They exploited you!” Robyn burst out of her muttering. “A teenage girl who just lost her mum turned up on their doorstep and they used you for free labour, knowing that you would do anything to find your dad. They heaped responsibility that should never have been yours on your shoulders.You almost died so many times and it doesn’t sound like they compensated you at all. I knew Earth was a third world planet but this is just so morally reprehensible. You dropped out of school for this as well. How were you supposed to get a job when this was all over?”

“I mean, I did get a job.” Sophie said awkwardly. “You know, here, at the Alliance.”

Robyn waved one of her hands dismissively. “That was pure luck, I’ve seen your files. When recruiting you there was a huge fuss over the lack of official work experience or qualifications; which you would’ve had if, for instance, you’d been on the books as an employee of the Science Institution. It seems like you didn’t officially exist, and the Alliance only offered you a job at all because of the incidents on Matraxa and with your dad’s ship. Would you have been able to get a job on Earth?”

Sophie was quiet for a moment. “Probably not.” she admitted.

Sophie sat still for a great length of time before she seemed to become aware of her surroundings and shook her body upright. “Sorry to go on for so long guys. We finished work ages ago, didn’t mean to hold you up.”

The others chorused that it was alright and not to worry but Sophie seemed barely to hear them, her eyes glazed as if her thoughts were far away.

“Are you alright Sophie?” Mickey asked gently.

“Did you wanna go get a hot chocolate or something? We could even make it smoked.” Beth suggested but Sophie waved her hands.

“No no I’m okay, you guys go ahead, I just want to sit here for a moment.”

Steve, Mickey and Beth exchanged a look, all concerned for this new quiet Sophie. Over the course of her story their friend had transformed in their eyes and was now quite unrecognisable as the goofy, carefree enigma she used to be. They’d never realised how traumatised she was, really. She hadn’t even seemed to have noticed herself. It pained them to see her so trapped inside herself, but they didn’t know how to help, and right now she was asking them to leave.

“Are you sure, Soph? We can stay with you.” Steve offered hesitantly.

Sophie emerged for a moment and smiled at her friends. “It’s fine, really. Thank you guys for all being such good friends, and listening to me ramble. You don’t need to worry, talking about it was a good thing.”

“Alright Sophie.” Beth gave her a hug and traipsed off towards the ship bay, to catch the next transport to Staphas where their apartment was situated (it was the first time they’d gone home in a month).

Steve filed out as well, and Mickey squeezed Sophie really tightly and reminded her that he was always there to talk and he loved her and that he would always be there for her, before heading to bed himself.

Robyn had busied herself with files following her impassioned outburst earlier. She had been deeply disturbed by Sophie’s tale, and was trying to order her thoughts and figure out if there was anything in it that required mandatory action on her part. She snuck a glance at Sophie as she finished up her work, and was surprised at how protective she felt of the girl. She pushed those feelings down, it was pointless to get emotional over such things. As Sophie’s team leader it was important to maintain a professional relationship between them. Still, she felt a great desire to storm into Earth and hold to account every person and system that had caused Sophie harm. She wondered what to do. The room was still for a while.

“Robyn?” Sophie called weakly after a long bout of silence.

“Yes, Sophie?” Robyn turned and focussed her attention on the girl, curled up sadly on a beanbag with turmoil in her eyes. Something inside her twinged.

“I think I need to go to counselling.” Sophie said, slowly, frowning. She looked up at Robyn and meekly asked, “Would you be able to organise that for me?”

Robyn smiled softly, and Sophie did too as she saw. “Of course.”