The idea of three meals a day and a safe, clean place of her own to sleep at night was a welcome relief to Buttercup from the everyday grind against hunger. As she walked with Hargrove down the fourth floor hallway she brought her palms up to her face and inhaled the fruity scent of the hand soap they had used. She could still see lines of dirt and grime in the grooves of her skin and under her nails—that would take some scrubbing—but they smelled clean.

Hargrove opened the door to her room and waved her in. Buttercup paused briefly before entering to ingrain the room number into her memory: 427. When she was inside Hargrove grabbed the door handle and gave a little half-bow as he exited the room.

"Goodnight child, enjoy your rest, I'll most likely kick you out in the morning," he said, and the door shut.

Hargrove said this to her the first few nights as a sort of half-joking reminder. But Buttercup took his threat seriously and was afraid to use anything in the room so she just slept on the floor and never touched anything for an entire week. Hargrove was endlessly amused when he discovered this, and subsequently offered to groom her for an official job at the hotel.

She accepted, and at twelve years old her tutelage under Hargrove in the accommodative arts began. Buttercup's absolute lack of education and proper etiquette earned her the affectionate nickname "feral child" from her portly mentor. She was a sponge for knowledge, though, and Hargrove rarely had to teach her anything twice.

When Buttercup turned fourteen she started her first job as a dishwasher. Most days she'd spend her time scrubbing plates and pots and pans in scalding water up to her elbows. She took immense satisfaction in seeing just how clean everything was when she was finished. She wasn't used to clean, so what many considered a laborious chore was a novelty to her.

The white ceramic buffet plates were her favorite. They had a brilliant snowy purity to them after being washed that Buttercup found beautiful. It reminded her of her first day of breakfast at the hotel, getting to the bottom of a full plate. Sometimes after her shift was over she'd stay in the kitchens to observe whoever had taken her place and take note of their techniques.

By the time Buttercup was sixteen she had risen from soapy obscurity in the kitchens to the respectable rank of concierge. Most hotels used robotic employees which needed no breaks, no pay, and no sick days, but the hotel's owner believed an environment where the staff truly cared for its customers—instead of merely being programmed to—was key to providing the best service, and retaining the best clientele.

Of course ever since she could remember, business had been, as Hargrove remarked from time to time, regrettably slow. Piracy was rampant in the trading and travel routes between the planets in their system, and fewer traders and travelers meant fewer guests. The regulars they did have were kind, generous, and loyal for the most part—but they were scarce.
 
However, despite the hotel's seemingly inevitable slide into failure, Buttercup felt she had a firm grasp on her life for the first time. She steadily nurtured a nest egg of funds in a bank account, fed with whatever she could manage from her hotel wages (plus tips!). She was comfortable and safe for the first time in recent memory.

Buttercup did not waste time enjoying herself, though. She had already begun in earnest her hunt for the man who orphaned her.

#

After two years, life at the hotel became a blur of familiar monotony. Buttercup worked, ate, slept when she could, and continued her fruitless investigation into her mother's death.

One of her daily tasks was checking the online bounty boards for mugshots: the most important detail she retained was his face, and she was certain she would recognize him. He was a white male, by now somewhere in his thirties, with black hair and blue eyes. He had tanned skin, she remembered, like he worked outside a lot.

Buttercup didn't risk filtering any of them for fear that he'd changed his hair or eye color. She'd just comb through all the new bounties in the outer rim individually—usually it was a few dozen every day. After that she would just flick through the old ones, planning to go as far back as the records did. Some nights she fell asleep this way, and in the morning she would awaken to the slack-jawed stare of some outer rim meathead.

Most were easily dismissed, but every once in a while a face would make her heart jump. Then she'd check into each promising lead and find they'd never been to her planet, or they were too young, or too old, or whatever. Amazing what she could find out about people online. Everywhere they went, people left trails. Eventually she had a pretty long list going of white males with black hair and blue eyes that were definitely not the man she was looking for.

She tried requesting old police records from the city, hoping the man had been through their system. Nothing. She tried files under her mother's name, thinking they might have a police report from the day of the attack. But there was no report at all made in her mother's name.

Since he got her to sign marriage certificates with his fake identity and fill out all kinds of official forms before he did anything, it was all somehow disgustingly legal. That was why it was so easy for him to bleed their accounts dry. He knew just what he needed.

Unfortunately, the kind of attack her mother fell victim to—the cops called it "dusting"—was an everyday occurrence in Capitol City at the time. A common method of administration was to sprinkle the spores onto a piece of paper or a printed map and ask for directions or some other innocuous question. Before the victim even knew what was happening, they were already in the grip of what the locals called the "devil's belch," and were happy to do whatever they were asked.

Buttercup read many reports detailing the willingness of victims to protect their attackers. Even months after being dosed, the victims would refuse to press charges or give information that could lead to the attacker's arrest. Her mother was just one more.

Once the spores took root they did irreversible damage to the brain. In the wild, the fungus the spores come from will wait until an animal comes near them, then puff out an acrid cloud of the spores. Then the animal will become very calm, lie down, and allow itself to be slowly covered and consumed by the fungus, thus nourishing it and allowing it to grow.

Mother survived a squalid four months begging for food with Buttercup on the city streets before she died filthy and diseased. Her body was used to the comparative safety, comfort, and cleanliness of the orbital station, and was in no way at all prepared for the uncaring manner in which she was cast aside. Even if she had been in full possession of her mental faculties, it may not have mattered.

During Mother's last week of life she ran a high fever that seemed to burn right through the fog that had so crippled her mind. She found the steel inside herself, the inner strength she could have used just months before to protect herself and her child. Rage boiled inside her at what became of her life. She pulled Buttercup in close and forced a hoarse command from her ravaged body: "Find him, find him."

After that the fever must have roasted her brain because she would just mumble and babble—to herself, to nobody. Fantasies of torture and vengeance tumbled from her cracked lips, Buttercup listening wide-eyed and rapt to every word. Mother's last words set a course for the rest of her daughter's life: Find him... kill him. Crack his bones and flay his skin—take his life, take everything.

And then it was all hunger and survival. Buttercup tried not to think about the things she'd seen, the things she'd been forced to do to keep on clawing toward another miserable day. It was the fire in her gut that kept her going, stoked by Mother's last words: Find him.

Then one day, by utter chance, she was taken in by Hargrove and her life took a different course. Hargrove made sure she was fed, clothed, and paid. He showed her how to educate herself using the internet, and made sure she had the time and motivation to do so.

She'd lived a rough life, but she was smart and determined to improve herself. One of the first things she did was enroll in virtual martial arts courses in which an instructor was projected into the room with her; Hargrove found out after several noise complaints from adjacent rooms.

All the while she kept up her one-woman manhunt, but after a year at the hotel the guilt of failure began to weigh heavily on Buttercup. It was demoralizing searching all the time without finding a single lead. And to her, living comfortably, surviving without a struggle—it made her feel too complacent. She became convinced that she wasn't trying hard enough to find him. She wanted to be out there, after him.

That's when she started hearing Mother's voice.

She'd be trying to get to sleep and she'd hear a whisper: Find him.

She'd be standing in the elevator alone, and softly the words would kiss her ear: Find him.

Whenever her mind had a chance to rest it would find ways to torment her, to goad her further in her search. Buttercup knew it was only her cruel traitor brain playing tricks on her, that she wasn't hearing a lingering spirit. But that knowledge gave her no comfort; she would have preferred her mother's otherworldly presence to the simple, cold reality of mental illness.

#

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