I turn around and look at the engine as if it could answer me. “We don’t need it, do we? We don’t need the fuel. We just need enough to get to top speed, and then we could shut off the engine. There’s no friction, no gravity — the ship would keep moving through space until we reached the planet.”
“Theoretically.” I don’t know if Marae’s voice is wary because she’s unsure of the theory or because she’s unsure of me.
“If the engine’s not working — and hasn’t been working for decades — then the problem should be that we’re going too fast, right? That we’re going to just zoom past the planet…” Now there’s doubt in my voice — what I’m saying goes against everything I thought I knew. But I’ve been researching the engine problem since Eldest died, and I just can’t correlate what Eldest told me with what I’ve learned from Sol-Earth’s books. “Frex, our problem should be that we’re going to crash into Centauri-Earth because we can’t slow down, not that we’re going to float aimlessly in space, right?”
I feel as if even the engine has eyes, and it’s watching me too.
Looking at the Shippers, I can see that they all — they all—knew that the engine’s problems did not lie in fuel and acceleration. They knew all along. I haven’t told them anything new with this information. Of course the first-level Shippers know of Newton and physics and inertia. Of course they do. Of course they understood that Eldest’s words about inefficient fuel and limping through space behind schedule were entirely false.
And what a frexing fool I am for thinking differently.
“What’s going on here?” I ask. My embarrassment feeds my anger. “Is there even anything wrong with the engine? With the fuel?”
The Shippers’ eyes go to Marae, but Marae’s silently watching me.
“Why would Eldest lie to me about this?” I can feel myself losing control. I don’t know what I expected — that I’d figure out the big problem and the Shippers would jump up and fix it? I don’t know. I never really thought past telling them that the laws of physics go against the explanations Eldest gave me. I never thought that I’d say what I came to say and they would look to the First Shipper, not me.
“Eldest lied to you,” Marae says calmly, “because we lied to him.”
2 AMY
A DROP OF WATER SPLASHES AGAINST THE METAL FLOOR.
I keep my eyes squeezed shut, ignoring the cold and focusing instead on the black behind my eyelids. “Riding in the car down a long empty highway,” I say aloud, my voice echoing, bouncing off the high, rounded metal walls. “With the windows down. And the music playing. Loud.” I struggle to remember details. “So loud that you feel the music vibrating the car door. So loud that the image in the rearview mirror is blurry because it’s vibrating too. And,” I add, my eyes still clamped shut, “sticking my arm out the window. With my hand flat. Like I’m flying.”
Another drop of water splashes, this time against my bare foot, sending a shiver all the way from my toes to the roots of my hair.
“Riding in the car. That’s what I miss the most today,” I whisper. My eyelids flutter open. My arms, which I’d raised foolishly while imagining driving down the road, flop to my sides.
There are no more cars. No more endless highways.
Just this.
Two melting cryo chambers on a spaceship that grows smaller every day.
Drip. Splash.
I’m playing with fire here, I know it. Or, rather, ice. I should shove my parents back into their cryo chambers before they melt any further.
But I don’t.
I fiddle with the cross necklace around my neck, one of the few things I have left from Earth. This — sitting on the floor of the cryo level and staring up at my frozen parents and remembering one more thing I miss — is the closest I can come to prayer now.
Elder mocked me for praying once, and I spent an hour berating him for that. He ended up throwing up his hands, laughing, and telling me I could believe whatever I wanted if I was going to hold onto my beliefs so hard. The ironic thing is that now everything about me, including whatever it was I once believed in, is slipping through my fingers.
It was simpler before. Easier. Everything was all laid out. My parents and I would be cryogenically frozen. We would wake up after three hundred years. The planet would be there, waiting for us.
The only thing on the agenda that actually happened is that we were all frozen. But then I was woken up early — no. No. He woke me up earlier. Elder. I can’t let myself forget that. I can’t let myself ever forget that the reason I’m here is his fault. I can’t let the three months that have passed between us wipe out the lifetime he took away.
For a moment, I think of Elder’s face — not handsome and noble like I know it now, but blurry and watery like the first time I saw him, as he crouched over my naked, shivering body after pulling me from the dredges of the glass coffin where he found me. I remember the warm cadence of his voice, the way he told me everything would be okay.
What a liar.
Except… that’s not true, is it? Of everyone on this ship, even the frozen bodies of my parents, Elder’s the only one who handed me truth and waited for me to accept it.
The watery image of Elder comes into sharp focus in my mind’s eye. And I’m not seeing him through the cryo liquid anymore; I’m remembering him in the rain. That night on the Feeder Level, when the sprinklers in the ceiling dumped “rain” on our heads so heavy that the flowers bent under the force, when I was still scared and still unsure, and droplets trailed from the ends of Elder’s hair across his high cheekbones, resting on his full lips…
I shake my head. I can’t hate him. But neither can I… Well, I can’t hate him, anyway.
The one I can hate? Orion.
I wrap my arms around my knees and look up at the frozen faces of my parents. The worst part of being woken up early, without your parents, on a ship that’s as messed up as this one is, is that there’s nothing to fill your days but time and regret.
I don’t know who I am here. Without my parents, I’m not a daughter. Without Earth, I barely even feel human. I need something. Something to fill me up again. Something to define myself by.
Another drop splashes down.
It’s been ninety-eight days since I woke up. Over three months. And what should have been fifty years before we land has become nothing but a question mark. Will we even land?
That’s the question that brings me down here every day. The question that makes me open my parents’ cryo chambers and stare at their frozen bodies. Will we ever land? Because if this ship is truly lost in space with no chance of ever reaching the new planet… I can wake my parents up.
Only… I promised Elder I wouldn’t. I asked him, about a month ago, what was the point of keeping my parents frozen? If we’re never going to land, why not just wake them up now?
When his eyes met mine, I could see sympathy and sorrow in them. “The ship is going to land.”
It took me a while to realize what he meant. The ship will land. Just not us. So — I keep my promise to him, and to my parents. I won’t wake them up. Not when there’s still a chance their dream of arriving at the new world is possible.
For now I’m willing to let that chance be enough. But in another ninety-eight days? Maybe then I won’t care that the ship might still land. Maybe then I will be brave enough to push the reanimation button and let these cryo boxes melt all the way.
I lean up so my eyes are level with my father’s, even though his are sealed shut and behind inches of blue-specked ice. I trace my finger along the glass of the cryo chamber, outlining his profile. The glass, already fogged from the heat of the room, smooths under my touch, leaving a shiny outline of my father’s face. The cold seeps into my skin, and I flash to the moment — just a fraction of a second — when I felt cold before I felt nothing.