“Elder died,” she says simply.

She means Orion — when Orion was Elder, he faked his own death to avoid a very real death at the hands of Eldest.

“After that,” Marae goes on, “First Shipper Devyn resumed research on the engine. Although… the research was even more closely hidden than before. Fewer Shippers were allowed access to the engine, and Devyn was not exactly, well, not exactly forthright with Eldest. When I took his place, I carried on as he trained me. But… I started to notice… irregularities.”

“Irregularities?”

Marae nods. “Things didn’t add up. Some of the engine’s problems seemed new — as if intentionally done, and recently. All records of past research were gone — destroyed, probably, as we’ve never been able to discover them.”

So Devyn had misled his apprentice, Marae. Whatever Orion had told him had made Devyn change everything, even going so far as to hide information from his own Shippers and Eldest. Orion once told me that Godspeed was on autopilot, that it could get to Centauri-Earth without us. Why would he say that if he’s the one who knew the problems with the engine went deeper than anyone else thought?

“Eldest started to realize this too, didn’t he?” I ask.

Marae looks down at her hands. “The Eldest’s job is to take care of the people. The Shippers’ job is to take care of the ship. But before he… before he died, I think, yes. He’d realized something wasn’t right.”

I rub my face with both my hands, remembering where I first heard those words. Remembering the way Eldest had spent more and more time on the Shipper level, in those last weeks before Orion killed him.

How long has this been going on? Eldest told me my focus had to be on the people, but we can’t have been the only Eldests to realize that we had to focus on the engine too. What happened to them? It all connects at the so-called Plague, the beginning of the lies, the beginning of Phydus. Somewhere between the Plague and now, the truth was lost, and we, all of us, me and Eldest and the Shippers and everyone else, whether we were on Phydus or not, allowed ourselves to believe blindly what others told us.