“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.