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…