“So?” Elder asks. His voice is still flat, and I know that while he’s physically in the Recorder Hall with me, he’s really still in the garden, giving up, still on the Bridge, watching his people die. He doesn’t care about Orion’s clues anymore.
I strain, reaching for the tiny model of Godspeed hanging suspended between the two clay models of the Earths.
“In Godspeed,” I say. “In it. ” The chair wobbles as I stand on my tiptoes on top of it, my fingers brushing the bottom of the small model ship. I noticed before that it was on a hook, as if it could be taken down and inspected. I push against the bottom, and the hook slides off. The ship falls. I reach out, grabbing it with one hand. The chair topples, and I jump off before it clatters to the ground. Elder catches me around the middle, and I gasp in surprise. He sets me down g
ently on the ground.
The model’s about as large as my head and caked in dust. I blow on it, and huge chunks of dust fly away and then drop to the floor, too heavy to float. There’s more dust on the top of the ship, in the grooves of the tiny model honeycomb window on the Bridge. I turn the replica over so the ship’s on its side. It almost looks like a broken winged bird—a beak for a nose and thrusters for tail feathers.
I hand it to Elder.
He weighs it in his hand as if it’s an alien thing, not a replica of the only home he’s ever known. His face is intense—a scowl so deep that the shadows seem like black marks on his face. The veins in his hand pop up, and his fingers tense. Very deliberately, he presses his thumb against the Bridge window until the tiny honeycombed glass breaks. I see a dot of blood on his thumb, but he shows no sign of pain.
“It’s accurate now,” he says, handing the model back to me.
I search his eyes, but they’re hollow inside.
“There’s more glass here,” I say, pointing to the bottom of the ship.
Elder shrugs, a sort of one-shoulder careless motion. “I saw it when I was outside. An observatory or something. ”
“It has to be on the other side of the last locked door,” I say. “Why lock an observatory?”
I step over to the wall floppy. Elder stays where he is, by the chair, but his eyes follow me. I place the now-broken model on the ground and zoom in on the blueprints on the floppy. I use both hands to manipulate the image on the screen, sliding over the cryo level until I get to the section that shows the locked doors. Not all the doors are marked—the armory isn’t—but behind the last locked door on the level is one word.
Contingency
“He keeps calling me—this—his contingency plan,” I say under my breath. I turn and meet Elder’s eyes, and notice there’s a spark in them again.
“This bit of glass here,” I say, picking up the model of Godspeed and pointing to it. I run my fingers from the broken Bridge to the bottom level of the ship. It’s the same basic shape, a beak protruding from the front of the ship. The only difference is that the cryo level beak is smaller.
On the replica ship, a tiny metal line runs along the bottom, all around in a circle.
“This isn’t Orion’s contingency plan,” I say slowly, turning the model over in my hand, “it’s Godspeed’s. I can’t believe we didn’t think of this before! What ship doesn’t have a backup plan? What ship doesn’t have an escape shuttle? It’s so obvious—the answer has been right in front of us the whole time!”
I carefully pull against the metal line on the replica Godspeed. The bottom half breaks apart from the ship.
Elder’s eyes widen. “The cryo level . . . the whole frexing cryo level—can break away from the ship? The entire level is an escape shuttle?”
I toss the bottom part of the replica—the escape shuttle—at Elder. It soars through the air in a graceful arc, free from the rest of the ship. Free to find a home on the new planet.
63
ELDER
I CATCH THE ESCAPE SHUTTLE REPLICA WITH ONE HAND. “This is impossible,” I say, staring at it.
“Why?” Amy laughs. “Think of the design. The most important supplies are down there. The stairs I went down earlier today—they don’t go straight into the cryo level. They stop on the roof of it, and there’s a hatch you have to go down in order to get into the actual level. In fact,” I add, trying to remember what the area looked like through the yellow-tinted smoke, “I could see what was left of the elevator shaft behind a pillar, and there was a seal-lock hatch there too. Why else would you need a sealed door there? The builders of Godspeed didn’t waste any space. ”
When she sees the doubt in my eyes, Amy growls in frustration. “Elder, think! You know I’m right—that part of the ship can break away. And you know what this means! We can still get to the new planet, even if the Bridge is gone. We can leave behind Godspeed and take the cryo level down!”
The possibilities swirl around me. Amy grins, knowing she’s won me over. “That level’s big—bigger than it needs to be if it’s just storage,” she says. “The roof is high—it has a higher oxygen capacity. And the floor’s large enough to hold everyone—”
My shoulders sag. “But how the frex are we going to be able to get there if the elevator and the stairs are both blown up?”
Amy’s grin is so huge all her teeth show. “Let’s go for a swim,” she says.
I can barely keep up with her as she races down the path back toward the Hospital. No—not the Hospital. The pond in the garden behind the Hospital.