Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

Rigg reached for the lever.

“Wait!” she said. “What if somebody’s out there?”

“I’d know it if they were,” said Rigg. “There’s nobody.”

“When we go out, we can’t talk any more.”

“But there’s always tomorrow. And the next day.”

“Rigg,” she said, and hugged him again. “You know I’ve gotten younger, waiting for you,” she said.

“Younger?”

“When I rush, the rest of the world flies by. When I’m going really fast, whole days can pass in what seems like a few minutes to me. Most of the time I don’t rush so hard, but—”

“How do you know how much time has passed for you?” asked Rigg. “How do you measure time when you’re rushing?”

“Let’s just say . . . it’s a pretty accurate method. I know how many days have passed in the regular world, and I can—I measure my time by the month. Do you understand? I know when a month has passed for me. And since I went into seclusion, it’s only been two months for me. Everybody else has aged more than a year. But two months for me. So they think I’m sixteen now, but my body has barely lived through fifteen years. At this rate I’ll live forever—only I’ll have no life at all.”

She was crying. Not like a child, face bunched up and whining noises, but like a woman, silently, her shoulders heaving as he held her. “Param, we’ll get you out of here.”

“Getting out of this house isn’t enough. They’ll hunt us down in the city, in the library, wherever we go.”

“Umbo and Loaf will come,” said Rigg. “We’ll find a way. You’ll get your life back. We both will.”

“You’re my little brother,” she said. “I’m supposed to be the one making promises to you.”

“I know,” said Rigg. “You can tell me bedtime stories when we’re out of here. But we’ve got to go now, while there’s still time to figure out how to close the door from the other side.”

In the end, they didn’t look for a broom or anything else. Rigg just cupped his hands and boosted her up. With Param leaning against the wall while stepping onto his shoulder, she could reach the corner. Naturally, they tried the wrong spot first. Nothing happened and Rigg was ready to despair until she pointed out that they were probably pressing the spot that opened it. Sure enough, when she pressed hard in the other corner—and he knew just how hard, since her feet pressed downward into his shoulders—the wall slid silently back into place. There was no sign that it was any different from the other walls.

When she was back down on the floor, she kissed him on the cheek and then she was gone.

In the whole time he had barely caught a glimpse of her face. The silvery m

irrored light in the secret passage, the flickering candlelight in the corridor—Rigg wasn’t sure he’d even recognize her if he saw her in broad daylight.

But she was real and alive and he had finally done what Father told him to do—he had found his sister. And she was expecting him. Father had said that he would set her free.

Father trusted me.

She trusts me now.

I’d better not let her down.

CHAPTER 18

Digging in the Past

“We have nineteen starships,” said Ram. “And only one world.”

“That gives us nineteen times the chance of success,” said the expendable.

“Nineteen times the likelihood of terrible confusion between colonies that have exactly the same personnel,” said Ram. “Nineteen times the likelihood of deadly rivalries, adulteries, even murders. Constant comparison between the lives of persons bearing the same names, DNA, even fingerprints. And in the end, our nineteen ships will still end up populating only one world.”

“We have no likely target worlds for the remaining ships,” said the expendable. “And we have only the one captain.”

“One of the best things about settling the human race on a new planet is that a disaster that strikes one human world won’t affect the other, so the species can’t be extinguished by a single event.”