The elevator doors open, and Elder holds his arm out to prevent them from closing without him. He searches my eyes. “I’m not angry at you,” he says, his voice sincere. “But these ‘clues’ aren’t going to fix the ship.”

Elder steps into the elevator, leaving me alone on the cold, empty cryo level. Part of me wishes he could stay, but I know he’s needed on the other levels. As I walk slowly back to the locked doors, I wonder how things would be different if Elder didn’t have to be in charge of Godspeed. I would never ask him to give up the leadership he’s longed for all his life . . . but maybe if he didn’t have to care about the ship first, I could believe him when he said he cared about me.

I pull the floppy we found out of my pocket. Maybe Elder is right. Maybe this is nothing but a wild-goose chase.

But . . . it’s all I have right now. It’s all I’ve had for three months. It’s the first spark of hope I’ve had since waking up, and I have to cling to it. I have to. I have to believe something, something will come of this.

I play the video file again, skimming over the words and straining my ears to pick up some nuance in Orion’s tone, something that will give me a clue.

Orion’s voice—so much like Elder’s—fills the hall. “Eldest doesn’t want anyone to know this secret. I don’t think he even wanted me to notice, but . . . the outside of the ship needed maintenance. . . . I—I saw what he wanted me not to see.”

“Whatever you found,” I tell Orion’s face, “you saw it outside the ship.”

We can’t go outside the ship. There’s the vacuum of space, waiting to suffocate us or turn our lungs to mush or pop our eyeballs or whatever. We’d die. Unless . . . unless behind one of the two remaining locked doors are space suits.

I stare up at the hatch that shows the stars. Well, of course there’d be something to enable people to safely go out the hatch. Surely the makers of the ship realized that in centuries of travel, the ship would need maintenance. That’s what Orion called me in the first video, his contingency plan—this must be theirs. Four locked doors on this hall. One leads to the armory, one leads to an evacuation hatch . . . one must store space suits.

The possibility of what I’m thinking hits me so hard that I don’t breathe for a minute. Then I remember the other thing Orion said.

But the secret . . . it should stay a secret.