“NO. You are not going out there. No way. Not with a flimsy suit you only know how to use because of an illustrated guide. No.”

“Amy, it—”

“NO.”

“But—”

“Don’t you remember what happened to Harley? Space isn’t a field on the Feeder Level! It. Will. Kill. You. And this?” I pinch the silky underlayer with my finger and let it snap back against his body. “This isn’t good enough. You can’t just throw on a suit and jump off the ship!”

Elder looks at me doubtfully, like a child frustrated with an overprotective mom. I don’t care. I lean in closer to him. “You’re too important to risk.”

“The vid,” Elder says, his voice low. “It’s the only way to figure out what Orion meant.”

“You were the one who said Orion was loons.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Besides, that last clue was probably tampered with. Most likely someone didn’t want us finding this room or the suits, and—”

“But Amy,” Elder says. “Space suits!” Elder can’t keep down his excitement about going out into the stars—but I can’t keep down my fear.

“The suits don’t change anything!” But I’m wrong. They change everything. “Let me go,” I whisper. “Let anyone else. We can’t risk you.”

Elder smiles—a huge, carefree grin, and I really do feel like a mother watching her baby totter off into a fire. “I’m touched. You actually do care about me.”

My mouth drops open. “You idiot. Of course I care about you.”

He leans forward quickly and pecks me on the forehead. “Then help me get the suit on.”

I growl—but I can’t stop him. At least I can make sure he’s as safe as possible. I pick up two halves of the breastplate. I feel like a lady dressing her knight in his armor, just like a movie I saw a long time ago on Sol—on Earth. The lady tucked a token—a small scarf—into the knight’s armor to remind him of her love for him. I don’t have a scarf, and I’m not even sure if I love Elder, but I strap him so hard into the breastplate that he grunts in protest.

I keep checking the manual. It doesn’t seem right that all it takes to go into space is a set of bronze long johns and a plastic shell. I knew space suits had come a long way from the puffy white marshmallow-like suits of the twentieth century, but this thin suit doesn’t seem adequate. Still, when I watched videos of men and women working in the space of Godspeed before it launched, their suits looked exactly like this.