“How did you know?” Elder asks, his nose buried in my hair. The question is so the opposite of everything I am right now—logical words formed into a logical question—that it confuses me at first. I lean back and look up at him. Elder leads me past the remains of the door and through the crowd to a quiet corner in a room nearby. Beyond his shoulder I can still see the chaos of the explosion—Kit has arrived with a posse of nurses and taken charge, corralling the wounded to one area and commanding everyone else to leave. A group of engineers examines the seal-locked door of the Bridge, ensuring that there’s no more danger of exposure.

“The explosion,” Elder says, drawing me back to him. “You knew before, didn’t you? You came here to warn me.”

“I found another one of Orion’s videos. In the armory.”

“Orion—Orion did this?” Elder’s eyes are befuddled; he’s still reeling from the explosion.

“No, not Orion. But . . . someone else has his videos. Someone else knows the codes to the locked doors. I think Orion’s been trying to tell us the way off the ship all along, but someone else found out his secret before we did and they’ve been trying to stop us.”

I hand Elder the floppy with Orion’s video. In the first video I found, Orion seemed certain that there was a choice to be made and that I would make it. But by this last video, he sounds the same way he did in the video of him just after he ran away from Eldest—scared and unsure. Whoever found these videos of Orion clearly agrees that the planet isn’t worthwhile—and will murder anyone who tries to land the ship. The explosion on the Bridge is proof enough of that—it has ensured that even with Centauri-Earth so close, we’ll never land.

I can’t read Elder’s face as he watches the short video—grief, anger, doubt, something else, something empty and painful. But when he looks up at me, all that’s left in his eyes is a hollow sort of nothing.

“None of this matters,” Elder says. “With the Bridge gone, we’re going nowhere.”

Once he says it, it becomes real for him. I see the sixteen years of his life trapped on the ship, and the decades of his future fall on him like a weight—he literally sags with the realization that Godspeed can’t land. He’s got everything on him now—the ship, the people, the deaths, the disappointment. And I realize: he has always had them. Always.

Elder looks behind him, to the Engine room, and beyond to the sealed doors. “Shelby was in there. In the Bridge.”