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.

Chapter 63

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.”