When she sees the doubt in my eyes, Amy growls in frustration. “Elder, think! You know I’m right—that part of the ship can break away. And you know what this means! We can still get to the new planet, even if the Bridge is gone. We can leave behind Godspeed and take the cryo level down!”

The possibilities swirl around me. Amy grins, knowing she’s won me over. “That level’s big—bigger than it needs to be if it’s just storage,” she says. “The roof is high—it has a higher oxygen capacity. And the floor’s large enough to hold everyone—”

My shoulders sag. “But how the frex are we going to be able to get there if the elevator and the stairs are both blown up?”

Amy’s grin is so huge all her teeth show. “Let’s go for a swim,” she says.

I can barely keep up with her as she races down the path back toward the Hospital. No—not the Hospital. The pond in the garden behind the Hospital.

“It was the fish that gave it away. I couldn’t get over how weird it was that there weren’t any fish in the pond,” Amy says. She’s practically running now, and I have to jog to keep up with her.

“The fish?”

“The koi. Harley painted koi. That’s what he was painting when I first met him, and that was one of the last things he painted, too. His room is filled with fish.”

“So?” I ask.

Amy stops so suddenly I crash into her.

“He knew fish. He saw them. It’s not like he could just look those images up. And you told me—you told me—that it’s not that there were no fish, but that there were none ‘anymore.’”

“Exactly,” I say. “There used to be fish.”

“So where are they? Fish don’t just disappear.”

I stop, thinking. It was so loons then, when Kayleigh died. I don’t remember anything but her body in the water when we found her. But after that . . . Harley didn’t go back to the pond for ages, and when we did, the fish had just . . . disappeared.

“There’s something at the bottom of the pond,” Amy says. “Think about the blueprint. You know what’s right above the contingency area?”

“The pond?” Hope bubbles up inside of me. Stars! There’s still a chance! We can still make it to Centauri-Earth . . . although it will mean leaving Godspeed behind.

“The pond.”

It’s all so simple—and now that Amy tells me about it, I can see the truth in it. If Kayleigh had drained the pond, the fish, of course, would have died. But before she could do anything, Eldest found her. Patched her up to make her immobile, then refilled the pond. To everyone else, it looked like Kayleigh had swum into the pond and let herself drown, but in reality . . .