“It’s too late anyway, Amy.” Doc sighs, a sound filled with disappointment. “Whatever kind of leader Bartie thought he could be or Elder may one day become, Orion already is. His only mistake was in trusting you to make the choice about the shuttle. I let you find Orion’s vids, but I should have destroyed them all.”

My mind races. “Why did you even give me Orion’s wi-com?” I ask. “You must have known it would lead us to the clues he left!”

Doc glances up at me. “I did it,” he says, “because Orion asked me to.”

And it really is as simple as that. Call him anything you want, but Doc’s loyal. Not to Eldest, not even to Orion, and certainly not to Elder. He’s loyal to the system. According to the system, Orion should be the next leader, and, therefore, the person Doc will blindly obey—even when he disagrees.

But—this doesn’t make sense. “If you’re the one who gave me the first clue, then who tampered with the sonnet book and the clue in the armory?”

“I did.” Doc checks a dial on Orion’s cryo chamber.

“You? But—why?”

He looks at me as if he can’t quite believe how slow I am. “I didn’t do it for me. This ship—everyone on board—we could all die if we land on Centauri-Earth. Die. But,” he adds, “I’m not unreasonable. I’ll let the Eldest make the final decision. If he says the shuttle should be launched, well, I will step aside. I just didn’t think he was right in choosing you as his decision maker.”

I finally understand—he altered the clue in the armory and cut out the page in the sonnet book because he didn’t want me to succeed. But he still left the book so I could find it. He didn’t want me to find the clue, but he couldn’t disobey Orion all the way.

“Did you mess with the space suits?” I ask.

“I figured if you got in there, one of you would use them.”

“And you didn’t care which one of us died?”

“If it helps,” Doc says, turning back to the dials on Orion’s cryo chamber, “I’d hoped it would have been you.”

It doesn’t help, actually.

“You never did realize the thing I needed you to understand,” Doc continues, adjusting another dial. “You got so obsessed with what Orion was showing you that you never saw what I was showing you.”

“Yeah?” I say. “And what was that?”