Amy nods. “I figured . . . it used to be Orion’s, so it would probably give me access to the Keeper Level, and . . .” She shrugs. “It did. I tried to com you before, but you didn’t pick up. Or did I do it wrong?”

“No, I got some coms that I ignored.”

Amy punches me lightly on the shoulder. “Ignoring me, huh?”

“I couldn’t if I tried,” I say.

She smiles again, another wry twist of her lips with no light behind it. We stand a few feet apart—her near the Learning Center door, me closer to the middle of the Great Room, and the silence falls between us like a tangible, awkward thing. She pulls her necklace out from under her shirt and twists the charm in her fingers.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says immediately, dropping the necklace.

I narrow my eyes but let the moment slide by.

“I haven’t seen you in a while,” she finally says. She hasn’t moved away from the Learning Center door, so I move closer to her. She puts one hand in her pocket and looks for a moment as if she’s going to pull something out.

“I had to go settle some problems in the City and then . . . on the Shipper Level.”

“Now it’s my turn to ask you,” Amy says, withdrawing her empty hand from her pocket. “What’s wrong? Did you see the message that was on the floppies?”

“Yeah,” I growl. “The Shippers were able to reverse the hack, but . . .” I shrug, and although I mean to appear nonchalant, even I know the gesture is bitter. “Damage done. I’ve asked Marae and the first-level Shippers to serve as my police force.”

“Good,” Amy says with such vehemence that I stare at her. “It’s just—I’m glad you’re finally doing it. Getting police I mean,” she adds when she notices my look.

“I should have done it a month ago.” I say, then wait for her reaction.

Her hand twitches, as if she’d like to reach out to me, but she doesn’t. “You’re still not telling me something,” she says softly.

Neither are you, I think, but I can tell from the hardness of her eyes that she won’t tell me whatever it is that’s bothering her. Instead, I confess my truth. About the engines. And the lies. How we’re not moving, and we don’t even know where we are. I tell her what I haven’t told anyone else on board.

“And we can’t tell them,” I add. “If the Feeders knew . . .”

Amy bites her lip but doesn’t argue. For now.

I run my fingers through my hair, trying to pull my answer up through the roots. “We’ve been stopped a long time. The ship’s not going to last forever. It’s . . . Godspeed is falling apart.”

When I say it now, to her, I finally realize the truth. And I finally see the things I’ve never seen before, and what they really mean. The dwindling food production, despite the fact that we’re pumping all the fertilizer and nutrients we can into the fields. It’s true that most Feeders haven’t been working as hard as they did while on Phydus, but even their lack of productivity can’t excuse the way the crops barely have enough strength to push their way up through the soil.