I think of the way Luthor’s voice rang, loud and angry, throughout the Recorder Hall. We can do anything we want!

ORION: Godspeed won’t last much longer. It wasn’t designed to last forever. It’s a miracle it’s lasted as long as it has. Here’s the thing—here’s why I need you, Amy, and I need you to make the choice that, for whatever reason, I can no longer make. I know you hate, you must hate me.

Orion leans forward, his face filling the entire screen.

ORION: But did you ever ask yourself why I was unplugging frozens now, of all times?

I suck in a shaky breath; I’d forgotten to breathe.

ORION: Why didn’t I just wait and let some future gen take care of that problem?

Even though he’s on the screen and not really here, I can feel the urgency in his voice all the way deep inside me, in my very bones.

ORION: The choice is coming! And it is a choice. And you—you must decide for everyone.

For a long moment, Orion pauses.

ORION: But I can’t tell you what it is. You’re going to have to find it.

Orion runs his fingers through his hair, in exactly the same way Elder does when he’s worried.

ORION: It took me years to discover the truth, and just as long to accept it. When I met you . . . I know you must hate me because I left people from Sol-Earth to die. . . .

Left them to die? It was so much more than that. He pulled them from their chambers and watched them die. There’s a big difference there. He killed them.

My eyes narrow so that Orion’s recorded face is nothing but a blur. I glance up at the real Orion, frozen behind the glass of the cryo chamber. You have no idea how much I hate you, I think. I could lay at his feet everything that’s wrong in my life now.

ORION: But Amy, you are so special. You’re from Sol-Earth. But you don’t have an agenda like the others . . . like your parents. You didn’t come here with a mission. You—and only you—will be able to determine what choice needs to be made, if the risks are worth it. I can’t trust anyone else to make this choice, not even Elder or those I once counted as friends. I’m going to hide the clues so that only you, someone from Sol-Earth, could find them. Trust no one, Amy. Not Elder, not Doc, not anyone from my past. They’re from Godspeed, not Sol-Earth. They won’t know—they can’t know—that there even is a choice to be made.

I don’t like the way Orion tells me not to trust Elder. I don’t like it at all. But—I think back to yesterday, and the way I have kept my darkest secrets from him. I am already doing what Orion wanted me to do before he asked it of me, and I hate myself a little for that.