ORION: You’ll need to begin with the first piece of the puzzle. But here’s the thing, Amy. I already gave it to you. So: go find it. Find all the clues I’ve left for you. And I have to hope that when you do, the choice you make is the right one.

Orion looks straight behind him, then back to me.

ORION: Because you’re running out of time.

<<end video feed>>

13

ELDER

I FEEL ALONE.

I don’t mean I feel lonely; I mean I feel alone, the same way that I feel the blanket resting on my body, or the feathers of my pillow under my head, or the tight string of my sleep pants twisted up around my waist. I feel alone as if it were an actual thing, seeping throughout this whole level like mist blanketing a field, reaching into all the hidden corners of my room and finding nothing living but me. It’s a cold sort of feeling, this.

When I finally get out of bed, the only thing I want to do is to go straight to Amy and demand her forgiveness. Maybe we can at least go back to what we had before our fight, even if all we had was an awkward friendship punctuated by significant silences. I have to figure out what to do about the ship’s engines—if anything even can be done—but I can’t fix the ship without first fixing whatever I broke in Amy.

I’m so intent on this idea that it’s not until I’m halfway down the grav tube to the Feeder Level that I remember the look in her eyes as she left me yesterday—a combination of anger and hurt and sad—and I realize that she probably doesn’t even want to see me. The solar lamp clicks on as my feet land on the dais under the grav tube. I trudge down to the path. The morning mist evaporates before my eyes.

Instead of going to Amy’s room in the Hospital Ward, I veer left to the Recorder Hall. Maybe if I give Marae some of the books I’ve read on police forces and civics, she’ll have a better idea of how to organize the Shippers in this new duty. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. But the reality is I dread seeing Amy, knowing that she’ll still be mad at me. And that she has every right to be.

I’m surprised that when I enter the Recorder Hall, there are already people here, gathered around the wall floppies in the entryway. Most of them crowd around the Science section. Second Shipper Shelby points to the generator in a diagram of the ship’s engine as she lectures to the crowd gathered at her feet. She meets my eyes and nods at me. I knew Shelby had, with First Shipper Marae’s and my permission, begun a class for interested Feeders on the technical aspects of the ship, but it hadn’t occurred to me that these lessons would begin just fifteen minutes after lamp-on.