Right at the top of my questions is a fear I’ve been too terrified to voice. Until now. Until I stand in front of the Shippers with the limping engine churning behind my back.

I shut my eyes a moment, and in the blackness behind my eyelids, I see my best friend, Harley. I see the hollow emptiness of space as the hatch door opened and his body flew out. I see the hint of a smile on his lips. Just before he died.

“There are no external forces in space,” I say, my voice barely louder than the whirr-churn-whirr of the engine.

There was no force that could stop Harley from going out that hatch door three months ago. And now that he’s in space, there’s no force to stop him from floating forever through the stars.

The Shippers stare at me, waiting. Marae’s eyes are narrowed. She won’t give this to me. She’s going to make me pull the truth from her.

I continue, “Eldest told me that the engine was losing efficiency. That we were hundreds of years behind schedule. That we had to fix the engine or risk never reaching Centauri-Earth.”

I turn around and look at the engine as if it could answer me. “We don’t need it, do we? We don’t need the fuel. We just need enough to get to top speed, and then we could shut off the engine. There’s no friction, no gravity—the ship would keep moving through space until we reached the planet.”

“Theoretically.” I don’t know if Marae’s voice is wary because she’s unsure of the theory or because she’s unsure of me.

“If the engine’s not working—and hasn’t been working for decades—then the problem should be that we’re going too fast, right? That we’re going to just zoom past the planet . . .” Now there’s doubt in my voice—what I’m saying goes against everything I thought I knew. But I’ve been researching the engine problem since Eldest died, and I just can’t correlate what Eldest told me with what I’ve learned from Sol-Earth’s books. “Frex, our problem should be that we’re going to crash into Centauri-Earth because we can’t slow down, not that we’re going to float aimlessly in space, right?”

I feel as if even the engine has eyes, and it’s watching me too.

Looking at the Shippers, I can see that they all—they all—knew that the engine’s problems did not lie in fuel and acceleration. They knew all along. I haven’t told them anything new with this information. Of course the first-level Shippers know of Newton and physics and inertia. Of course they do. Of course they understood that Eldest’s words about inefficient fuel and limping through space behind schedule were entirely false.

And what a frexing fool I am for thinking differently.

“What’s going on here?” I ask. My embarrassment feeds my anger. “Is there even anything wrong with the engine? With the fuel?”

The Shippers’ eyes go to Marae, but Marae’s silently watching me.