Olivia felt her muscles tense in horror. ‘That’s a pretty callous statement, isn’t it?’

‘Jeff’s told you what happened to me, right?’ asked Mitchell. ‘About how they found me, and how they brought me back here.’

‘He said that . . . that there are two of you, and you’re the one they brought back from the near future.’

‘If you look at it from my perspective,’ he said, ‘all this happened a long time ago. The fact is, you can’t mourn what you can’t change.’

Olivia fought to control her anger. She glanced at Jeff and saw the warning look on his face, and realized she was obviously close to blowing up.

‘Tell him now,’ she said to Jeff. ‘Tell him what we decided last night.’

Mitchell frowned. ‘Tell me what?’

Jeff hesitated, clearly caught off guard, then he reached out and put one hand over hers. She wondered if that meant he’d finally decided to forgive her for getting in touch with Saul.

‘I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you,’ he said to Mitchell. ‘We’re not going to the Moon.’

Mitchell sat back and glanced between them. ‘Seriously?’

‘Just think about it,’ Jeff continued. ‘Say all three of us went up there together, that only puts us on the surface of the Moon, not even inside Copernicus City or the Lunar Array itself. That means a further trek across the Moon’s surface from our landing site to either one or the other, which means we’d still have to figure out some way to get inside. And you’ve already failed once yourself, which is why you wound up in the cryogenics lab in the first place.’

Mitchell nodded, and Olivia had the uncanny sense he was relieved. She found herself wondering if it was just the strangeness of what had happened to him that made her so uneasy, or if it was something else – something she couldn’t put a name to.

‘So that’s it?’ said Mitchell. ‘You’re going to stay here on Earth, and just wait until the end?’

‘No.’ Jeff shook his head emphatically. ‘You’re forgetting about the outer-system research colonies. The older ones have their own dedicated arrays up north, including the Jupiter platform.’/p>

‘And that’s where you want to go? Back to Jupiter?’