“Hello, Cole,” Naomi said, putting her hand on the cool glass, tapping it once. “You’ve looked better.”

But he and the other frozen bodies were silent, waiting to be rekindled on a new world.

When she’d taken off and left Earth, she’d thought that’d meant she’d left her ex-husband behind.

CHAPTER FIVE

2.5 Years Before Launch

Catalina Island, California

Catalina Island rose before them.

Naomi clung to the handrail of the Hawthorne yacht as they passed the sea wall. It’d been built years ago to protect the island from harsh storm waves and rising tides. The rich had complained it blocked the views of Los Angeles, but the smog usually took care of that.

They docked in Avalon Bay as morning lengthened to noon. Naomi strode down the gangway after Valerie, her legs only a little unsteady beneath her.

White sails peppered the turquoise of the water. Already it was too warm, the air hot and close. Tourists decked out in hats and shades wandered the beach, lingering beneath the squat palm trees, the scrub-dotted hills of the island rising beyond the chintzy store fronts of the promenade.

Perched at one of the edges curving into the harbour was the Catalina Casino, with its rounded walls and its Moorish-inspired columned windows and terracotta roof. In a few hours, it’d be the site of Hawthorne’s charity dinner. Ostensibly the dinner was to support climate change refugees, but it was also a means for Valerie to crow about Project Atalanta. To wine and dine the higher-ups in government and private companies to convince them to offer more funding for completion of her vision for Cavendish. The only viable long-term solution for humanity, she was certain, even if the men in suits didn’t believe her yet.

It’d been six months since Naomi had moved back from windswept Scotland to sun-baked Los Angeles. Valerie had offered Naomi her old room, but she’d rented a studio near the office in Pasadena instead. She liked walking back home after the sun had set. The warm, muggy streets were cooler, quieter.

Back at Hawthorne, she wove together trellises of plants, a loom of lively green, or tended endless, long, skinny tubes of algae. Testing them, peering at samples beneath microscopes, seeing how to make them better and resilient enough for space and Cavendish. It meant a lot of experimenting with light and nutrient environments. She was developing a toolkit for genetic modification so that the algae could also be altered once they arrived on Cavendish. That way, they could survive with but not demolish the native algae-like cells already present in the planet’s oceans.

The project was already behind schedule and over budget. Valerie appeared unconcerned, funnelling more of her seemingly endless personal fortune into the company and convincing other rich people to reach deeper into their pockets.