The others were bleary, still waking up. They each had three nutriblocks on their plate, dotted with a few berries for colour.

“Do you think they’ll still feed us nutriblocks in prison, once they arrest us?” Hixon asked, poking at one listlessly. “It’d be a form of cruel and unusual punishment.”

Naomi hadn’t touched her food. She stayed still, alert. Hart noticed, sending her a questioning look that Naomi ignored.

Valerie cleared her throat. “Before we jump, there is something we should discuss. America has offered us clemency. Their offer expires once we pass through the warp ring.”

All at the breakfast table went silent.

“What’s the catch?” Hixon asked.

Valerie rose an eyebrow in Naomi’s direction as if to say: See?

She gave them a summary of Cochran’s last message.

Lebedeva made a disgusted sound. “His offer is—how is the word? Ah. Hogwash. It’s hogwash, yes?”

“I don’t believe he’ll give us immunity any more than I believe he’d go to Hawaii for three weeks and come back with a tan,” Valerie said.

“As resident redhead, I agree,” said Hixon.

“I’m more worried about that bit about agreeing to the PR spin,” Hart said. “That’s an implied threat that if we don’t play nice and say whatever he wants, we’ll face arrest anyway. That’s how he’d get us.”

“He has no reason to want us free,” Naomi said. “What kind of message does it send to his base that he let five women get away with what we did?”

Hixon rested her elbows on the table, her nutriblocks forgotten. “So, what, do we just agree to get them off our backs, jump through, and hope for the best?”

Valerie tapped her teeth together, the sound of enamel on enamel loud in the relative quiet of the canteen. “Whether we agree or not, the end result is the same. They follow and bring along humanity unchanged. Cavendish will end up being another America. Another Earth. They’ll throw out the treaty, draw the lines in the sand. Like we all talked about. Our version of Cavendish will stand no chance.”

“It never stood a chance,” Naomi said. “We were just being fanciful.”

“It’ll take decades to move people across. Having to leave people behind as Earth continues to heat up could shock people into being better. To not wasting a second chance,” Hixon tried.

Lebedeva laughed, the sound hard. “Maybe for a few years. Not for long. People are good at forgetting.”

Valerie placed her fingertips on the table, her face more animated than Naomi had seen in days. “What if it wasn’t just a passing fancy? What if we could make Cavendish what we wanted? Fair. Prosperous. Peaceful. Somewhere humanity could actually thrive.”

The silence lengthened.