“Out of where?”

Alyssa and Victor exchanged glances. Victor broke off from his work and walked over to Iona.

“After we crashed,” Victor began, “someone found us.”

“What do you mean? Who?”

“They built this dome . . . but really it’s a sort of cage, I suppose. They built it around us—and it goes right down into the ground, you can’t dig under it—and they made the inside match our natural environment. Or a natural environment.”

“The figures,” said Iona. “You’re talking about the figures. They put us in here.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know,” said Alyssa, “but the dome preserves its subjects indefinitely. In here you don’t age or die.”

Iona blinked. “How long have we been here?”

Alyssa bit her tongue. “It’s hard to tell exactly, because you traveled here through a wormhole and the time dilation effect isn’t predictable—but our records suggest . . . well, it’s at least seven hundred years.”

Iona nodded, but it was too much to take in. She couldn’t remember her childhood, her life on Earth, her family. She’d gained time by being in this dome—but she felt like she’d lost a great deal more. She felt like she’d lost herself.

“But . . . you only just got here?” Iona said. “From Earth?”

“Yes. They found me and realized I was like you, which I suppose is why they put me in here.”

“But why did you come here? To find us?”

“No . . . not exactly, we assumed you’d all be dead by now. But—”

“The crash wasn’t an accident, Iona,” said Victor. He was holding out a sheaf of papers with words printed on them. “We had a stowaway.”

* * *

The deaths had started after they came out the other side of the wormhole.

The wormhole was an integral part of the journey, cutting out hundreds of light years. The technique had been tested and was believed to be entirely safe. Nobody was worried about it at all.

The initial deaths appeared to be heart failures, occurring in people who’d been thoroughly tested before the mission and found to be in good health. At first the ship’s doctors theorized that traveling through the wormhole had weakened them somehow. They embarked on another series of tests, trying to find what had changed. They found small mutations in the bodies of the dead but didn’t know what had caused them or how to stop them.

The mission continued and the deaths continued. The doctors kept carrying out tests: there was nothing else they could do.

One day they carried out some tests on a member of the crew and the results said he was not human. At this point the crew member in question started killing the doctors. The ship was put on high alert: the crew member had to be neutralized one way or another. Several more were killed but eventually the crew member was thrown from the airlock. They believed this was the end of it.