I laughed. “Do you really think it’s necessary now?”

“I may not know everything about you, but I do know that if there is trouble, you’ll be in the middle of it.”

He stifled my squawk of protest with another kiss. After a while, I forgot to be mad.

The transition from the Travas controlling Inside to a more democratic method wasn’t smooth. Even though each family elected a representative and each scrub “family” had a person attending organization meetings, many uppers still viewed the scrubs with suspicion and the scrubs in turn made planning difficult with their distrust and bitterness.

I had hoped to avoid all the political wrangling, but, since I understood both sides, I attended all the meetings to smooth relations. Even so, we had a long way to go. Overcrowding remained a problem, and a few people resisted the change in their lifestyles. Violence erupted on occasion, and Anne-Jade organized a security detail with members of all the families to keep the peace.

Being able to walk the hallways of the upper levels without worry felt liberating. Domotor also enjoyed his freedom from the hideout. He was busy preaching to everyone to be patient and understanding. All the Travas had been incarcerated for now. The Committee would decide their eventual fate. Doctor Lamont had been confined, too.

It was week 147,007, and I had received a message to meet Logan in the Control Room at hour ten. He had been camped out there since the takeover, using the computers to harvest lost information.

He hunched over a keyboard, muttering and humming to himself. I touched his arm and he almost jumped from his seat.

“Don’t scare me like that,” he said, waving a hand in front of his face.

“I’m sorry. Should I have bowed and announced my presence first? Have they coronated you fleet admiral yet?”

“Go ahead and be sarcastic.” He swiveled back to the screen. “I’m not going to tell you—ow! Let go of my ear, I’ll tell you.”

I released his lobe. He rubbed it.

“Logan?”

“All right. I found the answers to those final three files and accessed the information. Outside is something called Outer Space. It’s an airless and pressureless environment unable to support life.”

Sorrow and guilt welled. If we just had waited, Cog wouldn’t be floating out there. “Thanks for the reminder.”

“Sorry. Ah…well, we are actually traveling through it. Seems it is so vast that it takes an incredibly long time to get from one planet to another.”

“Planet?”

“As far as I can tell, a planet is the real Outside.” He typed on the keyboard. The picture of the blue ceiling and greenery filled the computer’s screen. “This is our destination. We’ve been heading there for the past 147,000 weeks.”

“When are we scheduled to arrive?” But the answer popped into my mind. It’s the end and the beginning. What is it? I looked at Logan.

“Week one million,” we said together.

I groped for a chair. We had 853,000 weeks to go! My head spun as I sat. Eight thousand generations of people would be born, live and end in this metal cube before reaching the true Outside.