Ayanna squeezed her sister’s hand while she thought. Her immediate reaction was to feel incomparably stupid. How had she never considered that possibility? When her friends spoke about their religions, how they believed in heaven and hell, in the idea there were angels looking after them and their loved ones, she had a reaction that was sometimes a mix of be-nice-to-baby and of wonder at the ability of the human brain to believe. It wasn’t that she wanted to take their faith from them, she wasn’t like the boys at her school who liked to attempt to dress stylish and felt like the only way to exist in a truly moral way in this world was to be an atheist, but there was something about having tangible proof, about belonging to a religion, that encouraged and furthered a greater sense of knowledge that, she realized, could still make her smug and content not to question her ideas or the synthesizing she was doing of the research and ideas of the other people in her faith class.

“I guess,” Ayanna said, “if that happens, I’ll be a little disappointed. But it’ll also be cool because I’ll have discovered aliens. A Black woman making first contact will still put me in the history books.”

“You’ll probably get an awkward statue or plaque.”

“Maybe it’ll be a hot statue. Statues can be very attractive.”

Olivia rolled onto her side and laughed. “Tell me, please, which statues do you find hot?”

“I think the ancient Greeks really appreciated a great ass.”

Her sister laughed harder.

*  *  *

The expedition would have six people in total. Three billionaires who treated adventuring as a personality. They had climbed Everest. One had a ticket booked on a space flight that would shoot him up into Earth’s atmosphere in a fairly rickety rocket. The richest of the group was obsessed with the idea Atlantis had been real, there was treasure, a whole culture to preserve, and when his fleet of Alpha-and-Omega Submersibles were ready, he would give humanity its greatest gift. End Child Hunger you silly twat, someone tweeted at him every single day, and his social media intern ignored it every time. The most annoying rich guy of the group was rumored to have once gotten very high at a party and said to multiple people, “If we had been born sixty years ago we could’ve gotten away with hunting people. Imagine how fun that could’ve been. Actually intelligent foes! Proof that you’re truly an apex predator.”