I tried to feel prepared for what might come, but there was too much riding on this to be anything but nervous. I had to go through an asteroid field, land on some tricky terrain, take off again—calculating for added weight—but that was it. As the light came on in the pod, the timer still showed I had an extra twenty minutes. Adding in the thirty minutes I’d given up, I was finishing way early. It made me wonder if I’d missed something. Or maybe I bombed it so hard that the test ended early?

Roan was right. I could pass the simulation portion no problem, but he hadn’t mentioned anything about the first part of the test. There was no chance I’d passed overall.

The door swung open, and the harness unhooked automatically, releasing back into the seat. “How’d I do?” I asked as I stepped out of the pod.

The old man handed me a piece of paper as he stared at me with furrowed eyebrows. “We don’t print much out on paper anymore, but I thought you might want to keep this somewhere you could see it. Maybe in your bunk.”

I wiped my hands on my shorts before taking it. “Did I pass?” I asked as I fumbled with it. Stupid shaking hands. I needed this. It was my only shot.

There were some lines and question numbers and a bar graph and percentages for each question on the paper, but none of it was making any sense. I flipped it over, but there was nothing on the back. I couldn’t find a total score or percentage. I was exhausted physically from my morning on the job and mentally from the test, and clearly my brain was now kaput.

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either.” He looked confused as he glanced from the paper back to me.

What? “I meant that I can’t tell where my score is.”

“Judging from your score, I’d think you could figure it out.”

Was he being frustrating on purpose or was that his natural state? “Does that mean I passed?”

He took the paper from me. “See these numbers here?”

I nodded.

“Those are the questions. Overall point values you got are to the right. There’d be marks over here if you didn’t get something right. This one here?” He tapped a row on the left. “This is your total marks per question.”

“But it’s empty. Except for these three.”

“Yes.”

I skimmed down the paper again. “So you’re saying I only got three wrong?”

“Yes. Ninety-two percent.”

I felt the grin start from inside me, filling me up. It was like I was suddenly weightless, floating through space, on my way to someplace better.