The bald man at the front of the cabin was strapping Salvatore’s body to the wall. The man’s placid expression was even more unsettling than that of his grinning companion at the back. Salvatore’s arms, limp and unbound, floated in front of his chest, reaching blindly, and the man swatted them carelessly when the fingertips brushed his shoulder, with no more thought than a horse might flick away a fly.

Forward of the passenger cabin, the orientation of the ship changed. The arbitrarily designated floor and ceiling ended, replaced by a vertical shaft with a ladder climbing toward a hatch. My hands were sweating as I gripped the rungs. If they wanted me to record a message for my aunt, I would do it. I would not fight them. There was a gun to Baqir’s head.

Zahra said something quietly. It sounded like “We’re here,” and I realized they had been using a private comm system all along. Another thing I should have noticed—would have noticed, if I had ever taken my aunt’s security warnings seriously. The hatch unlocked with a soft clank, then opened.

The first thing I saw was the Earth, a colorful marble, directly ahead. I felt a sudden, dizzying disorientation that passed only when I realized I was looking not through a window but at a panel of six screens, each providing a view of a different angle outside the shuttle. There was Earth, there was the Moon as a small pale disk, and there were three views of darkness and stars—Regulus, Zosma, Denebola, familiar specks of light. Any other time, the views would have dazzled me. My yearning to return to space, to reach farther and farther into the void, had grown steadily over the past ten years. Any other time, I would have marveled. Now I could scarcely breathe.

On the sixth screen was House of Wisdom.

From a distance it looked like a skyscraper adrift in space, roughly rectangular, with its drive engines at one end and protective nose shielding at the other. Under acceleration the apparent gravity was oriented along the long axis. It wasn’t true that it was the largest ship humankind ever built; the generation ships launched before the Collapse would have dwarfed it several times over. But at a kilometer long it was the largest built in the Reconstruction Era. About one-third of its length was taken up by my mother’s Almora propulsion drive and all its associated systems. Just above the drive was the large, square docking bay, a window through the heart of the ship.

The shuttle’s pilot was a woman in her forties with white streaks in her red hair. She glanced over her shoulder as we entered, then turned her attention back to the controls. “Five hundred klicks and closing. We’re getting pinged with a request.”

A request. Five hundred kilometers. The security net.