The screen went dark. There was a pause—I was holding my breath—then the electronic lock within the door disengaged with a quiet click. I put my glove back on and closed the seal, then reached for the handle to pull the door open. Trapped air breathed outward. The agricultural levels were always kept under positive pressure to protect them from contaminants.

“How did you do that?” Malachi studied the screen by the door, still dark, before giving me a look that was half-baffled, half-accusing. “Why didn’t you open the other doors?”

“It wouldn’t work on the other doors,” I said.

“Why did it work here?”

I hated him for asking, and I hated the way he asked, as though he wanted me to confide in him. All I said was, “My dad set it up that way.”

There was no trick to it. There was only my father’s kindness, and the sad way he had smiled the third time I was caught skipping lessons to explore the maintenance tunnels that honeycombed the ship. I know it gets boring for you when your mum and I are working all the time, but it’s not safe for you to go poking around in places nobody expects a kid to be, he had said, his arm hooked over my shoulder. I had only shrugged. That was the whole point: if I spent my time sneaking around places where I was allowed to be, it wouldn’t count as sneaking. Dad had looked down at me and laughed, and he had said, How about we give you a way to explore that’s less likely to get you chewed up by a faulty filtration system?

He had only wanted to give his lonely, wandering son something to do. I had no intention of explaining that to Malachi or the others. They had no right to those memories.

I held the door and welcomed them into my father’s world. Here there were no living quarters, no workshops, no flight operations. The sprawling labyrinth of the agricultural zone had once been filled with greenery and life: food crops in long rows, nitrogen-fixing plants in carefully placed patches, flowers and fruit vines, trees and grasses, epiphytes and ferns in every orientation, all growing beneath the carefully regulated artificial sunlight.

The door opened into a long corridor, flanked on either side by glass walls. The red lights rose to welcome us, but the growing rooms behind the walls remained dark. Our reflections on the glass were ghosts of murky red punctuated by careless flashes of white. Moving through that corridor, there was a nervous jolt of fear every time somebody saw a motion they did not expect, then turned, breath caught and blood racing, to find it was only their own helmet-blank visage looking back at them.