“Adam isn’t here,” I said. “Open the door.”

Behind the faceplate Malachi’s expression was unreadable.

“Everything we know about the virus has proved to be a lie,” I said, speaking as calmly as I could. “I am tired of the lies. We have to find out what we can. If there’s nothing here, we won’t stay. Panya and Dag will go ahead and find the route to the next level.”

“Of course we will,” Panya said. “It won’t take long.”

She nodded at Dag, and they continued down the corridor.

“Open the door,” I said for the third time.

Finally, Malachi obeyed. I watched the stiff line of his shoulders as he worked to bypass the medical quarantine, and I tried to find words to reassure him, to bring him back to hope, although I had none to spare.

I said nothing. The door opened. Malachi moved to the side to let me through.

The dark room beyond slowly filled with low red light, casting our dim reflections back at us from a wall of windows. Facing the windows was a long row of workstations. There were no bodies.

I turned my headlamp off to see the room beyond the glass. A second later, Malachi did the same.

The chamber was a large cube, and in the center of that cube, mounted on three sturdy metal supports, was UC33-X.

The name Unidentified Craft 33-X had been bestowed upon the probe when the space telescope at Phobos spotted it soaring gently toward Earth in year 385 of the Reconstruction Era. It had arrived at the edge of the solar system with no warning. There had been panic when SPEC scientists realized it had come from deep space. Panic, but also wonder. Some people were relieved, others disappointed, when scientists confirmed the probe had been constructed by human hands aboard an ancient ship called Mournful Evening Song. I remembered sitting in a circle in my grade school classroom as the teacher read to us a child-friendly story about the Pre-Collapse generation ships. How brave those ancient humans had been, how noble, to flee an ailing planet for the stars, and how exciting it was to receive this message from their journey. Both the teacher and the picture book had conveniently left out the uglier truths: that the generation ships had been for only the privileged and elite, that none of those ships had ever come back, that it was widely believed they had all failed within a couple of decades of launching.