She continues. “You’ve just come out of suspended animation. Your vitals are all in the green. You’ve been sleeping for eighteen hundred years in one of a thousand suspension units, which you created. We’re all so excited. Your experiment worked. The crew came through at a ninety-seven percent survival rate. Better by a few points than you projected, and with no critical losses. Congratulations.”

Pilcher lies on the gurney, blinking at the lights.

The heart monitor he’s attached to begins to beep faster and faster, but it isn’t from fear or stress.

It’s exhilaration.

Within five seconds, it all clicks in.

Who he is.

Where he is.

Why he is.

Like a camera racking focus.

Pilcher reaches a hand up—heavy as a chunk of granite—and pulls the mask away from his mouth. He stares up at the nurse. For the first time in nearly two millennia, he speaks, raspy but clear: “Has anyone gone outside?”

She removes her mask. It’s Pam. Twenty years old and ghost-like in the wake of her long, long sleep.

And yet . . . still so very beautiful.

She smiles. “You know I wouldn’t let that happen, David. We waited for you.”

Six hours later, Pilcher is on his feet and moving unsteadily down the Level 1 corridor, flanked by Ted Upshaw, Pam, Arnold Pope, and a man named Francis Leven. Leven’s official title is “steward” of the superstructure, and he’s talking a mile a minute.

“. . . had one hull breach in the ark seven hundred eighty-three years ago, but the vacuum sensors caught it.”

Pilcher says, “So our provisions—”

“I’m running a battery of tests, but everything appears to have come through fully preserved.”

“How much of the crew has been awakened?”

“Only eight, counting us.”

They reach the automatic glass doors that open into the five-million-square-foot cavern that serves as a warehouse for provisions and building supplies. Affectionately called “the ark,” it is one of the great feats of human engineering and ambition.

A damp, mineralized smell pervades.

Massive globe lights hang down from the ceiling, stretching back into the ark as far as the eye can see.

They walk toward a Humvee parked at the entrance to a tunnel, and already Pilcher is breathless, his legs threatening to seize up with cramps.

Pope drives.

The tunnel’s fluorescent luminaries aren’t yet operational, and the Humvee plunges down the steep, fifteen-percent grade into abject darkness, nothing to light its way but the lonely headlights blazing off the wet rock walls.

Pilcher rides up front beside his henchman.

The disorientation is still present, but retreating.

His people have told him that the suspension lasted eighteen hundred years, but with each breath he takes, that seems less and less possible. In truth, it feels as though only hours have passed since that New Year’s Eve party in 2013, when he and his entire crew drank Dom Pérignon, stripped naked, and climbed into their suspension pods.