Now Harley Drake emerged from the Beehive, not only offering the hope of information, but giving Dale a reason to excuse himself from the conversation with Nick.

He got close enough to the front of the crowd to hear Jaidev say, “Harls, what’s going on?”

“Sasha’s in there with Jordana,” Drake said. “One of those cells is definitely active.”

“What size is it?” That was Zhao, always practical.

“Human.”

“Okay, then,” Makali said. “Who’s died?”

“What kind of question is that?” Harley said.

“She’s probably wondering if that might give you some idea of who is going to become the next Revenant,” Dale said. There was no reaction from Jaidev, Zhao, and the others in front of him. True, there was a lot of noise and he might not have been heard. But it was just as likely that he was being ignored.

Oh well. That might be changing—

Makali Pillay was upset by Harley’s response. “Don’t bite my head off.”

“Sorry,” Harley said.

“This is a strange situation,” Jaidev said. “I frankly don’t know what to do.”

“This is fucked up,” Harley said. “But it’s really what I just heard from Rachel.” If Harley was worried about Dale’s presence, he didn’t show it. “Things are just as bad as we thought down there. The team is in the same shape they were yesterday, but they’re on a long haul to try to reach this Reiver weapons site, and even when they get there . . . it’s five against a few hundred thousand.”

“We knew that,” Jaidev said.

“We knew we were sending a handful of people on a scouting mission. Now we have the intel, and it’s terrifying.” Dale was about to try to inch his way closer when Harley said, “Get over here, Dale. You might surprise us and be useful.”

Harley quickly hit the high points of his Rachel tag-up, concentrating on the new Reiver facility with what was surely a beam weapon capable of striking Keanu.

Dale suddenly understood Harley Drake’s agitation. “We need the vesicle to be launched as soon as possible.”

“It’s within a day,” Zhao said.

“Make it happen,” Jaidev said.

“Then I shouldn’t be here.” Zhao turned to Makali. He was serious about returning to the vesicle habitat.

“We might as well wait a few more minutes,” Makali said. “Let’s see what the big deal is.”

As Harley’s debrief continued, Dale stepped back . . . most of the other HBs had formed their own clusters. One, largely younger, had formed around this Nick: They seemed eager, even happy.

Another group was older, largely Bangalores. They looked like mourners at a funeral. . . . Dale suspected that they had lost a friend during the past year or two and were hoping that they might be witnessing a miracle.

They’d obviously forgotten how short-lived these miracles had been—

“There’s Sasha!”

Dale didn’t recognize the voice, which came from somewhere behind him.

It was Sasha Blaine, in all her statuesque red-haired glory.

And, leaning on her—he was having trouble walking—was a man Dale didn’t recognize. He was naked, or nearly so, wearing some skinlike covering.

“Oh my God,” Makali Pillay said. “Is that—?”

“Yes,” Jaidev said.

“That’s Sanjay Bhat.”

QUESTION: What have you missed most about life on Earth?

PAV RADHAKRISHNAN: My family, of course. I only recently learned that my mother passed away several years ago. I have been fortunate to reconnect with my father.

QUESTION: Anything else?

PAV: New faces, I guess. There are fewer than a thousand of us. I attended secondary schools that were larger. (laughs) Sometimes life on Keanu feels like high school . . . in a submarine.

INTERVIEW AT YELAHANKA,

APRIL 14, 2040

RACHEL

“We’ll be passing the Channel Islands in the next ten minutes,” Colin Edgely told Rachel.

Ten minutes earlier, Pav had awakened her with a gentle touch on her shoulder. She had been reclining in an airline seat under a thin blanket, dreaming about the Architect’s home world. The giant alien she had encountered that first week on Keanu had been dead for twenty years, yet a day rarely passed without some thought of him . . . where his people had come from, what they wanted, where they had succeeded in their quests.

Where they had failed.

Jaidev and the other HBs had devoted considerable effort to walking back Keanu’s trajectory, but with the limited resources available to them—and too many unknowns, such as the actual amount of time that had passed since Keanu’s original launch—they had never been able to settle on a particular star, much less a planet.

Which had not stopped them all from speculating about the type of world that would be home to creatures like the Architect, a large, low-density planet on the scale of Jupiter, but with a breathable atmosphere and tolerable temperatures. Rachel had formed a clear vision of the place, naming it “Homestead” and imagining endless pink steppes, blue mountains, black forests, and white cities that literally floated in the thick atmosphere. Her Homestead was familiar enough that she had dreams about it.

But today’s had not been happy. She had felt incredible sadness and impotence as she watched a flying city literally fall out of the sky, slamming into a blue mountain range and being torn apart, Architect bodies scattered—

But it was just a dream, the side effect of an otherwise solid night’s sleep. And some kind of strange, dreamlike mirror of the sadness she felt about Sanjay, and the frustrations she experienced with Adventure’s ongoing mission.

Okay, she thought, I have to start turning this around. Be active, not passive. She almost launched herself out of the seat.

Stretched across the entire row behind Rachel, Yahvi was still asleep. Pav was moving to wake her, too, but Rachel stopped him. “How long has she been out?”

Pav smiled. “No idea. I was dead to the world for five hours.”

“Let her sleep as long as possible. It’s not as though there’s anything she can do until we get to Mexico.”

“If then.”

“Well, we didn’t bring her so we could get work out of her.”

“I just think she’d be happier all around if she had a job.”

Yahvi had talents that might be useful. Sanjay and her other teachers had frequently taken Rachel and Pav aside to praise their daughter’s potential, especially in math. So far, however, Yahvi’s greatest accomplishment was getting her own way. “We can turn to her when we need someone verbally beaten into submission.”

Then Rachel slipped into the lavatory for a moment, peeing and washing up, emerging to find Chang busy with his datapad, creating his fantasies about the adventures of the Adventure crew.

Colin Edgely was ready with coffee and his geographical update. “Two hundred kilometers northwest of Los Angeles,” he said. “We’re flying parallel to the coast and should be turning east within half an hour. With luck, we’re on the ground shortly afterward.”

“What happens to you two once we’re in Mexico?” Rachel said. “I assume this plane goes back to where it came from.”

“Yes, Chang will turn around and fly back to China by various means,” the Aussie astronomer said. “As for me—” Here his face grew rosy with embarrassment. “I’d like to come along.”

“Don’t you have students to go back to? Or your family?”

Edgely grinned. “Family knows I’m on my voyage of personal discovery. I met my wife through Kettering, you know.” Until this moment Rachel hadn’t known that Edgely had a wife.

“As for school, I took a leave. My boss isn’t a member of Kettering, but he’s sympathetic to the mania. Everyone in Alice Springs knows a bit about space tracking and such, anyway.”