HE’S GOING TO KILL US BOTH.

Shocked back into alertness, Noemi clutches the armrests as if she can keep herself from falling into the Gate. And it feels like falling, now—the Gate shimmers brighter as they near the event horizon, growing more and more silvery until it looks like a pool they’re diving into. The silver surface of the Gate reflects the ship perfectly. For one instant, Noemi sees the mirror image of the Daedalus reflected there, like a raindrop. If she’d been at a window, she would’ve seen her own face coming closer until the two images melded into one—

Gravity shoves her against her chair, making her gasp. The increase feels as if it would press her flat, even as Abel smoothly says, “Entering Gate… now.”

With that, they surge out of normal space-time, into the wormhole.

Noemi has never heard a satisfactory description of how wormhole travel feels. Now she knows why. Words couldn’t capture this—the way everything seems to become translucent, including her own body—or how she remains motionless while feeling as if she’s turned into water swirling down a drain. Even light bends strangely, carving unnatural angles where none really existed, because it’s moving at different speeds and turning her perceptions into illusions. She and Abel seem to be fractals in a kaleidoscope, shifting every second. Nothing is real. Not even time. Not even Noemi herself.

I hate this, she thinks. In the same moment she also thinks, I love this. Both feelings seem true.

Gravity snaps back to normal, sending her rocking forward until her head nearly strikes the ops panel. Light is light again.

We’re through! Noemi feels a rush of relief and wonder—she’s traveled across the galaxy in an instant, to a whole new world—

—but as she lifts her head she sees the minefield.

The glinting green lights of the mines outnumber the stars. Her gut tightens as the explosives wobble in their courses, magnetic sensors drawing them toward the new intruder. Horrified, Noemi watches dozens of mines rush toward the Daedalus. Just one would have enough power to blow them apart into atoms.

“Abel!” she cries.

But he’s already reacting, both hands flying over his control panel. The ship darts through the maze of mines around them, swooping and swerving so quickly Noemi imagines she can feel every turn, every plunge. Nausea wells in her gut, and she grips both armrests so hard her fingers ache.

Abel shows no recognition of the danger. Mechs don’t care if they die. Probably he wouldn’t mind killing her in the process.

A faint shimmer keeps shifting around them, confusing Noemi until she realizes they’re the shields. While steering, Abel is simultaneously shifting shield strength from zone to zone, protecting the ship where it needs it most. No human could ever work at that speed. Not even close.

By now at least a hundred mines rush toward them like a swarm of green fireflies. There’s no way they’re surviving the next thirty seconds.

Maybe I’ll get to go to heaven after all, she thinks in a daze. If I die trying to save my whole world? That’s got to help.

The ship accelerates, roaring toward the mines. Noemi yells, “What are you doing?”

Abel never looks up from the control panel. “Did you know that even mechs concentrate better in silence?”

She bites her tongue, literally. Pain offers some distraction from the mortal terror.

But within seconds, Noemi realizes what Abel’s up to. Moving faster forces the mines to approach them in waves, which cuts down on the number of evasive actions needed for the Daedalus to stay in one piece.

One mine strikes the shields. Green electrical light sparks fitfully along the stern, and the entire ship shakes so hard Noemi nearly topples from her chair. How many hits like that can they take? One of the controls on her ops console glows red, warning her of danger she can’t even bear to check. It makes no difference. Abel will steer them through this, or they’ll die. The end.

“On my mark—” Abel says, finally looking up at the viewscreen—just as the Daedalus accelerates even more to outrun the few mines trailing behind. Now space is once again only blackness and stars. With a smile, Abel concludes, “—minefield cleared.”

Noemi manages to look at her console. The red light says the shields were below 10 percent. “One more strike and we’d have been killed.”

“Irrelevant.” After a pause Abel adds, “Congratulations are unnecessary.”

She actually might have congratulated him if she weren’t so astonished. Slowly her mind begins to accept that they’ve made it through the same obstacle that has stood between Genesis and the rest of the galaxy for the past three decades.

And that means she’s finally, truly, journeyed to an entirely new world.

Noemi rises to her feet and walks toward the viewscreen as the star field clears, free of mines at last. At the center of the screen blazes a star… no, not just a star. A sun, bluer and larger than her own. And there, the tiny amethyst jewel hanging in the sky—“That’s Kismet, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I suggest taking an indirect route there to better disguise our origin. It’s unlikely they’d expect anyone to come through from Genesis, but we should be safe.”

She nods, unable to tear her eyes away from Kismet.

The name means “fate.” Finding this world had been an accident—the result of a probe getting caught in a naturally occurring wormhole, popping into a system that might otherwise have gone undiscovered for centuries. Kismet is warm, blessed with a calm climate, and covered with water. It could even have been the world Earth hung its hopes on instead of Genesis, but for the near-total absence of dry land.

So Noemi had dutifully learned in school. But soon she’ll actually stand on this planet. Look up into a sky not her own. She’s dreamed of this, feeling guilty the whole time. Genesis is supposed to be enough. Yet her heart has always longed for this journey, and now it’s been given to her.

“Although it will take us the better part of ten hours to cross the Kismet system to the planet, there are preparations we should make for landing,” Abel says.

Noemi forces herself to focus. As the terror of their Gate crossing fades, exhaustion threatens to drag her down again. “Right. Of course. Can you change the ship registration? Make us anonymous?” She doubts anyone will be on the lookout for a vessel abandoned so long ago, but they might as well be safe.

“I can alter our registration,” Abel confirms. To judge by the screens he’s pulling up on his console, he’s already begun doing so. “However, we have other potentially incriminating evidence to deal with.”

“Like what I’m wearing?” The green exosuit brands her as a soldier of Genesis. “Maybe I can find something else that fits me.”

“Captain Gee was very nearly your size. I suggest you check her quarters.” A small, 3-D cross-section of the Daedalus hovers aboard Noemi’s console, one room burning brighter than the others. Abel continues, “However, I was speaking of a far more critical matter. Upon landing at Kismet, we may well be boarded by docking authorities. Your starfighter and the damaged scout ship could easily be salvage picked up for parts or resale, but we’d have far more difficulty explaining why we’re traveling with a corpse.”

Esther. The daze of weariness and wonder that had spun itself around Noemi breaks. She remembers that she’s alone with a mech on a ship she hardly understands, and the dead body of her friend lies still and cold in sick bay. “We—we tell them she’s a crew member who passed away.”

“How do we explain her injuries?”

“I—” It occurs to her at last that the Kismet authorities would assume she and Abel had murdered Esther. “Her ship is damaged. We can show them that, say she got hurt trying to bring it in.”

“If they examine the scout ship, they’ll know only a battle mech could’ve caused that damage.” Abel shakes his head. “That will raise questions we can’t afford to answer.”

Noemi’s temper flares. “We’ll come up with something! What else are we supposed to do?”

“Bury her in space.”

He says it like it’s nothing. Throw Esther out of the ship. Toss her into the void. Leave her alone for all eternity, drifting in the terrible cold of space, never to be warm.

“No,” Noemi says. “No.”

“Then how are we to—”

She doesn’t hear the rest of what Abel says, because she walks off the bridge and leaves him behind.

It’s nearly half an hour later before Noemi sees Abel again.

She’s spent that time in sick bay with what’s left of her friend. The body doesn’t even look like Esther anymore, not really. The same light-gold hair, the same freckles across her cheekbones: Nothing about Esther seems to have changed except that her skin is paler. And yet somehow, just looking at her, you know everything that ever mattered about Esther—her laugh, her kindness, the funny way she always sneezed three times in a row—her soul is gone, forever.

Noemi stands in front of the biobed, hugging herself, and doesn’t turn when she hears the sick bay doors slide open. Abel’s smart enough not to come too close at first. “If my suggestion earlier gave offense, I apologize.”

She shrugs. “You’re programmed to say that, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

Figures.

“It should’ve been me,” Noemi says, not to Abel, not to anyone really. “She had something to go back to. People who are going to miss her. Who loved her.” Noemi only had Esther, and now she has no one.

Abel doesn’t reply. Probably there’s no preprogrammed response to that.

“She’s not a thing, okay? Not a piece of refuse for us to toss out. Esther was someone, and you have to remember that.”

“I will.” But immediately he tries again. “Whenever you feel it appropriate, we can proceed with whatever method of… burial you prefer.”

Probably he was going to say disposal.

“I know we have to do something, but I can’t just leave Esther lying there in space.” Noemi still feels as if she’s talking to herself. “I can’t leave her alone in the cold. Anything but that.”

Abel remains silent long enough that she wonders if dealing with an actual human, with actual feelings, has fried his circuits. But finally he asks, “It is the cold that bothers you?”

You don’t know what cold means, she wants to answer. He’d probably answer her with the freezing points of various elements in centigrade, Fahrenheit, and Kelvin. So Noemi explains what haunts her. “There’s nothing lonelier than that. Than being cold and alone, and lost.” She swallows hard to keep her voice from choking off. “When I was eight, my family was going into the woods—at wintertime—”

Where exactly were they going? To build snowmen? To see one of the frozen waterfalls? Noemi can’t remember. Sometimes it feels as if the story would make more sense if she could only remember why they were out there in the first place.

“Our skimmer hit a bomb from the Liberty War, one that hadn’t exploded during whatever battle had taken place long ago. It had just been lying there all this time. The snow had covered the shell, so my parents never saw it. They just drove over it, and then—”

Noemi doesn’t remember this part either. For this bit of amnesia, however, she feels grateful. She doesn’t know what their screams sounded like, or even whether they screamed at all.

“When I came to, they were dead. Or dying, maybe. I couldn’t tell. But they were all gone. Mom, Dad, my baby brother. His name was Rafael, but he was still so little I just called him baby. We lay there in the bloody snow for so long—it seemed like forever, and they were so cold. So cold.”

Her throat closes up again. For an instant she feels as if she can recall the time before the crash—her mother’s laugh, the weight of her tiny brother in her lap. But those aren’t real memories. Just her imagination trying to fill in the gaps. The only real memories are those of blood, the smell of smoke, and Noemi shivering in the wreckage, unable to understand why she didn’t die, too.

Abel steps closer. Probably he’ll tell her that nothing in her past is relevant, that her objections are illogical.

Instead he says, “The star, then.”

Noemi turns to him. “What?”

“We could bury Esther in Kismet’s star. Nothing is warmer or brighter. Of course she’d be cremated, but you would still have a sort of grave where you could mourn her. You would always be able to find this star in the sky.”

She stares at him, speechless.

Abel ventures, “The star is visible from Genesis’s northern hemisphere, given good weather conditions.”

“I know. I just—” I can’t understand how a mere machine could think of that. Abel’s idea is sensitive. Even kind. Noemi knows Esther would have approved. Her friend will become part of a star that warms and nurtures an entire world. “That’s good. We’ll do that.”

He seems relieved. She hadn’t realized, before this, that he’d been tense. “Let me know when you wish to proceed.”

“Now.” Waiting will only put Genesis at risk. Noemi has to complete her mission before the Masada Run, or else hundreds of people will die, including Captain Baz, all their friends—and maybe Jemuel, too. After this, he might volunteer for the Masada Run himself. Esther wouldn’t want that. “Let’s go.”

The only possible coffin is Esther’s damaged scout. They can’t use it any longer, and it’s one less thing she and Abel will have to explain to the authorities on Kismet. Abel carries Esther’s body back to the docking bay and sets her back into the bloodied mess of her cockpit. As he checks the instrumentation, Noemi leans over Esther and brushes a few stray locks of hair from her face.

“Here,” she whispers as she folds Esther’s hands around Noemi’s own rosary. Esther wasn’t Catholic, but it’s all Noemi has to give. “I love you.”

If Abel thinks speaking to the dead is ridiculous, he gives no sign. He simply sets the scout ship’s controls as the Daedalus soars closer to Kismet’s star. They both leave the docking bay so the air lock can be sealed but, without being asked, Abel instantly brings up the image of the star on the nearest wall monitor.

Noemi feels the small shudder deep within the ship as the rover launches. She ought to pray, she knows, but she can’t even find the heart for that. Within moments, a tiny streak lances through the dark sky around Kismet’s sun. For one split second, Esther’s coffin is a dark speck against that brightness—and then it’s gone.

Now she’s sunshine, Noemi thinks. Tears well in her eyes, but she blinks fast, refusing to let them fall.

Glancing sideways, she sees Abel studying her while trying very hard to look as if he isn’t. There’s something about Abel that’s almost too intelligent. Too knowing. He’s less like a device, more like another person. And his idea of burying Esther within a star showed something so close to compassion.…

But no. Abel’s supposed kindness must be like the rest of his careful programming and his pleasing appearance: a disguise meant to deceive. Noemi can’t afford to forget that this is merely a machine, one she can use to save her world.

“All right,” she says hoarsely. “On to Kismet.”

He hesitates, then replies, “My estimates of your mission prep time and flight time to the Gate are necessarily inexact. However, I know that the battle with the Damocles ship, our first encounter aboard the Daedalus”—encounter, how tactful—“and everything that has happened since has taken long enough that I’d estimate that you’ve been awake for at least twenty-four hours straight. In addition, you have been under considerable physical and emotional stress. You are no longer in prime operating condition. Please reconsider your decision to go without sleep.”

Noemi pauses. “You don’t change course. You don’t send any communications. You don’t do anything that I haven’t expressly ordered you to do unless it’s necessary to keep the ship from being destroyed. Those are your orders. You’ll obey them?”

“Of course.”

Without another word, she turns and walks back up the corridor, around the long swirl of the spiral, until she reaches the first set of crew quarters. It’s a small bedroom, military stark. Suits Noemi fine. She activates the lock, flops down on the bed fully dressed in her exosuit, and falls asleep almost before she closes her eyes.

Noemi barely has time to realize how good it feels to let go. To leave everything to Abel for a while.