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Now that she says it, it makes sense. Jets must be stored in the rectangular areas sunken into the ground so that whoever controls this compound can lift them up to ground level, position them, and use this asphalt as a runway.
“But who put it here?” Amy’s voice comes out in a squeak.
I have no answer for her. This is nothing like the ruins we discovered earlier. The ruins were dusty buildings, long abandoned and derelict. But this runway smells faintly of oil and burnt rubber; it’s been used, and recently.
I motion for Amy to follow me to one of the small buildings—not stony relics, but modern, single-storied glass and steel offices. She hesitates. Whoever made this compound has technology far more advanced than we could have guessed from seeing the ruins.
“Look. ” I point through the window of the closest building. “A communication system. ”
The room houses a control panel not that much different from the one we used on the bridge when we landed the shuttle—which is to say, it’s equally confusing. But I think I can figure it out.
“Locked,” Amy says as she tries the doorknob. I nod to a small square at eye level by the door. It’s not unlike the biometric scanners on Godspeed, but there’s a small thumb pad rather than a roll bar.
“Can’t hurt to try,” Amy says, pushing her thumb against the pad. A moment later, the thumb pad flashes a message once—HUMAN—and then the door opens.
“This door was built to only let humans enter?” I ask as we step inside the room.
Amy shoots me a worried look. If the scanner detects humanity, then that means there must be something other than humans it’s designed to keep out.
29: AMY
Once inside, my first instinct is to reach for the lights, and even though my hand touches the wall where a light switch would normally be, my fingers find nothing, slipping over the smooth paint. Of course not. Stupid of me to think that. Whoever built this might not have electricity like we do. . . . Still, they have something. As soon as Elder closes the door behind us, a small panel opens up in the ceiling, exposing a softly glowing square—something like an automatic, flat lightbulb that brightens the room as efficiently as a fluorescent bulb—but with no hum of electricity or power. I blink in the unnaturally bright light.
“Do you really think Dad knew all this was here?” I ask in a hushed voice. Elder doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. Of course Dad knew about this building, the whole compound. Otherwise, what reason would he have had to stop us from coming here?
A flag hangs over the door. Two white circles, one larger than the other, are sewn into a field of sky blue. The larger circle is slightly off center, and the smaller one is just to the right, below it. I’ve never seen a flag with this design before.
“Look,” Elder breathes.
And there, engraved on a plaque at the top of the control panel in the little building, is a symbol we both recognize.
“This was made by the FRX,” I say, forgetting to whisper.
Elder leans over, inspecting it. He reads the tiny words engraved below the symbol. “On this site was discovered the first probe sent by the first interstellar mission from Earth in 2310 CE, providing the information needed to develop the first successful extra-solar colony, Explorer, 2327 CE,” Elder reads. “This plaque is a memorial to those lost on Godspeed. 2036–2336 CE. ”
“They think we died out,” I say.
I point to the end date—2336. That’s when Godspeed was supposed to land.
But we didn’t land.
“They found the probe,” Elder says in a low voice. “But not us. ”
I think about the grav tube and the floppies on the ship—technology made while I slept. “Technology increases at an exponential rate,” I say. “My grandparents paid thousands of dollars for a computer that was bigger than my television and had a fraction of the memory space of my freaking cell phone. ” I’m babbling, but I can’t seem to keep my voice under control. “My grandparents used CDs to listen to music instead of downloading it, my great-grandparents used tapes, my great-great-grandparents used records. ”
Elder’s eyes are wide and scared; he’s getting what I’m trying to say. “The first airplane was made at the start of the 1900s; the first man landed on the moon in the 1950s. ”
I gulp. “In 2029, my grandmother took a vacation on the lunar resort, and by 2036, my parents and I were packed in ice and thrown across the universe. ”
Technology moves faster and faster and faster.
I look around this very modern, very well-kept communication bay.
We weren’t the first colony from Earth to land here.
“We were late to our own landing,” Elder says hollowly. He touches a small blinking light under the plaque. “A homing device. The same kind on the probes. This is why the shuttle landed here. ”
Right in the middle of a world that’s already outpaced us.
