“Is everyone ready?” Suh asks. “Okay, then. This is it.”

  She walks off, striking out toward God’s city, and I stand there longer than the rest, watching her back as she walks away from me, tiny beneath the twisting black tendrils and pods, forging the last path of the journey.

  (I know this is the best place to pause the footage, but it’s hard to shut it down and no longer see her. It’s like sticking a fingernail into an old cut that’s bleeding once more. But I know what happens soon afterward and I simply cannot relive that again.)

  “Stop footage,” I say out loud and I’m back in my house, wedged in and aching. My throat is raw and the fabric over my chest is wet with tears that dripped unchecked. I wipe my cheeks with the back of my hand and tackle the gunk in and below my nose with another T-shirt lying within reach. I realize it’s one of Kay’s tops. I never had any intention of returning it anyway, even though her scent left its fibers long ago.

  Exhausted, I rest my head against the stack of fabric beside me and realize, with a sense of utter wretchedness, that suffering that day again has brought me no closer to a solution. I have to conclude that unless one of the crew smuggled something down to the surface (highly unlikely as it wouldn’t have been fully decontaminated), that bit of metal didn’t come from one of us.

  There is a limited set of logical explanations, and none of them satisfy me.

  One is that someone else from the colony has been visiting God’s city secretly, as I have. The only person I know who’s been back there since that first day is Mack, and I know for a fact that he hasn’t been back into that particular section again. I can’t imagine anyone else breaking the rules, but I do, on a regular basis, so I have to entertain the notion that someone else has too and that they left something behind.

  There’s another possibility: someone else came to God’s city before us. For that to be true, it wouldn’t be someone else from Earth, as we were most definitely the first to achieve interstellar travel on that scale. The risk that someone could improve upon the technology Suh developed and beat us to our destination was a concern of mine right from the start of the project. When Mack came on board he fought with Suh over patents and her desire to help humanity as well as reach this planet. In the end they agreed to lock away secrets within a capsule, protected by several gov-corps, to be opened forty years after we left. Suh got to feel she had left something useful behind and Mack and I were satisfied no one could beat us here. Unless something went wrong with that capsule—unlikely considering the amount of international red tape Mack wrapped it up in—we are the only people to reach this place from Earth. If someone else was inside God’s city before us, it would have to be someone from another civilization.

  I shiver. Were there others who, like us, came seeking God?

  14

  THE QUESTION STALKS me all the way to Mack’s house. I can’t mention it to anyone, not even Mack, which makes it feel even bigger. At least it’s enough to distract me from the emotional aftershocks still rippling out from the footage. I just hope that my face isn’t too puffy from the crying.

  I press my palm to the sensor at the side of his door and it opens. The smell of omelets turns my stomach as I enter and Sung-Soo looks up from an almost empty plate, grinning at me. His clear delight at my arrival is jarring. Some part of me is still stuck over twenty years in the past. I should have given myself more time to recover.

  “Want one?” Mack calls from the kitchen.

  “I’ll have a shake,” I call back.

  “Can we start now?” Sung-Soo asks through a mouthful of egg.

  Mack peers around the door into the living room. “Ren, please start—he’s driving me mad.”

  “Okay. Give me access to your projector.” I sit on the sofa as Sung-Soo gobbles down the remainder of his breakfast. I try not to think too much about the thing in his gut. “So, there’s a much easier way for you to get an idea of people’s houses,” I begin and call up the interface to Mack’s projector. “All the plans for each house in the colony are stored on the public server. I’ll bring up some 3-D reps here for you to take a look at. Then you won’t have to ask anyone if you can look inside their house.”

  Mack enters with my breakfast and sets it down next to me as I call up the files. “Though I’m sure people won’t mind if you did want to do that.”

  Sung-Soo looks at me pointedly and Mack laughs. “Ren isn’t people.” He pats my arm affectionately. “She’s very private.”

  I keep quiet and the moment passes soon enough. “Okay, here we go.”

  The plan of Mack’s house appears in the air above the fire pit, rotating slowly in a translucent gray. Sung-Soo yelps and his plate and cutlery fly into the air as he leaps back, knocking his chair to the floor.

  “Shit, I’m sorry.” I shut it down. “Sorry, I should have warned you.” I should have known it would frighten him; the pods weren’t fitted with projectors. They were designed to reach the planet’s surface and give people temporary shelter. There was no room for anything as frivolous as entertainment systems.

  Sung-Soo picks up the remains of his breakfast, apologizing too, as Mack reassures him that no harm is done.

  “That was a ‘projection’?” Sung-Soo asks, using the word carefully.

  I nod.

  “My father talked about them. I didn’t know what they looked like.”

  The image of Hak-Kun lifting the crate and asking about the gravity here returns with far too much clarity. Now I see him in Sung-Soo’s face, instead of just Suh. I still don’t see Lois though. I’d never have guessed she was his mother. He never mentions her and with a shiver I wonder if it’s because she died when he was very young.

  “Put it back on,” he says.

  The image returns and he approaches it, this time with fascination and quiet delight. I sit back as Mack shows him how to use his hands to interact with the images. Sung-Soo laughs as he expands and contracts them, gasps as he selects sections and brings them out from the whole object to inspect more closely. He reacts with the purest joy when shown how to move from the plans of one house to the next, effectively gaining insight into the whole colony with just a sideways swipe of his hand. He’s enchanted by the technology in a way I never could be again.

  Mack steps back and gives him a few moments to see if he’s got to grips with the interface. When he sees he has, Mack looks at me and inclines his head toward the kitchen. I pick up the shake and follow him in, making myself drink some of it on the way.

  “It’s Carmen,” Mack says, sotto voce.

  “Is she stirring up trouble?”

  He leans against the countertop, nudging the frying pan with his backside. He’s a purist; he likes to cook with base ingredients rather than printing a complete meal. He’s one of those people who says he can taste a difference and is happy to waste hours every week to achieve it.

  “More than that. She’s tracking my movements. Secretly. I only know because I ran a check on her activity.”

  Mack is one of the handful of people on the colony with the clearance to check that sort of information. Carmen should know that it’s impossible to keep tabs on him without the chance of being found out.

  “She can’t be thinking straight,” I say. “Surely she knows you’d find out.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t care,” Mack replies, his arms folded and hands tucked into his armpits, drawn tight into himself. “Maybe she wants me to know that she’s doing it.”

  “But why?”

  “Because she thinks I’m going to break the rule and go to see Marco. To warn him maybe, or coach him in what to say to her when the ceremony is about to start. I don’t know.”

  I shrug. “So what? You weren’t planning on doing that, were you?”

  He tuts. “Ren, think about it. There is somewhere I need to go in the next week and Carmen mustn’t know about it.”

  He stares at me, raising both eyebrows. I’m lost and shake my head to indicate that. He sighs. “I need to put the seed in place. If she sees me going into God’s city . . .”

  He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. “Oh fuck,” I whisper.

  “That’s why you need to do it for me.”

  I step away, holding my hands up. “Oh no—no way, Mack!”

  “You have to!” he hisses, closing the distance between us until he’s only inches from my face. “You’re the only other person who knows and—”

  “I won’t do it.”

  He grabs my shoulders. There’s no aggression, just desperation, but it still upsets me. “So you’re happy to let this happen, every year, as long as you don’t have to touch it? You think you’re less involved? That’s bullshit! You can’t just choose to stand and watch the whole of your life and let others do what you’re not brave enough to do yourself!”

  “I never wanted this!” It’s hard to keep my anger confined in a whisper. “Just because you couldn’t do it without confiding in me doesn’t make me complicit!”

  “You never stopped me.”

  “How could I? You put it all into place before I had the chance to—”

  “That’s bullshit, Ren. You had the chance, several times, but you know how much the colony needs this. If that seed isn’t there, they’ll think they’ve been abandoned. Do you want them to feel that?”

  I shove him away from me, wanting to push away the way he’s making me feel as well as his physical presence. I cover my face with my hands, needing a moment with something between us, as if the skin and bones could shield me from his glare. “Perhaps we should tell them the truth.” I speak into my palms, but he can still hear me.

  “Are you out of your fucking gourd?” I can feel his breath on the backs of my hands. “This place would collapse. We can’t tell them anything, about the seed or about his”—he jerks a thumb toward the living room—“bloody father or any of it.”

  “You’re just afraid.”

  “Of course I fucking am! They’d kill us, Ren.”

  I lower my hands.

  “Yes. Us. We just have to get through the ceremony, settle Sung-Soo in and it’ll quiet down again. You have to help me keep all this together.”

  He looks frightened. I wonder if I look the same. Would they kill us? I don’t know; it’s impossible to predict, but he’s right about everything falling apart.

  I sag. “You’ll have to show me where to go and how to get there without going inside.”

  He breathes out at the sound of my implicit agreement. “Of course. I’ll do everything I can.” He pulls me into a tight embrace and even though I didn’t invite it, I accept it, resting my head against his shoulder.

  “Is everything okay?”

  Sung-Soo’s voice at the doorway makes me jump and instinctively I move to break the embrace, but Mack keeps hold of me.

  “Ren had a nightmare last night,” he says. “She was just telling me about it and needed a hug. We all do, sometimes.”

  He kisses the top of my head and lets me go. Sung-Soo’s sympathetic expression makes me feel sick with nerves and self-hate.

  “I know what kind of house I want,” he says after a beat. “Can we start now?”

  At last, something practical I can lose myself in! “Of course we can.” I smile. Perhaps building something real is the answer.

  15

  I GUIDE SUNG-SOO through a rudimentary visengineering process to knock up a rough plan for the main structure of his new house. He chooses a dome structure with spokes, a lot like Mack’s, but with a deeper floor like mine. Of course, only a portion of my house’s layout is on the server: the sections that needed to be printed at the communal manufacturing center. The additions and changes I’ve made over the years are known only to me.

  “I’ll take you to the place where we print out the main struts for construction,” I say to him as I save the file in the right place on the cloud. “We can talk about the next bits on the way.”

  “Next bits?”

  “Yeah—how you want to create the energy your house will use. Each one has to be fully self-sufficient and have a zero-waste footprint.”

  He frowns with concentration. “The houses tread lightly, like my father talked about.”

  The door out of Mack’s place opens and we wave good-bye to him. He seems relieved to be left at home.

  “He used to say it was the best way to live,” Sung-Soo continued. “We shouldn’t take more than we needed and stay longer than we had to. Then we could be sure the food would be there the next time we stayed in that place.”

  It doesn’t sound like Hak-Kun to me. But I knew him only as a pampered man, cosseted by technology in the way we all are here. I’m amazed he survived long enough to teach his son anything.

  “We’re keen to live lightly here, yes,” I reply. “But not in the same sense as you’re used to. There are rules about energy production versus consumption, water collection and processing waste. Most of that is handled by the materials we make our walls from.”

  “I want to be able to see the stars at night,” he says after a pause. “Can you make the walls so that I can see out but no one can see in?”

  “I can, but not one hundred percent—you need special soils between the membranes to process the waste. But most of the ceiling could be made like that, if you’re happy to collect sunlight from cells around the edge of the house instead of across the roof. That’s how mine works, and why I can grow stuff on the outside.”

  “But some of the plants on your house are dying.”

  I shove my hands in my pockets. “Oh . . . well, that’s because I test new strains and new soil compositions on my house before rolling them out to the colony.” I give him as confident a smile as I can. “Sometimes they just don’t take. I’ll replace them soon.”

  We walk through the colony to the side farthest from God’s city and there still isn’t a soul on the streets. I’m glad; I wouldn’t want anyone else to come and stick their nose in and bombard him with options. “Can I have fish in my windows like Mack does?”

  “Of course. You could get some energy from the algae too.”

  “Did his fish come from Earth?”

  “No. We didn’t bring any of the animals down to the planet. We couldn’t predict their impact on the ecosystem.”

  He looks up. “Bring them down . . . Was the ship you came here on somewhere up there?” He points up at the sky, now a pale blue in the early morning.

  “It’s still up there. It’s called Atlas.”

  “Could we go back up to it?”

  “Theoretically.” I look back to where we’re heading. “We had to strip the shuttle for parts when the printer broke down, so that would have to be rebuilt.”

  “Is that why you didn’t come and look for my father and the others? Because the shuttle was broken?”

  I almost miss a step. “We thought they were dead,” I say quietly. “We used Atlas to look for you, with satellites we’d sent out to scan the planet before we came down. But by the time we found the crash site, there were no signs of life.”

  It’s only partly true. Mack sabotaged the satellite data as it was received by Atlas. By the time anyone else in the colony had gotten themselves together enough after Planetfall to look for the missing pods, they were actually looking at old footage of the crash site. Mack updated the pictures only after he’d screened them first.

  Sung-Soo is staring at me and I realize I’ve fallen silent. “At least you looked,” he says.

  “We almost built something to go and search, but with nothing to go on, we couldn’t risk critical people—” I shut my mouth. After a moment I add, “I don’t want you to think we didn’t believe those we’d lost weren’t critical too—they were—it’s just that the early days were so hard. We needed every single person working at full capacity.”

  Sung-Soo just nods. “If you’d known where we were, would you have come to get us?”

  “Of course we would!” I clench my fists inside my pockets. Sadly, that isn’t a lie. Once things had settled down and everyone else had given up on the search and a formal memorial service was held, Mack had another look at the site. There were no signs of life—they must have moved on by then. But I know that if they’d stayed in the place they crashed, Mack would have built a craft and gone to get them. To kill them.

  Would I have let him do that too?

  “Why did their pods crash?”

  His question makes me fear I’ll be sick, or at the very least give something away. “We don’t know exactly.” Did my voice tremble? Can he hear the lie slathered on top? “There was always a risk; the pod technology was relatively untested.”

  We walk in silence for the rest of the journey. It must be so hard for him and I can’t think of anything to say that will make it better. There is nothing to say.

  When we reach the communal printers, I’m grateful for the change in topic. He watches closely as I run a check on the largest printer and recalibrate it. “It’s not used so often now,” I explain. He waits as I send the files to it and begin the printing, unable to see anything without a chip of his own. “We can start off the foundation preparations while that first batch is printing. It’ll only take a few hours. The soil we take out will be put into the cavity between the wall membranes, after we’ve added in the correct biocultures and protocells to process the waste. There’s a few other bits and pieces that need to happen, to manage water and stuff, but I’ll take care of all that. It’ll only take a couple of days at the most.”

  “Then I can live inside it?”

  “Yep. And grow your furniture and stuff. Ready to pick a spot?”

  16

  WE PRINT. WE dig. We design. We construct. It’s a glorious day of finite tasks with optimum ways to execute them. Every single one of them is within my comfort zone and none causes guilt or panic.

  When the rest of the colony wakes, our construction project turns into a bizarre party, with people bringing food and drink and blankets or chairs to sit on and chat with one another and Sung-Soo as we work. I end up giving impromptu lessons to the children who were born after most of the colony’s construction was completed, or are too young to remember.