Matthew moved quickly when he reached the Corvus, wanting to finish what he’d come to do and leave again as soon as possible. Though Kyne and Xendr Chathe hadn’t technically claimed any of the prairie as their territory, Matthew felt as though he was treading on contested ground whenever he neared the ship. The Corvus wasn’t far from the old village, and he didn’t know what would happen if he encountered one of the Forsaken out on patrol.
He opened the airlock and went inside, making straight for the control room. He sat in front of the computer and with a few taps at the keys brought the system online and called up the navigational program that he and Dunne had written.
The two of them had been coming here together every few days, experimenting with the ship’s various systems and trying to figure out how they could program it to fly back to Earth. For a long time, they didn’t get anywhere, but then they found some ship manuals on the computer’s hard drive—though even then, Matthew couldn’t understand most of what he was reading, especially when it came to the complex physics of the lightspeed drive. But Dunne, though she protested ignorance, was a quick study, and she’d soon devised a way to send the Corvus home.
Matthew knelt and checked the wires connecting the computer to the missile on the floor. It was one of Soran Thantos’s, taken from his laboratory bunker under the streets of Ilia. Though Dunne and Matthew couldn’t decipher the missile’s controls, understanding its detonation mechanism was easy enough once they’d cracked open the casing and taken a look inside. Then they’d managed to rig the warhead to explode when the Corvus entered Earth’s atmosphere and the computer initiated the landing sequence—spreading the Ancestors across the sky. If there was any life left on Earth when they arrived, the Ancestors would help it to live and thrive and grow into something new.
Something better.
Matthew moved back to the computer. His forefinger paused above the control panel. His heart thundered in his chest. He pressed a button and started the program.
“Initiating takeoff in two minutes,” a computerized female voice echoed throughout the ship.
Matthew walked from the control room to the airlock, then stepped outside and closed the door behind him. He ran clear of the Corvus and turned back to watch from beside the speeder.
The thrusters fired. Smoke billowed out from the base of the Corvus. The sound was deafening. The grass surrounding the ship burst into flames. Soon, the ship lifted off the ground and accelerated into the sky with a ground-shaking roar.
Matthew lifted his arm to block the sun from his eyes as he watched the Corvus shrink to a dot in the sky. For a moment, it disappeared entirely. Then, there was a bright flash of thunderless lightning as the lightspeed drive fired.
Matthew breathed a sigh.
He’d done his part. The rest was up to the Ancestors.
He climbed on the speeder and pointed it home.
Kiva lay on the hill below her sister’s cairn, her fingers laced behind her head as she gazed up at the sky.
She listened.
This was how it had all started. Lying in the grass and listening.
Kiva was no longer the Vagra, but she still had the power of the Ancestors. She could still sense the minds of others. She could still feel their emotions and hear their thoughts.
But she hadn’t had a vision for a long time. She had no sense of what the future might hold. Perhaps not even the Ancestors knew.
She and Matthew talked about the future often, worried deep into the night about what might be waiting for them and their new people.
Would the Vagri and the Forsaken allow them to live in peace? Or would those who lived in the old village come to regard the new settlement as a threat?
And Earth—did they believe Matthew when he said that they shouldn’t come to Gle’ah? Would they stay away, or were they planning a new expedition even now?
Kiva couldn’t say.
She took her hands out from behind her head and set them on her belly, thinking of the life—half-Vagri, half-human—growing inside her.
She’d name the baby Quint. That much Kiva could say with certainty: that whether her child, the firstborn of a new world, was a boy or a girl, she’d name it after the one who’d died so that world could be born.
The rest was unknowable.
Kiva sat up and looked toward the horizon, waiting for Matthew to return.
It wouldn’t be long now.