“I’ll take that as a yes.” Riley unhooked the clasp of the necklace. “Another one of our traditions is for me to make the pendant myself, but I had help from Logan and Anne-Jade.” Helooped it around my neck then secured it, sweeping my hair out of the way.
I fingered the sheep. “Logan and Anne-Jade? Is it one of their gadgets?”
“Yes, but—” He hurried to add, “it’s inactive. If you ever get into trouble and need help, you can squeeze the pendant and it will send a signal. We can trace the signal to your location and send reinforcements.”
I laughed. “Do you really think it’s necessary now?”
“I may not know everything about you, but I do know if there is trouble, you’ll be in the middle of it.”
He stifled my squawk of protest with another kiss. After a while, I forgot to be mad.
The transition from the Travas controlling Inside to a more democratic method wasn’t smooth. Even though each family elected a representative and each scrub “family” had a person attending organization meetings, many uppers still viewed the scrubs with suspicion and the scrubs in turn made planning difficult with their distrust and bitterness.
I had hoped to avoid all the political wrangling, but, since I understood both sides, I attended all the meeting to smooth relations. Even so, we had a long way to go. Overcrowding remained a problem, and a few people resisted the change in their life styles. Violence erupted on occasion, and Anne-Jade organized a security detail with members of all the families to keep the peace.
Being able to walk the hallways of the upper levels without worry was liberating. Domotor also enjoyed his freedom from the hideout. He was busy preaching to everyone to be patientand understanding. All the Travas had been incarcerated for now. The Committee would decide their eventual fate. Doctor Lamont had been confined, too.
It was week 147,007, and I had received a message to meet Logan in the control room at hour ten. He had been camped out there since the take-over, using the computers to harvest lost information.
He hunched over a keyboard, muttering and humming under his breath. I touched his arm and he almost jumped from his seat.
“Don’t scare me like that,” he said, waving a hand in front of his face.
“I’m sorry. Should I have bowed and announced my presence first? Have they coroneted you admiral yet?”
“Go ahead and be sarcastic.” He swiveled back to the screen. “I’m not going to tell you—ow! Let go of my ear, I’ll tell you.”
I released his lobe. He rubbed it.
“Logan?”
“All right. I found the answers to those final three files and accessed the information. Outside in something called Outer Space. It’s an airless and pressure less environment unable to support life.”
Sorrow and guilt welled. If we just had waited, Cog wouldn’t be floating out there. “Thanks for the reminder.”
“Sorry. Ah… Well, we are actually travelingthroughit. Seems it is so vast that it takes an incredibly long time to get from one planet to another.”
“Planet?”
“As far as I can tell, a planet is therealOutside.” He typed on the keyboard. The picture of the blue ceiling and greenery filled the computer’s screen. “This is our destination; we’ve been heading there for the last 147,006 weeks.”
“When are we scheduled to arrive?” But the answer popped into my mind.It’s the end and the beginning. What is it?I looked at Logan.
“Week one million,” we said together.
I groped for a chair. We had 852,994 weeks to go! My head spun as I sat and did more math. A hundred and twenty-two more generations of people would be born, live and die in this metal cube before reaching the true Outside.
“There’s so much to learn about our past and why we’re here,” Logan said. “I’ve just scratched the surface. The Travas tried deleting all the files, but they were protected by the system’s safety guards and buried.”
“The system’s guards? What about the Controllers?”
Logan flipped his hand as if dismissing an underling. “No evidence of them. At least no indication that the Controllers are actual people. It’s the system’s operating parameters and fail safes. Also certain directives have been programmed into it, which were set by the original designers.”
“What directives?”
“Like the one about our population. Once we reach Outside, the designers wanted to make sure we had enough people to survive. These directives couldn’t be changed or altered, so the Travas must have thought they were a divine message.” Logan chuckled. “Anyway, it’s amazing Domotor found those buried files, and was able to copy parts of them.”
“It wasn’t Domotor. He was the leader of the group, but Nolan Garrard was the first to find them.”
