My father’s sigh blows static across my ear. He wants that colony. Bad. Dad is good at what he does. His work documenting the nomadic tribes of old Russia already has his name in the history files. But finding Canaan is his passion. Ever since he was a kid, he’s been hanging out with the equally obsessed, forming groups, swapping theories, and sending signals into space. Solving the mystery of the lost colony would be the pinnacle of his career. Of his lifetime. Of ten careers and ten lifetimes. The reason my parents risked their lives and mine to fly across a galaxy.
I want it just as much as they do. And not the echoes of it. I want a living city. To see what the lost colonists have become. But Earth hasn’t picked up a signal from Canaan in more than five hundred years. The only other expedition, in the Centauri II, went dark just after landing almost two centuries ago, and now the scans of the Centauri III have come up completely, thoroughly, and depressingly empty.
If I can’t know what they’ve become, then the next best thing is to know what became of them.
I toss the rock back onto the forest floor and go to release the spike we shot over the cliff to anchor our climbing ropes. There’s a sweetness in the air as I pack our gear, heavy, like the alive smell on the wind, only stronger. I think it’s coming from the crushed beetle. History is my specialty. I leave the bugs to Roger, back at base camp, who stepped straight off the Centauri into some sort of entomological nirvana. But even I know that smell means the beetle was after sap, not blood. When I look up at Jill, she’s got the cartographer again, and she’s grinning.
“Done,” she says. She’s fast on that thing, and she knows it. “And we’re going this way.”
I follow her through the dense growth, slow, careful, observant, and with little noise. Like we’ve been trained for two and a half years. Unlike the astrophysicists, here for the planet’s coming comet, and the geoanalysts exploring for mining, the anthropology team’s strategy is low impact: small scouting parties and a protocol of minimal, mostly invisible, basic tech. Just in case.
The Canaan Project was the most infamous social experiment of all time: a group of people sent to a new planet to regress rather than advance, to live pretech—without any technology—creating a society capable of existing in harmony with its world rather than against it. We’re here to observe what they’ve made, not to interfere or change it, and we don’t know what they remember. People are frightened by what they don’t understand, and frightened people, Dad says, are the ones you have to be scared of. Jill and I have orders to avoid interaction at all costs, to leave any initiation phase to the experts. If there’s anyone left, that is. And we already know there isn’t. The team wouldn’t have let us out on our own for two seconds if there was.
I keep my head turning in broad sweeps so Dad can see all the forest that I do, and so I don’t stare at Jill pushing ahead of me through the foliage and heat. Her hair is plastered to her head, curves obvious even beneath the heavy pack and the jumpsuit, and the last thing I need is to force Sean Rodriguez to watch me watching her, and to hear about nothing else in my earpiece for the next two hours.
And then, because it’s just my day for revelations in this area, I wonder if the lost city was the only reason my parents decided to take me from Earth. The whole crew of the Centauri III has had every test that anyone can think of, and our blood is clean. No contaminated DNA. A zero percent chance of catching or passing on the Lethe’s mutation. Maybe my parents weren’t just pursuing their dreams. Maybe they were protecting their bloodline. Maybe that was half the plan all along.
I only know I’m not walking when Dad says, “Stop staring, Beck.” Even Jillian has noticed, looking back at me from partway up a steep slope, one eyebrow arched in question, a hint of sly at the corner of her mouth. I swear inside my head, where Sean Rodriguez can’t hear, wave Jill forward, and start climbing after her, ignoring my father’s chuckle.
What if I don’t want their plans? Has anyone ever thought of that? I think of the way Mom’s face goes a little smug every time I mention Jill’s name. But what if I’m just not interested? What then? How do you get rid of a girl when she’s the only option on an entire planet? Or should I even want to? Maybe I’m the one who’s being stupid, ditching the one available female in thirty-nine trillion kilometers just because my parents didn’t ask my opinion about it when I was fourteen. I can guess what I would have said about the options at fourteen. It would have been something like, “Cool.”
“Beck!”
I think it’s the third or fourth time Dad has said my name.
“You’re killing me, you know that? Could you please not waste the last two years of training and give me a visual instead of staring at your hands?”
This isn’t fair, since I’m having to use my hands to climb. But I slow down and do a sweep of the surroundings anyway. Stats roll across one corner of my vision, air temperature (34 Celsius, 94 Fahrenheit), heat sources (sun, and somewhere deep in this mountain, a thermal spring), radioactivity (nonexistent), power sources (nonexistent), the distance from base camp (14.1 kilometers). But I’m looking for things our scans would miss: cleared paths that have grown over, a piece of worked wood or stone, a planted field too small to identify from the air. Or a sign would be nice. “This Way to Canaan.”
“Beckett!” This is Mom now, coming through the earpiece. “Are you hydrating?”
Really, Mom?
“Yuàn dé yī rén xīn, bái shǒu bù xiāng lí.”
Fourteen kilometers away and she thinks I’m going to forget Chinese.
“And monitor your body temperature!”
“ài, Mom.”
I really think we should just all stop talking.
“About two and a half more hours,” Dad says.
And this is where Jill and I had planned to start sweet-talking my father into letting us camp instead of hiking back to base. If we camp, we had reasoned, we could strike out even farther after we rest, use the sun while it’s here, cover more ground. And after all, Jill had whispered, her breath in my ear, the glasses can’t be on my face every second, can they?
But I don’t say anything, not yet. The climb is hard. Even Jillian is winded. Rich, loose soil slides beneath my boots, and another mountain peak is coming into view, towering up on our right. And then static buzzes sharp in the earpiece, a stab of hissing noise.
“Dad?”
“What is it?”
“Is Jillian okay?” This voice is Vesta, Jill’s mother, close by or on one of the nearby screens.
“We’re fine,” I say. “Just a glitch.”
“Beck, go … ”
The buzzing jabs my ear, and then the connection is back again.
“… show us what Jillian is looking at,” he finishes. I crawl around a boulder and stand beside her, boots on the edge of a sharp drop into a shallow canyon. A stream is falling several meters down into a pool on one side, sunbeams shooting across the spray, making the droplets shine like crystals. It’s spectacular, but wild. Nothing human.