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swallow down the urge to cry, or be sick, or scream.
    In all my years of hating Lorien and the way it was run, I never expected to see it like this. I wanted to change the planet, not watch it be destroyed.
    “It means we’re alone,” I say.
    Crayton stares at the floor.
    “We left them,” he says quietly. “We left everyone to die.”
    He starts to mutter names and then apologies. Tears stream down his cheeks. Zophie isn’t crying, though. Her eyes look out into space, searching for something but finding only stars and planets and other celestial bodies light-years away, and a cold, black expanse of emptiness.
    I tap on the instruments again, confirming our course—breathing out a sigh of relief to find that the navigational system I helped to reinstall is actually working.
    But that’s the last of the good news.
    “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mutter.
    “What is it?” Zophie asks.
    “We made a fast start, but it cost us a lot of fuel.”
    “Right . . . ,” Zophie says, bracing for bad news.
    “Which means it’s going to be a long flight,” I say.
    “How long?” Crayton asks.
    I turn back to the control panel, staring at the number on the screen in front of me.
    “About one and a half years,” I say.

CHAPTER FIVE
    CRAYTON FINDS SOME PILLOWS AND PUTS ELLA down for a nap in a pulled-out drawer in one of the private rooms. Afterwards, we sit on benches in the little common area beside the galley and go over the events of the last hour so many times that they begin to feel unreal, like an old myth told to scare children into doing their chores. I have to keep reminding myself that every word spoken is true. I think we’re all in shock.
    I know I am.
    “All those ships,” Crayton says. “Those bastards.”
    “Who were they,” I ask. “ What were they? When they were wounded, they just disintegrated.”
    Zophie narrows her eyes, staring at the ground. I recognize this look from the days at the museum when she would work out complicated problems in her head or try to figure out how we were going to get vintage wiring and fixtures for the refurbishment. Back whenthe rocket was just a project I was working on for some money and not the only thing keeping me alive.
    “What is it?” I ask.
    “Well . . .” Her nose crinkles a little. “There were always rumors at the museum of an old conflict between us and another planet. Tales archivists and historians told when too many ampules had been passed around at parties. There was no hard evidence to substantiate these stories, but there were hints that there was some truth in the claims—telling gaps in our historical record and allusions to terrible casualties and vicious otherworldly beings found in diaries and letters. We couldn’t help but speculate.”
    “You’re talking about the Mogadorians,” Crayton says.
    She seems a little surprised that he knows the word. It means nothing to me—and yet I feel as though I’ve heard it or seen it before. In encrypted messages I didn’t think were important, or whispered in the halls of the LDA when I was there so long ago.
    “Raylan talked about them often,” Crayton says. “He had all these theories about secret wars just like you described. He was sure that his father had been not only a key figure in the conflict between us and the Mogadorians, but an Elder, and that there was some sort of conspiracy that led to the number of Elders being reduced to nine.” Crayton shakes his head. “Raylan’sclaims changed all the time, but he was obsessed with trying to prove them. I always thought he was a little crazy, but . . . this is crazy.”
    Zophie keeps nodding.
    “There were . . . whispers that Raylan’s father had been a traitor to the Loric,” she says. “Again, there’s no hard evidence there even was a ‘secret war,’ but Raylan had probably heard these rumors at some point or another. I think it’s one of the reasons he was so keen on donating money to the museum and getting this