The New World - By Patrick Ness Page 0,1

prepping them for orbital entry. My mother glances up at my reflection in her screens. ‘And she rejoins us.’

‘It’s my job,’ I say, sitting down at a terminal ninety degrees from her. And it is my job, one I trained for on the convoy and in the five months I’ve been here. My mother will pilot us into orbit, my father will ready the thrusters that will carry us down into the planet’s atmosphere, and I’ll be monitoring for possible landing sites.

‘There’s been something new while you pouted,’ my mother says.

‘I wasn’t pouting-’

‘Look,’ she says, bringing up a box on the viewscreen showing the larger of the two northern continents.

‘What is that?’

There’s a stretch of river that heads east towards the ocean on the night side of the planet. It’s impossible to tell from this distance, even with the ship’s scanners, but there’s an emptier space up the river a ways, possibly a valley, where the forest breaks open a bit and what looks like might even be lights.

‘The other settlers?’ I ask.

The other settlers are almost a ghost story to us. We’ve had no communications from them either in my lifetime or my parents’, so we always figured they didn’t make it. It’s a long, long trip from Old World to New, decades and decades, and so they were still on their way when our convoy left. But we heard nothing from them. Even our deepest space probes only caught distant glimpses of them as they travelled. Then after the time came when they would have landed, still years before I was born, it was hoped that we could communicate with them on the planet as we got closer, let them know we were coming, asking what it was like, what we should prepare ourselves for.

But either no one was listening, or no one was there anymore. And it was the second possibility that got everyone worried.

If they didn’t make it, what would become of us?

My father says they were idealistic settlers, leaving Old World to start a simpler, low-technology, farming kind of life with religion and all that. Which seems both stupid to me and also seems to have failed completely. But we were already so far out by the time whatever happened to them happened, there was no turning back, just the same course to the same place where we’ll find our own doom, no doubt.

‘How didn’t we see it before?’ I say, leaning closer to the screen.

‘No real energy signatures,’ my mum says. ‘If they’re powering themselves, it’s not through a big reactor like we’d expect.’

‘There’s a river,’ I say. ‘Maybe it’s hydro-electric.’

‘Or maybe it’s empty.’ My mum’s voice is quiet as we watch the screen. ‘It’s hard to tell if those are even actual lights or just blips in the readings.’

The little patch by the river starts getting farther away. We’re entering orbit the other direction, heading west, circling the planet once as we enter the atmosphere, and coming back round the other side to land.

‘Is that where we’re going?’ I say.

‘It’s as good a place to start as any,’ my mother says. ‘If they didn’t last, then the first thing we need to do is learn from their mistakes.’

‘Or get killed the same way.’

‘We’ve got better technology,’ my mother says. ‘And from what we know, they shunned what they had anyway, which could very easily have been why they failed.’ She looks at me. ‘That’s not going to happen to us.’

You hope, I think to myself.

We both watch as the continent rolls away from under us.

‘Ready,’ my father calls over the comm system.

‘Then let’s call that ten minutes mark,’ my mother says, pressing a countdown button.

‘Everyone up there excited?’ my father’s voice says.

‘Some of us are,’ my mother says, frowning at me.

***

‘I’m so glad we’re not going,’ Steff Taylor said the first time I saw her in class after it was announced it was my parents who were the landing party and not hers. It was actually my favourite class, arts with Bradley on the Beta. Bradley also taught us maths and agriculture, and was pretty much my favourite person on the whole convoy, even though he made me sit next to Steff Taylor since we were the only girls our age in all of the caretaker families.

Lucky us.

‘It’ll be so boring,’ Steff said, twisting her hair in her fingers. ‘Five months on that little ship with just your mum and dad for company.’

‘I can vid back to friends and classes,’ I said. ‘And