ETHAN HAD KNOWN THE day would come, of course. Everyone had. Somehow, that didn’t make anyone less jittery when it arrived. The Woken knew that something was up. It was only a matter of time until they discovered exactly what the Gens had done. What wasn’t so clear was what the scientists and their oppressive Guardians would do about it.
A party was down from the ship, including someone newly Woken—a bigwig of some kind. Cariad was there too, Ethan had heard. He would have liked to have gone to see her. On the other hand, he feared her realization that he’d kept something important from her for so long and he would have found her inevitable questions hard to answer.
The Woken were asking plenty of them. Why was the settlement almost empty? Where had everyone gone? As agreed, every Gen th
