Ark (Forward Collection, #1)

by Veronica Roth

In the Bible story, Noah had built a boat to survive the flood, to endure. The Naomi would not survive anything. That was not her purpose.

Borders had stopped mattering after the asteroid Finis was discovered twenty years ago. Everyone was just an Earthling now.

At the same time, they had constructed two massive storage ships, one in Australia and one in Svalbard—Ark Flora and Ark Fauna, they were called—and

I was never any good at puzzles. But I’m good at detail, generally. And tedium. Highly tolerant of tedium.”

“There are many reasons,” he said, “but there is also just one: I can’t bear to leave my home.”

Why take a shower when you’re just going to get dirty? Why eat when you’re just going to get hungry? Every flower dies eventually, Sam. But not yet.

though she had clutched her hands tight around the rise of fat around her middle when she first put it on, only for her mother to smack them away and tell her not to be silly—it was no crime to have a body.

So maybe he had been apologizing for giving her life in the first place, when he knew it would be full of dread. She wished she could have told him that life was already full of dread, no matter who you were. That there was nothing you could have that you couldn’t one day lose. That autumn always gave way to winter, but it was her favorite time of year—those fleeting bursts of beauty before the branches went bare.

“Well, you can’t love everything equally,” she said. “You just can’t—and if you did, then it’s the same as loving nothing at all. So you have to hold just a few things dear, because that’s what love is. Particular. Specific.”

“You have to hold just a few things dear, because that’s what love is. Particular. Specific.”

“You feel like you’ve been dying all this time, too, then,” Samantha said. “It’s just that your body hasn’t caught on yet.”

I’ll keep to calm waters, see as much of the peninsula as I can. And put down my anchor to watch the world end.”

it was simply that her entire life had been lived in anticipation of loss, such that neither her mother’s death nor her father’s had surprised her in the least, but had rather seemed like the fulfillment of a promise.

“A lifetime on a ship,” she said finally. “Sounds like a pale version of life to me.”

“It’s the story of this planet in reverse,” she said. “We were born out of—coalescing matter, chaos, here, all lava and earthquakes and thunder.” She smiled a little. “It will be like . . . seeing the birth of the world. Can you imagine anything more beautiful, more worth witnessing, than that?”

But now she felt like he had known too well that he was in a piece of weaving that was unraveling, that the world was unmaking itself, and he just didn’t want to witness it.

Samantha wondered if, after the Ark launched, they would spend all their time looking backward—at Earth, at the life they had built there.

Twenty-five thousand species of orchid, and counting. The world would never run out of them. And the universe would never run out of discoveries.

But not yet. And Samantha had always loved autumn.