Ark (Forward Collection, #1)

by Veronica Roth

Samantha felt a little pocket of warmth in her chest at the thought. This rare thing, Finis passing Earth, and he had given the moment to her instead of taking it himself.

He crouched down next to her. It was too dark to see all the details of his face, but she could make out the rise of his cheekbones and the hollows beneath them. “I’m sorry,” he said to her.

Now that she was older, she understood that there had been other possible lives to live before Finis. Lives without evacuation plans taped to the refrigerator or emergency go-bags stashed in the hall closet.

Lives full of plans, for college and houses, children and golden retrievers, retirement and last rites. Those lives had not been lived in the shadow of Finis. And he had known when he made her that they wouldn’t be possible for her.

So maybe he had been apologizing for giving her life in the first place, when he knew ...

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 yea...

“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’m going to steer a boat out,” she said. “I know how to drive one; I have since I was a kid. 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.”

She made herself stop. If she went on, she would find herself talking about how she wasn’t suicidal, never had been, not even in the throes of grief. Instead, 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.”

“When the asteroid hits, it will shred our atmosphere,” she said. “Finis is too large for it to be much of an encumbrance. The only thing that will slow it down will be Earth’s crust. It’ll likely hit water, though we can’t be absolutely certain. Its current path will take it away from Svalbard, regardless—somewhere on the Southern Hemisphere, so we won’t see the impact zone even at a distance.

“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?”

When she was younger, she had been angry at her dad, thinking she wasn’t enough to keep him around. 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. Not like her, she thought. She wanted to see it all come apart.

She didn’t know why, of all the last words he could have chosen, he chose these, and he chose her to say them to. But she listened.

“Why do you seem angry? You’ve just found a new species, in the last forty-eight hours of human occupancy of Earth. That is—” “Amazing, I know.” She pushed her hands into her hair. The seed pod in her throat swelled yet again, and she was a flower, blooming— Bursting into tears.

“Oh dear.” Hagen’s lumpy sweater was against her face, her head nestled beneath his chin, and he held her tightly. “There is so much left for you to see.” His hand moved in a slow circle between her shoulder blades. “Don’t you know that?”

There had been no point in going through his things or packing anything away. There was no selling the house; no one was buying. There was no consigning of old jackets, no reclaiming of valuable possessions, no hollowing out of spaces to get rid of the ghost of him.

“There is so much left for you to see.”

Perched on his desk, still suspended in the life-preserving fluid developed by the Ark scientists, was the Oncidium Samantha. Hagen had confirmed, before she left it with him, that it was in fact purple, not blue.

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.

She had spent the last year with her head buried in the tiny things of Earth, the roots that gripped the soil, the fine hair that covered stems, the veins of color through the center of a petal. Plant cells you couldn’t see without a microscope.

But pulling away from the ground in the helicopter had a way of simplifying things. Flakes of snow disappeared into white masses of frozen land dotted with floodlights and abandoned buildings. Fierce w...

Soon it would break apart, break free of its orbit,...

Soon the crisp blue sky would turn dusty with debris, and all the things of this world that made it beautiful—the fish with their multicolored scales, the flies with their iridescent wings, the churring squirrels and the deep sighs of whales, the new leaves, still curled and pale, the earth rich with red...