He woke before the lights changed.

  He did not know how he knew the lights were about to change — some calibration in him that registered the quality of the dark and found it thinning, the specific pre-light that existed in the few minutes before illumination was introduced. He lay in the narrow bunk and stared at the ceiling and waited for the ship to confirm what his body had already decided.

  The lights shifted. Low at first, then graduated upward to something that approximated morning without being it. Around him the sleeping quarters filled with the sounds of ten thousand people returning to consciousness — the rustling, the small confused noises, the particular quality of a large space waking up.

  He sat up. His Nexus Seal pulsed steadily on his wrist. He looked at it and felt the same thing he had felt when it was placed there: the wrongness of it being right. He put it aside. He had filed it. He would not keep filing the same thing.

  The speakers came on.

  Compatibility calibration is complete. Survivors are requested to proceed to their assigned result stations in sections. Section One, please proceed now.

  He looked at his number. 9,900. Section assignments ran in sequence. He was going to be waiting for a while.

  He sat on the edge of the bunk and watched the sections empty in order. Watched the people around him rise and move — some quickly, with the energy of people who needed to know, who had been lying awake measuring the darkness and waiting for permission to find out. Some slowly, with the deliberateness of people who understood that the result would be the same whether they arrived at the station in two minutes or twenty and had decided to take the twenty.

  He was the kind of person who took the twenty. He did not rush toward information he could not yet act on. He watched other people rush toward it and noted the outcomes.

  Section after section cleared. The noise in the quarters dropped in stages as people filed out. By the time his section was called the space around him had thinned considerably — a handful of others still rising, collecting themselves, moving toward the door with the unhurried gravity of people at the end of a queue.

  He stood. He followed them out.

  The result stations were arranged along the main corridor outside the sleeping quarters — temporary terminals, each staffed by a scientist with a list. He found his station by number and stood in the short remaining queue and waited while the two people ahead of him received their results. He watched their faces when they read them. One went still in the way people go still when something is simultaneously surprising and exactly what they had feared. The other exhaled — a long, deliberate exhale, the kind that comes from a body releasing a tension it had been holding since before the person was consciously aware of holding it.

  He could not tell from either face whether the result was good.

  Then it was his turn.

  The scientist at the terminal — young, competent, working through the tail end of the queue with the focus of someone nearly done with a long task — looked at her screen, looked at him, looked at her screen again.

  "Number 9,900."

  "Yes."

  She pulled up his result. He watched her face as she read it. Something happened there — a small shift, not alarm, not confusion exactly, the specific expression of someone encountering a data point that does not fit the surrounding data points and is deciding in real time how much to say about it.

  She turned the screen toward him.

  COMPATIBILITY RESULT — SURVIVOR 9,900

  Primary Assignment: Category 1 — Cultivation World

  Compatibility Index: 94.7% — HIGH

  Secondary Readings: ANOMALOUS

  Status: FLAGGED — Pending Review

  He looked at the screen. He read it twice. He read it a third time with the specific attention of someone who does not yet understand something and is checking whether more reading will produce understanding. It did not.

  "What does anomalous mean," he said.

  "It means the secondary readings produced results outside the expected parameters." She said this with the tone of someone reciting a prepared explanation. "Your primary assignment is unaffected. Category One, cultivation world — that's confirmed."

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  "But the secondary readings."

  "Are outside expected parameters."

  He looked at her. "That's the same sentence."

  She held his gaze with the expression of someone who knew it was the same sentence and did not currently have a different one available. "The flag is for review. It will be looked at before transfer."

  "Before my transfer specifically."

  "Before all flagged results." A pause that was brief enough to be professional and long enough to be honest. "You're the last transfer. There's time."

  He looked at the screen again. Anomalous. He turned the word over the way he turned all words over — examining it from available angles, finding what it held. Outside expected parameters. The matrix had tested him while he slept, measured his constitution and mental framework and emotional profile, and had produced a result it did not know what to do with.

  He filed this. He did not know what to file it under. He filed it anyway.

  "Is there anything else you can tell me about what was flagged."

  "Not at my level," she said. This time with something closer to honesty in it. "The flag goes to the senior panel. They'll have more."

  "Will they tell me."

  She looked at him. Something in her expression shifted — not sympathy, something more considered than sympathy. The look of someone deciding how much truth was appropriate to give to a person in a situation they could not change.

  "I don't know," she said.

  He nodded. He took the result card she handed him. He stepped back from the terminal and stood in the corridor and looked at the card and then put it in his pocket and looked at the corridor instead.

  Cultivation world. 94.7 percent compatibility. Something anomalous that nobody at the station level could explain and that had been escalated to people who might or might not tell him what it was.

  He turned this over once and set it down. He had other things to attend to.

  The transfer bay was larger than the announcement hall.

  He stood at the entrance and looked at it and understood, for the first time at a physical rather than an intellectual level, the true scale of what was being attempted. Ten thousand bays — not all visible from here, the structure extending in both directions further than he could see. Each bay a gate. Each gate a destination. The infrastructure of ten thousand individual departures, running simultaneously, the largest organized transfer of human beings to other worlds that had ever happened in the history of a species that had not previously known other worlds existed.

  Someone had built this.

  He kept returning to that thought. Someone had known. Had built corridors wide enough for ten thousand people and halls large enough for ten thousand people and bays numerous enough for ten thousand simultaneous transfers and a compatibility matrix sophisticated enough to assign ten thousand people to ten thousand specific planets out of ninety-three thousand options. Had built all of this before the need for it had been publicly known. Had prepared for the end of the world with the thoroughness of people who had been watching it come for a long time.

  He looked at the queue.

  Nine thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine people ahead of him.

  He found his position at the end — a marked point, a small indicator on the floor with his number — and he stood there and he waited.

  The transfers began.

  It was not fast. Each transfer took approximately ninety seconds from gate lock to completion — he had timed the first three before he stopped timing them because the arithmetic was not useful. At ninety seconds per transfer, nine thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine transfers before his, he was looking at approximately fourteen hours. Give or take. Depending on whether there were pauses, malfunctions, delays he couldn't anticipate.

  Fourteen hours of watching people step into a gate and disappear.

  He settled into it. He had the specific capacity of someone who had learned, at some point in a life he could not access, that waiting was not the same as doing nothing. That watching was a form of work. He stood at his marked position and he watched and he let the watching be the thing he was doing.

  The people who went early went with the particular mixture of terror and determination that characterized people who had decided to treat the terror as information rather than as a verdict. Some went alone — stepping into the gate with the solitary focus of people who had decided that ceremony was unnecessary and speed was kindness to themselves. Some went in small groups that paused at the gate, brief embraces, brief words, the economy of goodbyes between people who understood that the goodbye was permanent and had decided not to make it long.

  He watched all of this and said nothing because there was no one to say anything to, and noticed that he was standing slightly to the left of his marked position — between it and the nearest person ahead of him in the queue, a small unconscious adjustment of position that placed him marginally between that person and the open space behind them. He noticed this and did not know what it was about and moved back to his mark.

  Hours passed.

  The queue shortened. The sounds of the transfer bay changed as the population of it reduced — the ambient noise dropping, the specific texture of a large crowd thinning to a smaller crowd thinning to something that was almost quiet. He watched the number of people ahead of him decline in the way he watched most things: steadily, without urgency, with the attention of someone who had decided that the watching itself was sufficient.

  Somewhere around transfer six thousand he noticed that one of the scientists at the control station — a woman, young, stationed at a terminal that was positioned at an angle that gave a clear sightline to the entire queue including his position at the end — had looked at him three times in the last hour.

  Not stared. Looked. Brief, deliberate, the specific quality of attention that was not incidental.

  He noticed this and filed it and did not look back and continued waiting.

  He reached for his wrist once, in the long middle hours when the queue had thinned enough that the silence had weight. His fingers moved toward it before he caught them — the same motion, the same reaching certainty, the same finding of the Nexus Seal instead of whatever his body was actually looking for. He held the device for a moment. The pulse of it steady and present and wrong in a way he still could not name.

  He let his hand fall.

  He waited.

  End of Chapter 6