The New World by Patrick Ness Page A

new home.’
    ‘Unless the original settlers are still there,’ I said.
    They exchanged a glance.
    ‘Are you unhappy with this, Viola?’ my mother asked, her face serious.
    ‘Would you not go if I was?’ I asked.
    And they exchanged another glance.
    And I knew what that meant.
    ***
    ‘Thirty minutes to orbital,’ my mother is saying as I step back into the cockpit, only a little bit late. She’s the only one there. My father must have gone down to the engine room already, 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