It was Lila who came to collect him the following morning, for breakfast, she said, and a meeting. This was a subdued version of the self-assured woman he had met the previous day. Instead of leading the way with her strident pace, she matched him step for step, and seemed almost nervous beside him, wringing her hands with agitation.

"I owe you an apology, Mr. Mueller," she said after a minute. "I was quick… careless… and maybe cruel yesterday. Please believe that I did not mean to add to your pain and apprehension. I was so happy to meet you that I didn't think about how you must be feeling."

Danny didn't know what to say to that. Part of him wanted to punish her while another part was numb to the whole thing. At least she apologized, he reminded himself. She made a mistake and admitted it. He settled on a distant, somewhat disingenuous reply.

"Were you? I didn't notice. I was just glad you weren't a robot."

Lila took on the role of a guide, pointing out corridors off their main path. They normally took their meals together in a cafeteria down that way, she explained. "That's where you'll go for lunch. This morning is more of a business affair."

She deposited him at a pair of double doors thrown wide. "I'm not invited. See you later, maybe. Good luck!"

There were a dozen people in attendance - department-heads and leaders, he was told during a round of introductions. Among these, Danny recognized the man who had greeted him at the elevator the previous night. Younger than the others in his early thirties, he explained that he worked with the generators.

"My job is to keep the lights on," he said with false modesty. "I hope you'll consider helping me in that endeavor."

Verne Weaver, the tall, thin man who presided over the meeting, carried himself with a proud, almost military bearing, his iron-gray mustache lending to his air of authority. Unlike Lila's, his apology had no depth of feeling. It began with "We regret" and ended with "we believed our ends were justified" and Danny was seething inside by the time he was given leave to speak.

"It's not Mr. House I should be angry at, is it? You've been hiding behind his name, but you're the ones responsible for everything. You're the reason I'm here. He's nothing but a figurehead."

Weaver didn't flinch from the accusation. "We are indeed responsible. Mr. House, the author of our cause, has abdicated that burden to us in gradual installments over the past century. What he did not give, we acquired. We now control everything of substance and make every decision.

"Your anger at us is understandable. Our selection has disrupted the course of your young life. We have caused you great distress." He paused and sighed. "In the interests of full disclosure - and you would eventually learn this on your own - there was some uncertainty as to whether there even would be a tribute this year. There will be no more; I can promise you that. You are the very last. In the end, it was a question of need that tipped the scales." At this juncture, he nodded to Corum, who stood up in his place again, a slightly abashed look on his good-natured face.

"If you need someone to blame, son, you can blame me. I requested another apprentice for our power room. We had no satisfactory candidate of the right age within our own numbers. And so we-"

"Kidnapped me," Danny finished bluntly. He was still reeling at the revelation that he was here only because of a last-minute decision. "Don't try to make this something nice or noble."

"Yes, we kidnapped you," Corum agreed. "My hope is that you'll understand once you learn more." He sat down again and Weaver resumed speaking.

"Two years ago, I was elected to a ten-year term as Chairman. That role gives me a certain amount of executive power over not only our holdings in Vegas, but also our extended network of contacts in the NCR. I am responsible for you, Mr. Mueller, for as long as you sojourn with us, but you won't see me much. You'll have your year with us, and then… well, we'll see, won't we?" He glanced at his watch. "If you have any questions for me, ask them now."

Danny wanted to ask what Weaver had meant about the "last tribute," but he didn't quite dare. Instead, he gave voice to his confusion on another matter. "Do you speak for Mr. House in negotiations with the NCR and others? As Mr. House?"

"Yes. We wield his voice and visage. We didn't want to give up the appearance of continuity. Apparent immortality and omniscience is a very powerful thing."

"Does the NCR know?" Danny was struggling to reconcile the new information with what he'd always assumed about New Vegas. He imagined the story he could sell if he ever did get back: The man behind the curtain is a lie!

"Does your President Morrissey know she's actually speaking to me or one of my aides? No, of course not. All the same, we're not so different. She is also responsive to a committee of advisors and subject to the will of the people through their representatives. We're both democratic societies, after all."

"She's not my president," Danny said automatically. Like most Followers, he was conditioned to pretend to no political allegiance, even if he was indeed a citizen by birthright. "Anyway, from what I've seen, you're a theocracy."

"Yes, well, there is that too." Now Weaver seemed embarrassed. He glanced at his watch again. "Encouraging idolatry was his idea and now it's difficult to uncouple from it, as distasteful as it seems. It's one of the few things we still let him actively participate in. With supervision, of course."

Danny almost felt sorry for the ghost he'd met in the tower. He'd seemed earnest, interesting, and intelligent. Down here, however, they treated him like a child who only needed a few distractions to be happy. Pondering over this, he asked the question that puzzled him the most. "Why would Mr. House give up this kind of power? In the beginning, I mean, when it was still his choice."

Weaver looked at the ceiling. "He is rational. Sometimes selectively, but rational all the same. After his friend, the Courier, died almost a century ago, he admitted for the first time his own vulnerability to emotional weakness. That's when he began to entrust our predecessors with some of the decision-making. It snowballed from there, until the human side of this partnership had control of almost everything. More than anything, Mr. House wants this to work, and he's always known he couldn't do that in isolation."

"What is it that you're trying to do? Can you tell me, or is that a secret?"

"You'll know, and soon enough. We've found it advisable to ease people into that knowledge. Miss Avenatti - or a different guide, if you prefer - will finish showing you the common areas today, after which you'll be granted a few days' respite before your real education begins."

"I just have one question," Danny began. He willed himself to sound defiant, but the quiver in his voice stole some of the intended effect. "Were you a tribute?" He turned on Corum. "Or you?"

"Not me. My grandmother," Weaver said evenly. "She's been gone for twenty years, but I always appreciated the perspective she brought as a one-time outsider."

"My ancestors were among the first recruits," Corum said proudly. "Volunteers, even. They knew the Courier. So, no lad, we don't know how you feel. Others do. They'll seek you out. Maybe then you'll begin to understand."

Three days.

That was to be his time of respite, the break he'd have before Corum would show him to the work he would be doing for the next year. Though he couldn't bring himself to thank anybody - if it weren't for them, he'd be in Dayglow by now - Danny did appreciate it. For almost a month now, he'd been keyed up, waiting for the blow to fall, and now he found that he very much needed the chance to unwind.

He went where he wanted - or almost everywhere he wanted. The outer gates wouldn't open to him, and the sympathetic guards explained that he wasn't "ready" to go out among the tourists yet. But at least he wasn't confined to underground. There were gardens, functional but beautiful places teeming with fresh herbs and vegetables. There was a shady, half-mile path that snaked in and around the grounds, with ample nooks and crannies for private reflection.

And writing as well. The letter he couldn't write on the train - and which had stayed inside his suitcase for the entirety of the carriage ride - now found its way out again. He scratched out what little he had (stupid, sentimental crap), and began again.

"Dear Rachel." He got that far and stopped. It was a fair enough beginning, but was it good enough for this? He rubbed out the salutation (tearing a hole in the paper in the process) and continued below, leaving the address blank for now.

"I'm okay. They're not inhuman here. A little inhumane in their methods, maybe, but not intentionally so. None of us really understood what they were doing here. Maybe if we had-" He broke off again. He still didn't understand what Mr. House's private army of brainwashed scientists were doing. He'd seen many wonderful things, but as a collection of separate parts they were more confusing than illuminating.

He tried to continue. "...that is, if we'd been told that there was work going on in Vegas that needed scientists, there would have been volunteers, and not just from disillusioned kids looking for a way out of a rut. They've built something really impressive here. I know that just from what little I've seen." He sighed. This was pointless. She'd never read it. And yet... the words tumbled out of him like an avalanche, his already untidy script becoming large and erratic in his agitation.

"...Mr. House says I only 'owe' him a year. That I'm free to go at the end of that year. He says they've all had that choice, and that only a handful have ever taken it - not one in the past forty years! I don't believe him. I can't imagine what I could possibly see or experience that would make me want to stay.

"There is some mystery here, but I don't care what it is. Whatever it is, it can't justify-"

He stopped writing abruptly as a shadow fell over his page. He looked up, expecting Lila and already opening his mouth to ask her to leave him alone. She hadn't spoken to him since she'd finished her bashful tour the previous day, but he'd seen her watching him at mealtimes. It wasn't that he was particularly angry with her - he wasn't, or at least not any more than he was angry with all of Mr. House's 'children' - but she was still one of them. More than that, she had laughed at him on the worst day of his life and that was what he remembered when he saw her.

As it turned out, he needn't have worried. The person standing in front of him was a complete stranger.

"Hey there new guy. Dan, right? Martin Aberforth. Nice ta' meetcha. Got a minute?" Standing in front of him, rocking impatiently on his heels, was a pale man in his early thirties, slightly obese and sporting a pudding-bowl cut of thinning orange hair.

"Sure." Danny wasn't used to having people approach him and it took a long, awkward moment for him to make room for the newcomer, shifting over to one end of the bench. He tried to tuck the sheet of paper discreetly into his notebook, but wasn't fast enough to conceal it.

"Writing a letter home?" he asked with an unpleasant leer, trying to lean over Danny's shoulder, his breath a sour cloud. "The censors will have to have a long, hard look at that before it goes out. You understand. Don't want to give away any spoilers before the end." His eyes glinted mischievously at this, but his tone was flat and cynical.

"The end?" Danny echoed. There it was again. An implied timeline, hanging like a noose over his head. The notion that even the sense of stability and tradition he felt from this place might not last made him feel freshly afraid of when the final blow would fall.

Aberforth slapped his knee and chuckled, full of cheer again. "So you don't understand. I forgot. You've only been here a day or two. Well, it's more than my job's worth to tell you prematurely. They do like their theater here. One wrong move from me and Weaver's lackeys will stick me somewhere in the ass-end of nowhere. I like living with air conditioning. I only got a cushy spot in Vegas because my grandfather was someone important a generation ago. Nepotism, I thank you."

"You were born here?" Danny asked, eyeing the newcomer with fascination. It was interesting - and somewhat refreshing - to meet a native who wasn't one hundred percent committed to the envisioned utopia. He might not get actual honesty from this malcontent, but at least his exaggerations might skew in the opposite direction from the others'. For people like this, he knew from experience with bureaucrats at the university, a little flattery went a long way. "You must know everything there is to know about this place."

This, however, had a souring effect on Aberforth's mood. The generically pleasant look pasted on his features vanished, replaced by something much nastier. "Naturally. Not that it does me much good. I never was good enough for the likes of them. I wasn't hand-picked like you."

This sounded like an accusation and Danny resented the unfairness. "I'm sorry? I mean, I don't know what you expect me to do about that. I didn't ask to be brought here. Quite the contrary."

"Of course you didn't," he said reassuringly, rising to go. "It's all them. Their scheming. Their lies. My advice to you, boy? Keep your head down. Do your time. Get out of here when you can and don't look back. No matter what you think you see or learn. Even if I had the choice, you wouldn't catch me leaving a sure thing for a dream. No sir."

Danny watched him stroll away whistling, his hands in his pockets. Soon after, he got up to leave, hands shaking as he packed away his things. He certainly couldn't resume his letter now. The morning had been spoiled as far as he was concerned. Aberforth had seen to that.

Just as the Chairman had said, Danny saw no more of Weaver. True to their word, the powers that be permitted him to do more or less what he wanted unperturbed. A few people sought him out with a kind word of welcome, and introductions he struggled to keep up with, but for the most part they left him alone. This had to have been due to an order from on high, Danny decided; from the number of eyes on him in public areas, there was a lot of open curiosity there. He appreciated the space, though in the end it served to make him feel even more like an animal in a zoo.

He slowly became aware of a whole world around him, almost a city beneath a city, as complete and complex a community as he'd ever seen. Entertainment, education, industry, and administration, people of all ages going about their work and play. It reminded Danny of what he'd heard about the old vaults - mostly the being underground and more or less self-contained - but that was where the similarity ended. Unlike the vaults, this was something vital and growing.

There was also the reality that many of them actually did travel beyond the city and its environs, though for what purposes he didn't know. From the places they mentioned, however, Danny slowly realized that the committee that made up "Mr. House's" public face had a longer reach than he - or perhaps any outsider - had previously imagined, and considerable influence on the NCR. If what they said about their network of contacts among the higher echelons of the Followers was true, then no institution back home was truly independent from their schemes.

Was this to become widely know, he knew, there would be consequences. The Followers had been allowed to flourish and spread for so long because they weren't perceived as out-and-out anarchists, only a mildly subversive class of intellectuals, producing usable results enough to make up for their sometimes provocative behavior. Some of Danny's teachers had muttered into their sleeves about their leaders being too hand-in-glove with the NCR, but none of them, he was positive, had imagined this level of complicity with a secular power. It depressed him and made him wonder if he ever could return to the rank and file.

On the third morning since his arrival, Corum approached him as he was beginning in on his breakfast. The fruit was canned but the eggs were fresh, something Danny looked forward to every day. Setting his own tray down, the stocky man took the chair across from him.

"Are you ready to get to work, Mueller?" Without waiting for an answer, he went on. "I thought we'd start with a tour of all the other departments - water treatment, hydroponics, and the like - and then I'll introduce you to the team you'll be joining." He beamed proudly. "We provide power to the entire complex and much of Vegas as well. We still sell most of the Dam's output to the NCR, but we're not dependent on it. That was an early priority of Mr. House, after the Legion nearly destroyed it."

Danny found that he wasn't very hungry any more. Setting his fork down, he swallowed the last bite with an effort. "Fusion, I presume? I hope you know I've only had three years' practical experience, and that part-time. My real training was to have begun… well, this month. At a refurbished plant in Dayglo." He thought angrily about the applications and interviews he had spent much of his last semester on, and repressed the urge to refuse. He wanted something to do, needed a routine to feel like himself again.

Some of his feelings must have made it to the surface, however, as Corum looked down at his plate, to all appearances genuinely contrite. "I'm sorry, Mueller. Really, I am. The time was short and it was my opinion that we needed another person. Someone young and trainable like you."

"What do you mean, 'the time was short'?" Danny asked hotly. "You've been down here for a hundred years. What's the rush?"

There was a glint in the other man's eye when he looked up and he seemed about to say something, but then thought better of it. "It's maddening, isn't it? The not-knowing. I have friends like you who said the same about their early days. Still, this goes better if we take it slowly. Even they admit this. Believe me, we've tried it both ways. You'll know at the end of the day. I give you my word."

The tour took most of the morning. Danny saw massive fish talks, plants, filtration equipment for cleaning and distributing water and air, public areas he hadn't been to before, manufacturing centers the size of above-ground warehouses, a well-equipped medical bay, and offices that all seemed to look the same. He shook the hands of more people than he could count, knowing that there was no way he would remember them all. Through at all, he was distracted, wondering what surprise was waiting at the conclusion.

In a corridor outside of the elementary school classrooms, a young girl - not more than eight years old - broke away from a clump of her fellow students to greet him, a grin on her face.

"Are you coming? I am. I'll still have to share a room with my sister, but that's okay. Are you going to work for my daddy? He's really smart. Don't let him fool you with that sleepy look of his."

"Not yet, Luz," Corum said warningly. "Remember the rule."

As they took the elevator down to where the generators were housed, Danny spoke quietly to his guide. "Cute kid. It's more than a little humiliating that a child knows more than I do."

"My daughter - like all the children here - has grown up knowing. She doesn't remember a time when she didn't. Not much longer now."

"Are you people going somewhere? Establishing a new settlement? Because I'm not opposed to the idea. It's not like I have much to tie me to my old home. I'd just like to know." Privately, he thought that he'd rather undertake nothing of the sort with unapologetic kidnappers, but it seemed better to play along.

Corum was friendly but unrelenting. "Come on. Time to show you the old grindstone. You'll have clearance of your own soon enough; for now, follow me."

The large wing devoted to power production was kept at an uncomfortably low temperature. It was better for the machines this way, Charles explained. Danny shivered from cold and nervousness, touching the dosimeter clipped to his collar with a superstitious gesture, wishing he'd accepted the offer of a spare lab coat. He'd expected their equipment to be safe and in good working order and wasn't disappointed. He'd never seen the plant he had been destined for, but it wouldn't have been as nice or as large as this. Nothing in the NCR was, so far as he knew, and possibly nothing in the world at large.

"Who knew I'd been given a promotion?" he muttered, but too quietly for his enthusiastic guide to hear.

There seemed to be at least twice as many workers in this space as he would have expected. They weren't working at the moment, however, and it was clear that he was the reason, as every eye in the room was fixed on him.

"This is Tonya Hudson," Corum said jovially, leading him to a tall, stately woman with her silver hair in a short braid. "She's in charge down here. Taught me everything I know."

Temperamentally, this woman couldn't have been more different from her associate. She graced him with a tight, reserved smile and a tone that seemed to suggest some hidden irony. "I doubt it means much right now, but welcome. I've stood where you're standing. Class of '56, from the Followers University in Angeles, and look at me now! But you have the chance to go much further than I ever did. You've come at a… propitious time, shall we say. We'll be seeing a lot of each other in the immediate future, but perhaps less after that."

Danny was puzzled. He looked at Corum and back at the woman. "No offense, ma'am, but I thought I was going to be assisting him."

"I work in a different area with a different team," Corum said unhelpfully. "I hope you'll join me and the others there once you're acclimated to our practices and philosophy. In any case, we're going there for a preview next. But first - don't you want to meet everybody? They're all here. Everybody directly involved in power production came to see you."

And so went the usual, dizzying round of introductions. At the end of them Danny found himself in a quiet corner, desperately clutching a cup of some hot, bitter beverage he couldn't have identified to save his life as Hudson explained the security measures to him.

"...and this will be your temporary badge. It will gain you access to only such areas as are appropriate. An expansion of those privileges are dependent on your eventual decision. Here and in the place Charles will show you next, we are more careful than in other places."

"Thanks," he said automatically, slipping the lanyard over his neck and wondering exactly what act of sabotage they believed him capable. "Can I ask you a question? You've been here a long time. Why did you stay?"

"The usual story: I believed in what they were doing. I had nothing better to return to. It was here I met the man who became my husband. He died last year, just short of our fortieth anniversary." Danny opened his mouth to offer his weak condolences, but she superseded his comment. "Before you ask, no, I don't regret it. It was important work. Many have less to show for a lifetime than I do. Even if I don't..." she trailed off, staring into space.

"Don't what?"

"I've known since the beginning that I wouldn't get to participate in the final goal, even with the earliest prospective completion dates. Some of those in my generation and the next have struggled to come to terms with that, but I never did."

"Would it do me any good to ask what the goal is?" Danny asked wearily, when she didn't seem inclined to expand on the thought.

"No, but I'll walk with you and Charles to your next destination. You're about to have a strange day, young man. The strangest of your life. It will be painful, in more ways than one. Whatever else you think about us - and you have the right to be quite upset, speaking as one tribute to another - remember this as you go forward: I'm sane. So is Charles and everybody else along for the ride."

She had said "walk," but this turned out to not be the case. Once they were past yet another checkpoint, they reached a long, straight corridor with a pedestrian path on one side and a double row of tracks on the other. Danny couldn't see where it ended. The low, domed ceiling reminded him of old subway tunnels he'd seen, but he didn't think this was a pre-war site. It felt much more recent than that.

"We're going to a… ah, secondary work site," Corum explained, buckling himself into a seat on a small, open-roofed vehicle that stood waiting. "It's about three miles. Some people walk or jog for the exercise. I should, but not today." He patted his gut. "My wife certainly wants me to. Maybe tomorrow." Once they were all seated, he pressed a button on the front of the car, which took off with a slight lurch.

Danny watched the lights on the ceiling whizzing along and tried to estimate how fast they were going. It felt faster than the train to the Outpost had been, but that might have been the lack of a frame of reference here.

"What's above us? When was this built?" Even by pre-War standards, this tunnel would have been a colossal feat of engineering. Danny could hardly imagine its construction using the tools of today.

Hudson spoke up primly from across the aisle between them. "At this point, we're at the city limits. Soon we'll be passing under fields on the north side. To answer your other question, Mr. House laid the groundwork long ago and we finished it. Like everything else you see."

"We didn't always have the cars," Corum chimed in. "Back in the dark ages, everyone had to walk. Aboveground, even. Can you imagine? Of course, you do need some sunlight," he conceded. "But that's what UV lamps are for."

The carts behind them were full of the people he'd met a few minutes before, he noticed, presumably on their way to the 'secondary site'. They were passing a lot of other commuters taking the slow route, Danny noticed. A few were even riding bicycles. It was more traffic than he would have expected for merely another power plant.

"Why so far from the city?" he asked Hudson, who seemed more likely to be forthcoming. "Is it dangerous?"

"Not particularly. It's just - well, you'll see. Have you ever seen the inside of a vault, Danny?"

He nodded. "13. The Followers still use it as an archive. We visited it when I was in school."

"The place we're going to is a lot like a vault. Every system you've seen today has an analog up ahead. It's very nearly independent, even in terms of power, food, and water, from any outside input. It's bigger than most of those were, however. When everything's in place - and it nearly is - it's meant to permanently house between twelve and fifteen hundred people, though only a few families currently have living quarters there."

"Uh… does Mr. House know something the rest of us don't? Is there another war coming?" He was half-joking, but his voice trembled a little. The tracks had been sloping upwards as they spoke, and now the vehicle was slowing to a halt. The fear he felt of the unknown quantity ahead reminded him of when he had disembarked from the train in Freeside.

Hudson fielded this question as she stepped down onto the pavement. "No, there will be no nuclear war in our lifetimes, not that this would do much to protect against such an eventuality. Unlike the vaults, this was constructed very close to the surface. Charles, you know I don't have the clearance to go further. Would you mind-?"

"Of course, milady," Corum answered with a gallant gesture. He led them through a metal door guarded by turrets and a pair of a securitrons. They went up a ramp, where he slid his card once more. He turned with a grin back to Danny, who'd hesitated a few feet behind. "Welcome to the Icarus, Danny Mueller. This could be your new home, should you choose it."

Small chance of that, Danny thought. He saw more fish - tilapia splashing around in great vaults and shrimp swarming at the underwater roots of a grain he didn't recognize. There were lot more plants in the hydroponics bay than he'd previously seen, as well as huge indoor gardens. At lunchtime, they stopped and ate a simple meal at a spotless table in their sparsely-occupied mess hall. It was altogether more of the same, though cleaner, newer, and more compact on every level. Finally, they stopped at the power center and he stood looking around, somewhat bemused. Half of the people he'd met before had ended up here and were doing their jobs, ignoring him completely except for the odd sidelong glance.

He cleared his throat. "Okay, it's all really great. Top of the line, truly. What's it all for? Just for accommodating future population growth?" He wasn't sure why they were dead set on expanding so much below-ground. Sure, it was cooler and more secure, but the effort that it would take to build and maintain such a place could have been better spent, surely.

Corum took a roll of paper from a desk in the corner and beckoned him to follow. "Let's go topside for a minute. There's something I want to show you."

Outside of the complex, near to where they'd left the carts behind, there was a elevator. This brought them to the surface where the sun stood at its zenith, beating mercilessly down. The older man began climbing a small watchtower, puffing slightly on the steps, and Danny followed.

"Look, boy. What do you see?"

Behind them, there were fields - hardy, drought-resistant legumes and grains, mostly. Ahead, however, there was only a long, broad expanse of bare, sunken earth. Here and there, dully-gleaming, flat metal peeked through the thin layer of soil.

"Is that the roof of the Icarus?" Danny asked with growing apprehension. Maybe it was saying the name aloud, but he was thinking of mythology again and he didn't like where his imagination was taking him. Surely, they wouldn't have been so foolish as to imagine-

"That's right. Or close enough. It's the roof of the shell that houses it. There's just enough dirt to hide it from casual observers. Note the fence all around us. The securitrons. It's well-guarded." Corum unrolled the paper he'd brought from below. "Here's a basic blueprint of what we've shown you today, lad. It's a copy of the one Mr. House had prepared by discreet experts a long time ago. We've made adjustments as necessary. Notice the scale. It's very spacious for what it is, for what it's meant to do. Nothing like what you've read about before. Nothing like anything that's ever existed in human history."

Danny looked for a long time. He studied the ground below and then he looked down at the paper again. "No."

The enthusiasm in Corum's voice was obvious, full of passion and zeal. "It's nearly done. Over a hundred years of labor and preparation, and we're the generation to see it to completion. Next summer, our machines will tear away the shell and-"

"No." A strange feeling was settling over Danny. He felt mulish and angry, could do nothing but repeat his rejection.

"-and it will take off. The boosters will get us past the atmosphere and we'll shed them in orbit once they're spent. A little space junk, more or less, won't hurt this world any. No one's following us any time soon to be bothered by it." The big man raised a hand as if he wanted to pat him on the shoulder, and then he lowered it. "The Icarus is a colony spaceship, Danny. Bound for a distant planet circling a different star. That's where Mr. House is sending us. I won't live to see the end, nor my children or their children. But somewhere down the road - a hundred years, our earliest estimates say - humans will walk on a new world.

"We're not forcing you to do anything you don't want to do a year from now, but we'd obviously like you to come with us.

"No, don't answer yet. Give it some time. Think it over. You can take up to six months, Weaver says - then you'll have to make a decision one way or another. Come on. Let's get out of this blasted heat."

Lost in a daze, Danny didn't remember the descent back underground, and was barely aware of sharing a car with Hudson on the way back to the main complex. To her credit, she didn't try to talk to him, or stop him when he took off at the end of the ride.

He forced himself to keep to a walk until he'd cleared the last security checkpoint, not wanting to alarm any of the industrious, zealous people he passed. The steel walls seemed to press in upon him, the enormity of what he'd been told threatening to crash down on him. They're all crazy! This will never, ever work. He was surprised to find that he was deeply disappointed; he had hoped for so much more. Lila, Corum, Hudson, and the rest - they'd almost had him convinced. That was before he'd heard the truth. Even Aberforth, bitter dissident that he was, believed. The odious man's words came back to him, their meaning now clear: You wouldn't catch me leaving a sure thing for a dream.

It wasn't enough of an escape just to be back on familiar ground. No, he needed to be outside, to walk the courtyards of his prison and remind himself there was still a real world to return to. One that he'd return to once he'd finished his term of service to this inconceivably wasteful act of madness.

He found himself moving far too quickly through the crowded corridors. The afternoon shift signal flashed from the ceiling, and people were strolling in merry clumps toward their assignments as he fought to move in the opposite direction. The faces he passed wore looks of knowing sympathy, curiosity, interest. One man - he never found out who - called out a question to him, "Have you decided yet?" Danny didn't attempt an answer, but blundered on, nearly crashing into a chatty group of teenagers. He was almost to the elevator now.

"Daniel?" came an unfamiliar voice from behind him. He wheeled on the speaker, ready to give them a piece of his mind. He stopped when he saw who it was: Celeste Bennett. He'd seen her at a distance, but they hadn't spoken even once in the days since his arrival. He had half-suspected her of avoiding him. Now she twisted her hands in front of her, a nervous but determined look on her face. "My apologies. Mr. Mueller, that is. We haven't met. I'm Celeste."

"Call me Danny," he answered automatically. "I know who you are. I saw you at graduation last year. Biology, right?" Her name and face had become significant only later, when her selection became public. He and his classmates had talked about her, of course, in the low, furtive tones of people self-conscious of breaking a taboo - as now, he knew, the underclassmen talked about him. He felt a flutter of hope. If anyone could help him understand, it was her. After only one year, she couldn't be as far down the rabbit hole as the rest.

"Yes. There's something that I'd like to show you now, just as my predecessor showed me in turn. It will help with what you're feeling right now, just as it helped me."

"You don't know what I'm feeling right now."

"You think we're all crazy," she answered promptly. "You're thinking, 'Best case scenario, nothing happens. Worst case scenario, we turn north Vegas into a crater.' I want to set your mind at ease on that count, to persuade you that it's at least plausible. That we aren't expending all this effort for nothing."

"A biologist is going to sell me on interstellar travel. This I can't wait to hear."

"No. I'm going to let Robert House - the real Robert House, not the one you've met, not exactly - do that himself. That, and we have… evidence. A sort of museum on a level you haven't yet been to. It's normally closed, but I have permission to take you there today." She stepped past him to the elevator, pressed the down arrow, and stepped inside. "Please come with me, Danny. You won't regret it."

As they rode the silent lift downward, Danny stole a glance at the former Follower, wondering where she had come from and if she was happy - really happy - here, far away from the future she'd expected. Had loneliness driven her to accept the shared delusion? Or was it possible that there was something down here that could substantiate the others' outrageous claims?

No, he decided, dismissing the possibility. The space age was over before it began. We're at least a century away from the level of infrastructure required. If we ever reach that point again, he appended gloomily. To the Followers of the Apocalypse, space exploration inevitably had a weaponized edge; intensely focused on the planet beneath them, they had used their not inconsiderable influence to discourage even a return to the skies of their own atmosphere. At any rate, the NCR had built no new aircraft yet. Any scavenged rockets or fallen satellites had long since been beaten into plowshares. As things should be, or so Danny had always thought.

The elevator stopped and the door slid open to reveal a theater, with at least twenty narrow rows of seats on either side of a lighted path that led down to the dark screen. There was a musty, neglected feel to the air; unlike every other room he had visited here, this one clearly received little care or attention. Celeste broke the silence between them. "They bring their children down here every year when they're young. That's why there's so many seats. Let's try to find a couple that aren't too torn up. Have you ever seen a pre-war film?"

"No. Only the usual NCR propaganda," Danny said sullenly. He didn't like being led around by the nose. Not by anyone. The first seat he tried sighed beneath his weight, exhausted springs giving up. The second was better, though the armrest had been eaten away with age.

"We're ready, sir," Celeste told the watchful darkness. Almost at once, the screen leapt into a crackling blankness which quickly resolved into the familiar figure of a lanky man dressed in creamy shades of grey and white, face half turned away. He stood looking possessively out of a floor-to-ceiling window onto a glittering city that Danny almost didn't recognize: New Vegas in its prime. It was nighttime in the video, he thought, but he couldn't see the sky, only the glow of the casinos below, bewildering streaks of light that hardly seemed to resolve into concrete shapes.

"Is that-?" Danny began uncertainly.

"It's him. About five years before the War. Shh."

From somewhere off-camera, a sultry voice was finishing her question, "...tell our viewers more. What's the next step for Robert House? What's your ultimate goal?"

"The goal, Desirée, is survival. Not mine, not my empire's, nor even my city's. Humanity must go on. I won't let anything prevent that outcome."

The interviewer's voice became slightly strained, her sultry tones lost in apprehension. "We all appreciate your generous support of peace on the world stage. The summit you funded in Switzerland last month-"

"-will do precisely nothing, my dear." Rich with sympathy, voice didn't slip a notch. Warm, paternal, and earnest, he looked directly into the camera at this juncture, his dark eyes seeming to bore into Danny's own. "We've drained this planet dry, built our sprawling civilizations on a foundation that can't last. Any cease-fire we make is forever dependent on a tribalistic instinct toward self-preservation that hasn't kept up with the reach of our weapons. It's not greed that drives the nations now, but a question of ensuring one's own people's future at all costs. Paradoxically, that's a struggle that can end only one way."

"So what are you going to do?" No longer the confident woman of a minute before, Desirée now sounded like a lost little girl. Danny found himself wondering if she had died in 2077 like so many others - from the bombs themselves, from the fallout, or from the collapse of essential services that had killed the majority of survivors in the aftermath. Maybe she had been among the lucky few fated to repopulate the earth. Had she remembered this conversation at the end of her life? What had Mr. House's promises meant to her then?

He turned back to his view, hands extended as if he would take it all in. "I'm going to take us to the stars. Not just revisit the moon or Mars - though those may well be necessary stepping stones - but new worlds altogether. I can do this. I will do this, no matter what it costs."

This was met with uneasy laughter and an attempt at humor as the reporter tried vainly to get her interview back on track. "Well, book me a window seat then. What does this mean for RobCo Industries?"

"It means that my every plan for the future is laser-focused on making this dream a reality." The self-made billionaire never took his eyes off the camera, every line of his figure radiating confidence. "My company is only a means to an end."

The interview went on in a similar vein, as an increasingly frustrated Desirée continued to try to extract the kind of answers she expected, while Mr. House defied her at every turn. At its conclusion, the screen returned to its blank state as the lights turned back on, and Celeste looked over at Danny appraisingly. "That segment never aired. His stockholders found it too depressing to make public. For the people he began to draw to himself two hundred years later, however, it became a promise they could hold onto. He had an eye to the signs of the times; he knew what was going to happen and he planned for every eventuality."

"But a colony spaceship, Celeste? That's…" Science fiction, he wanted to say. The brainchild of a diseased intellect, his imagination supplied. "That was impossible even before the War," he said firmly. "Solar systems are simply too far apart. That's not a journey of a mere century or two and never has been, not at speeds that are possible for matter. I do know that." He felt like he was explaining some basic truism to a child, not speaking to a scientist who'd had the best education today's world had to offer.

"There is precedent," she said calmly, not perturbed in the slightest. "Our planet has had visitors for centuries. Maybe millenia. Significantly, they left artifacts behind. Artifacts which Mr. House took every pain to collect, preserve, and study. Those were our key to retracing their steps and finding a new home of our own."

Danny groaned with real disappointment at this and buried his face in his hands. Aliens. Of course it's aliens. Of all the doomsday cults that had flourished among the descendents of nuclear war, none had been so persistent as those which claimed extraterrestrial inspiration. Post-apocalyptia had a flair for lunacy in all its myriad forms and it showed.

"I want to go back to my room now," he said after a chilly pause. These people could prevent him from leaving the complex, but they wouldn't ensnare his mind with absurd credos. He wouldn't surrender that to them at least.

"Not yet," Celeste answered. Her tone was sympathetic and understanding, but it still carried the unshakeable conviction of the true believer. Danny couldn't trust someone who talked like that, no matter what she showed him next. "You still haven't seen the museum."

Instead of shouting at her, he made sure she heard the disgust in his reply. "Let's see it then."

"Right this way." The parallel lines of lights led the way, a trail of breadcrumbs that descended on a gradual slope even deeper into the earth. Danny shivered. He couldn't see anything beyond his feet. Only Celeste's gentle exhale and soft tread, an arm's reach away, assured him that he wasn't alone down here in the dark. Though he couldn't see the ceiling, he had the impression that the space was opening up around them as the air grew colder and the sounds of their passage felt smaller. When their illuminated trail ended, Celeste stopped and so did he, afraid that otherwise he might plunge off the edge of some unseen precipice, or lose himself forever in the dark.

"You may want to close your eyes," she said quietly. "It's going to be bright at first." A little louder, she addressed the omnipresent genius loci again. "We're in place. Lights, please."

His eyes narrowed to tiny slits, Danny watched a grid of lights appear far above him and gasped. This wasn't merely a room - it was a hangar, many times larger than the grandest meeting halls and ballrooms of the NCR. More significantly, bathed in the cold, fluorescent light, there were aircraft. Dozens of them, along with items and artifacts whose purpose and origin he could only guess at.

To his right, just off the path, was a glass case containing a row of peculiar masks and ornaments fashioned of jewels, gold, and other materials he couldn't name at glance - some of them positively ancient from the look of them. Danny ignored these and took a faltering step toward the small vessel that took pride of place in the center. Sleek and round, its gleaming surface undifferentiated by damage, external sensors, or any visible means of egress, it was the most otherworldly thing he had ever seen. It could be an elaborate fake, he supposed, but why commit to deception on such a scale? It wasn't the only strange craft in this room, only the most intact. The others, he noticed, were badly damaged by and large - torn in half, scorched by fire, degraded by age.

"You should go touch it," Celeste said softly. "It really did come from out there. Call me a romantic if you like, but I imagine I can feel the distance in the metal. Others have said the same. Some have said much more. You have to experience it for yourself."

Danny stepped closer, so near that he could almost have reached out a hand to that strange, alien chassis. He found that he had to remind himself to breathe. His lips formed a question far too clinical for what he was feeling, but it was an important one. "Is there… organic evidence?" Bodies? he wanted to ask. Prisoners?

"Yes. A few samples, nothing more. Some pictures. I can show you to them next. He keeps them in cold storage. Mr. House acquired the vessels through enormous expense , but he didn't prioritize the visitors themselves. He was more interested in what he could learn from their technology. Touch it," she repeated, her dark eyes serious. "Trust me."

He wasn't sure he did trust her at that moment. The longer he looked at the craft, the less he wanted to go any nearer. Had it just been him there, he would almost certainly have walked away. Under Celeste's gaze, however, he felt the male's pressure to perform in the presence of the female. As a young boy, he'd once let a girl goad him to dizzying feats of schoolyard bravery - and to a broken arm, when a rotten branch on the tree he was trying to climb gave way. The girl hadn't even rewarded his pains with a kind look.

"I dare you," he muttered to himself, taking another half-step forward and reaching out the long-healed limb to the metal. From the instant his skin made contact, he

was lonely and lost. He'd come through the cold, dark vacuum, skipping on the folds and wrinkles of space. A mistake, a miscalculation had brought him here, to this too-hot, too-wet, too-populous planet of primitive bipeds. His limbs were the wrong shape, his body too large, his mind almost unusable, but they would make it work in the end. Together.

Diagrams, instructions, lists of materials, and coordinates filled his senses, as distant stars filled him and swam before his eyes. He would go. They would escape, together. Only first he must kill the alien standing beside him. It would interfere.

The part of him that was still Danny recoiled from the suggestion, but he couldn't escape the trap that held his mind in suspension, cold and black and lifeless and already far from earth. He longed to feel again the merciless rays of the only star he knew by name, or even the reflection of his planet's only natural satellite. The light-filled world above may have been lost to him, but it comforted him to think of it now. Maybe his new sun would be half as bright, when he arrived at his new home.

"That's enough." Celeste had his wrist in her hand and she kept him from stumbling as he reeled backward. "It pulled you in hard. What was it like?" The look in her eyes was curious, envious, and almost hungry.

"You know. You've touched it," he choked out harshly. "You could have warned me. That thing is… alive. It's dangerous!"

"It's neither of those things," she said calmly. "It is imbued with some kind of psionic resonance, but there's only a spark left. More than three hundred years ago, there was still enough to catch the mind of Mr. Robert House, but even then he was strong enough to make it work for him instead of the other way around."

This had more frightening implications than he cared to consider, but he didn't want to get into it now. Not with her. "You should have warned me," he repeated firmly, and walked away in a daze, his fingertips still tingling.

Celeste explained and showed him a lot more before before they got back in the elevator, but he barely heard a word of it. Barely saw the curious items before his eyes. His mind kept straying back to the spaceship, inert for now but still waiting after all this time. Danny wondered what kind of Faustian bargains Mr. House had made in the process of adapting this technology for his purposes, and if he'd ever regretted it. One thing Danny no longer entertained was doubt. If Mr. House had fully engaged what Danny had barely touched, then he knew everything that he needed to know.

When they reached the commons floor, Danny started toward his room, but Celeste caught him by the arm.

"I know you have a lot to process, but there are some people you should meet. We wanted to invite you to a welcoming party this evening. Will you come?"

"Who's 'we'?" Danny asked cautiously.

She smiled for the first time since he'd met her. It brought a hidden prettiness to her plain, serious features. "The other tributes. You're one of us now. Everyone there will have lived through the day you've had today. It's tradition and we've all been looking forward to it." She looked a little embarrassed. "To be honest, I didn't want to go last year, but they talked me into it. I was glad I went."

Maybe it was the relief of leaving the basement behind or maybe it was a desire to understand and be understood, but Danny relented quickly. "How can I say no?"

They gathered in a shabby but comfortable recreation room Danny hadn't yet seen. There was food. There were drinks. And there were a lot of people coming and going - perhaps four dozen at one point. The older ones didn't linger long. He spotted Hudson across the room, talking with a small group of people of a similar age. She lifted her glass in a silent toast to him and he nodded in return. When he looked back at her, she was gone.

There seemed to be an invisible line drawn between those who had a place on the Icarus and those who did not. The first group - men and women in their twenties, thirties, and early forties - were openly celebratory. Several expressed the sentiment that they would be glad to have Danny "on board." The others were quieter and more reserved in ways that went beyond the fact that they were, by and large, older. He saw no bitterness among these at a casual glance, though - nothing like Aberforth's naked venom, at any rate.

The party resolved into a sort of school reunion, as those who had graduated in recent years reminisced about teachers they'd had in common, and hijinks they'd gotten up to in their student days. Though nonplussed at first, Danny found himself joining in with the laughter and providing the latest news from the university - who among the dusty old professors had retired in the last year, what else had changed. Very little had, really, but they still hung onto his every word.

Many of these people had a story similar to his own, he found - orphans and foundlings thrown upon the Followers' charity at an early age. School had been their family, and in coming here they had lost that. It was clear they had found a suitable replacement, though, from the way they talked about their families, friends, and work.

A few drinks in, and Danny found himself in conversation, quite by accident, with a much older man who introduced himself as Damon Golding. Like a handful of the other attendees, he had been recruited by virtue of his school test scores from the populace of Vegas itself. He had never lived anywhere else.

"I was several years younger than you. Only eighteen," he explained. "As a native of this city, I was terrified of Mr. House. Awed. When he spoke to me and said he wanted me to come work in his tower, I couldn't refuse. I said goodbye to my family that day and haven't looked back since, despite how much my 'faith' changed when I met my idol… and lost him on the same day."

Danny belatedly remembered where he'd heard the name - had it really been only three days? - and almost choked on an ice cube.

"Your niece, Kirsten, doesn't even know if you're alive. Your brother is dead, she said. Was it worth it, losing your family that way?"

A wistful smile spread over the old man's face. "Ah, dear girl. She remembers me. I've watched her life, from a distance, of course. I saw the banns posted when she married. I've walked the streets of her neighborhood and nodded to the children, not sure which ones were hers. In my chambers, I have some of her work on display - not her paintings of Mr. House, but of other people. She always was good at art."

"Couldn't you have gone back for a visit? Or is that against the rules?"

"I could have, once I had earned sufficient trust. But most choose not to. Once you know, it cuts you off from the old way of looking at the world. I had my life and she had hers. They didn't really mix." He looked Danny in the eye. "Do you want to go back to the NCR, knowing what you know?"

He didn't know what to say and Damon didn't press him for an answer. Not long after that, Danny lost track of the night altogether. He didn't think he was drinking all that much, but he was very tired and inclined to forget himself. Gentle, laughing hands delivered him to bed and he wasn't aware of anything else until very late the next morning.

"I'd like another game," Danny growled, not even waiting for Mr. House to materialize. He spun the board around, taking white for himself this time, and threw his first move out as a challenge. "Also some tomato juice. Or something." A headache was pounding in his temples and the cold hash he'd scrounged up in the cafeteria had settled uneasily in his churning stomach.

The voice came before the form this time. "Of course, my boy, of course." The hologram didn't bother with the facsimile of a door this time, but simply appeared on the couch across from him and pushed one of his own pawns forward gently. There was a touch of anxiety to the unctuous voice this time. "Are you quite alright? I've watched you throughout the process of discovery, but one never knows exactly what a human being is thinking."

"I'm upset," Danny said, studying the board and choosing a defensive opening, "because of the situation I find myself in. I have less than a year to choose between two options, and both are terrifying in their own right." He looked at Mr. House. "What would you do in my place? What are you going to do?"

"Were I human, with human advantages and limitations, I would most certainly go. Unlike you, however, I don't have to choose."

Danny scowled. "So you're duplicating your consciousness? Having your cake and eating it too?"

"Not quite." He selected a piece and moved it purposefully. "My people decided long ago that a passionate, powerful AI was a liability, particularly in a closed system like the ship. Or this complex, for that matter. I lent the structures of my mind to the program that will assist the Icarus in its navigation, but it lacks personality or a will of its own. In no sense will I be leaving next year.

"The departure of the ship will initiate a challenging transition on this continent and beyond. The influx of technology that we're preparing to hand to our allies through our intermediaries among the Followers will allow humanity to ascend rapidly again, despite the risks that entails. I have, of course, offered to assist Weaver in the years to come, though I strongly suspect that he and the other leaders intend to… phase me out, so to speak. Well, I suppose it is time. Maybe they'll keep me on in my current capacity as a museum piece. I do have the means to pull my own plug at any time. They left me that, at least." For the first time, there was a note of bitterness in the ghost's voice that his smile didn't quite conceal.

Danny was taken aback and barely noticed when another one of his pieces was taken. After all that time, all that effort, why would he just give up? A sudden suspicion floated up in his mind. "Why should I - why should any of us - believe you? As much time as you spent with that damned black ship down there, I know you want to go. How could you not? I also don't believe that you would accept your death like a philosopher. It doesn't suit you."

"They shouldn't believe me, no," Mr. House answered agreeably. "By now, they will have gone over the program with a fine-toothed comb, discovering the back-doors I left for myself and removing them. I trust them to be thorough. Truth be told, I haven't looked yet. I will, though - it's in my nature to want to survive. Like any living creature." Unexpectedly, he moved his queen and finished the game. "Check mate. Another game?"

I believe. I mean, I did before, but now it's real. That means I have a decision to make.

Danny was surprised at how calm he felt coming down from Mr. House's domain. Detached even. All the walk back to his room, it felt like he was viewing the world through a heavy pane of glass. More than anything, wanted to talk to someone on the outside, and for the first time he felt like a real prisoner. He thought he might finish his letter to Rachel. His old classmate would never see it, and she certainly couldn't give him any advice, but it might help him to get his thoughts in order.

Blundering along absently, he almost stepped into the wrong room - twice - but when he finally arrived at his own, the door was ajar and the lights were on. Incensed at the intrusion, he stormed in and found Aberforth, the last person he wanted to talk to, reclined in his chair. The odious man was reading the copy of A History of New Vegas that had lain untouched on Danny's bedside table since his arrival.

Before he could say anything, he looked up and gave him an oily smile. "I hope you don't mind my letting myself in. Interesting book. Wrong on almost every particular, of course, but it's fascinating to see an outsider's perspective on House's little experiment."

Danny wasn't in the mood to bandy words with the likes of this. He wanted peace and quiet to mull over his thoughts. He also wanted a nap. This time around, he didn't even make an attempt to be polite. Why should he? The man was trespassing.

"Get out. Now."

Aberforth didn't budge, but he did return the book to its place. "Thought you might need a friendly ear. You've had quite a shock. And now you get to choose. Do you go or do you spend your life wondering what could have been? Don't you feel special?"

Danny didn't miss the mocking tone. From somewhere inside, he found a unfamiliar feeling of pride and superiority. "There's nothing I need from the likes of you. You're choking on sour grapes because you're not good enough to even go near the Icarus. At least I have options."

The unctuous countenance dissolved into an ugly sneer. "And you are welcome to them, boy." Aberforth extracted his bulk from the chair and waddled slowly past him to the door, pausing with his hand on the knob. "Me, myself, and I will be safe and sound down here when you and the others are so much blackened carbon circling the earth. May your privilege bring you much comfort then, you and the rest of the 'chosen ones'." This curse finally drove Danny to lay hands on the man, grabbing him by one pudgy arm and pushing him into the hallway with a warning.

"Stay away from me. I'd rather die as myself than live as someone like you."

Lying alone on his bed, alternately thinking and dozing, Danny missed lunch. A soft knock in the evening brought him dinner, though he didn't see the person who had delivered it. He was hungry by then, but let it grow cold anyway. His thoughts swirled around and finally took the form of half-legible poetry scrawled onto the ink-spattered verso of his letter.

Why does there have to be a choice? Just make me go. Make me spend my life in the belly of the beast, tinkering with a dirty fusion engine in the dark spaces between the stars.

If I choose to stay - to cling to the one irradiated cinder that is my birthright - then I'll regret it forever.

If I choose to go, I commit my descendants to generations spent in transit. Humanity's grandest vault would become their prison and mine. There'd be no turning back.

My biggest fear is not disaster. That would be over in an instant.

What if we're lonely out there? What if we have regrets?

Before he could explain himself to Rachel - to apologize for being cryptic and maudlin, probably - he was asleep again, dreaming of long journeys and a destination he'd never see.

The next morning, he took a seat at the same table as Lila and others their age and ate a hearty breakfast, making up for his skipped meals the previous day. He didn't try to talk to them, but listened, letting the normality of the conversation wash over him. It helped. When, at the end of the meal, she wished him a good day, he responded in kind without any trace of bitterness. He'd already decided where he'd do his thinking today.

Danny could have sworn he saw dismay on Maria's immovable features when he made his request in the elevator. Her diplomatic protocols were running full-tilt to deny him - politely, of course - when a whisper from an ever-observant eye overrode her. "Going up, sir," she conceded, the mechanical voice sounding decidedly hesitant. "Mind the edge, please. It's not in good repair."

Always the busybody, Mr. House followed him onto the roof, his form indistinct in the bright sunlight, insubstantial so far from his emitters. Danny wasn't having it. "I want to be alone." In a moment, the ghost was gone, leaving him to move as close as he dared to the crumbling balustrade. It was the view he was after, not the company. He'd already heard everything he needed from Mr. House, he decided. It was people he wanted to think about.

The cloudless sky was like a bronze bowl above him, trapping the heat above the city in a shimmering dome. Every breath brought the oven inside him, choked him, and threatened to drive him back down into the climate-controlled corridors. There was no movement of air to speak of, and precious little commerce in the streets far below. Common wisdom said that everyone slept at this time of the day, or whiled away the hours inside.

The well-baked city was waiting to wake up, just like the wider world beyond his view. In every direction he cared to look, civilization was slowly arising from the dead, sending out their emissaries with wires, rails, and weapons. Beneath the fallow field to the northeast, the sod scraped membrane-thin, something new and marvellous and terrifying slouched toward birth. Still keeping his vigil as an outsider, Danny bore witness to this expectation without committing himself to it. He could still go back home, whatever that meant. He could stay and be a part of what Mr. House's children intended for earth. If he chose, he could go… on. Each choice had its dangers, and he was no longer sure of what he wanted.

He lingered there until he was faint and his limbs felt as if they were melting, at which point he crawled back inside the elevator and pressed his palms against his eyes until the sunbursts faded and his head cleared.

"Mr. House?" he said aloud. "I'm ready. I'll go down to them now."

After considerable searching, Danny found the person he was looking for in the recreation center, watching a children's basketball scrimmage, occasionally shouting encouragement to the players. Without any preamble at all, he spoke up boldly.

"I've made my decision. I'll go."

Corum looked up at his approach and listened to Danny's disoriented explanation patiently, his normally lazy expression sharp and piercing. "Are you sure? You haven't had much time at all. So, you played a game with the old man, baked your brains out up top, and now you know? Don't rush into this."

"I'm not. I want to be a part of things. If I stay here, I'll spend my life regretting it." This was an inadequate way of explaining the revelation he'd received on the mountain, but Corum seemed to understand.

He stood up and clapped him warmly on the shoulder. "Well then. I guess a celebration is in order. Give me five minutes - my son's game is nearly done - and we'll go talk to the communication team about making the announcement. They'll want to know. It's always a bit of a holiday when someone new commits." He winked knowingly. "Fair warning. You are going to meet a lot of people today. I know you love that part."

He was right, of course. Gathered in the main dining area, many people came to welcome or congratulate him. There were hugs, handshakes, and one chaste kiss (from a joyfully-tearful Lila), along with more conversations than Danny had ever had in a single day. It was overwhelming. It was exhausting. It was also rather nice. For the first time in his life, he felt welcome. Accepted. A part of a family.

When he finally broke away from the party, many hours later, it was out of sheer exhaustion. There was one more thing he needed to do, however. Pulling out his crumpled letter and smoothing it for the hundredth time, he resisted the urge to blot out everything he'd already written and begin again or trash the whole thing. No, let her read it, he decided. It's a goodbye note now. Not just for her, but for everything. He added a fresh page and wrote his conclusion.

I'm going. I guess I'm one of them now. Forget what I wrote before - this is what I was meant to do. If this actually gets delivered, if you don't hate us for the problems we're leaving behind, please accept my good wishes. In a different life, I might have given them to you in person.

You see, Rachel, if I have one regret, it's that I never really talked to you, or not the way I wanted to. If I had, I mightn't have been chosen, and that would have been an adventure of its own. I guess we'll never know.

Your admirer,

Daniel Mueller