The Navigator by Pittacus Lore Read Free Book Online Page A

once. I guess this is something I’ll have to handle on my own.
    “You’ll tell her whatever you want,” I say.
    “That’s a great bedtime story,” he scoffs. “That her mom and dad are most likely dead and that they sent me with her on a ship with a bunch of animals to make sure she was safe. How do you explain that to a little girl?”
    I don’t know what to tell him. What I’d tell Ella. What would I tell Zane? My first instinct is the truth, without question. But what if the truth is terrifying? How do you find the middle ground? What if the truth puts her in danger?
    “Maybe you don’t explain it,” I suggest. “Maybe you tell her something that will help to keep her alive andsafe. Even if that means lying to her. You’ll have to ask yourself if her knowing the truth is more important than her being able to fall asleep without the fear of everyone she knows being destroyed in a hail of fire in the middle of the night.”
    Crayton looks up at me. His eyes are bloodshot.
    “I’m not going to lie to her,” he says.
    Ella starts to wake up, stretching and cooing. Crayton is on his feet in an instant, bent over her. I shake my head.
    “When the time comes,” I say, “you’ll do what you have to in order to protect her.”
    I leave him with the baby and retreat to my room.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    BY THE TIME WE HAVE A VISUAL ON EARTH, Ella has a full head of auburn hair. The rest of us are looking unkempt.
    Crayton sports a bushy dark beard that hangs almost to the middle of his chest. There’s a puff of black hair an inch thick on my own head. Zophie keeps her long, red locks tied back with a piece of cloth.
    Actually seeing our destination is reassuring, as we’re starting to run out of supplies. Without ever talking about it, we’ve all been doubling down on rationing, and the result is three gaunt Loric with dark circles under their eyes. Ella is the outlier. She’s practically chubby, which leads me to believe that Crayton has been giving her some of his own food. Not that I mind. The girl can stand now, and will run a little if we’re not careful—the ship wasn’t really made with children in mind and is full of sharp corners. She can even saya few words. Maybe more than a few. It’s hard to keep track of whether she’s making gibberish noises or trying to form words in one of the languages we practice.
    She definitely knows our names at least, even if she does struggle with some of the consonants. We have become “Ex,” “Zoey” and “Ray-un” to her, the last of which is the strangest to hear coming out of her mouth since it could just as easily be her trying to pronounce her father’s name. But there’s no denying that it’s Crayton she’s calling for when she wakes; her eyes light up whenever she sees him.
    And for his part, the way he looks at her has begun to change. No longer is it only with worry, like she’s a fragile bubble he has been tasked with protecting. That’s still there, but under a thick layer of affection.
    When I call everyone to the cockpit to see Earth, even though it’s only a blue pinhead in the distance, Crayton brings Ella with him.
    “You see that?” he asks her, pointing into space. “That’s our new home. That’s where you’re going to grow up.”
    She just coos and pulls on his beard with chubby little fists.
    It’s a few more days before Earth looms large ahead of us and we can discuss where and how we’re going to land. We don’t exactly have the luxury of time or travel, as we’re coasting on the fumes of synthetic fossil fuelsby this time. Based on our angle of approach and the rotation of the planet, we have a very narrow window of where, geographically, we might land. We’re so low on power reserves that we’ll be relying on the force of Earth’s gravitational pull to bring us down to the ground as it is.
    Zophie pores over scans from Earth’s surface, seated in the copilot’s chair. Finally, she points to a spot on the digital map