The grown-ups—that was Mother and Father and the aunts and uncles—started talking about leaving Earth when civil war broke out, but that was about the time the colony ships stopped running. Exploratory missions were aborted; records of habitable planets erased. Father had kept a file on a spot near to the Warp-Way, a Category C, “just in case,” he had said—for even before the war our families were many children over the legal limit, and Earth cities were not safe for us. Still, only haphazard preparations were made, so that when the bombs started falling and the copter fire tore up the grass, rat-tat-tat, we had to leave in a rush. We did not choose our provisions carefully; we took what we could. Keziah remembered to bring her white mice, and we all remembered our Bibles.

Our last times on Earth, then, were driving away through gunfire, against darkness with dark green evergreens whisking by. There was an off-grid launcher in the North; Uncle Alan had connections with a man who said he’d take refugees. It was four hushed, nervous hours in the car, then rushing into the space-craft (the youngest of us had never seen a rocket, and stared, wondering, at the oil-slick metal and the rows of janked-in drop-pods, blackened from years of no scrubbing), then Mr. Halloway (that was the pilot) explained to us that we would traverse the Warp-Way then use the drop pods to land so that he could fly back to Earth. “Category C” was a word the grown-ups kept saying in a quiet, tense way; Ezekiel asked what it meant. Mother explained that it was a planet with air like Earth and some water, but with not very much known about it otherwise. “So our leap through the Warp-Way,” she said, “is a little leap of faith, but we will pray for a Promised Land like God gave the Israelites.”

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Then there was the rocket launch. Father made all of the children, us and the cousins, line up to be counted. These were all of us on the ship:

Mother and Father, with their children:

Heaven (17),

Genny (14),

Ezekiel (10),

Keziah (7),

Ransom (5),

and Eloise (3);

Uncle Robert and Aunt Lydia with their children:

John (14),

Mischa (13),

Maranatha (11),

and Silence (9);

Aunt Eva and Uncle Isaac with their children:

Judah (15),

Moshe (15),

Zion (14),

and Ezra (8);

Aunt Tex and Uncle Enrico with their children:

Cory (19),

River (6),

and Michele (4);

and all the other aunt and uncles: Uncle Alan, Aunt Joy, Aunt Christina, Uncle Juan, Aunt Karina, and Aunt Anastasia.

There were seventeen children and fourteen grown-ups: thirty-one all told. It was a crowded ship and there were just enough drop pods. The actual launch was very loud and bumpy: Eloise and River fussed, and Heaven had to have Aunt Eva’s blanket over her head because of the noise. But many of us squirmed in our seatbelts, excited. Then everything felt light; we were in orbit. The uncles and Mother unclipped and drifted around, but Aunt Eva told them sharply to get back in their seats; they were setting a bad example for the children. We could see the Earth through the porthole, all marbled in blue-green and wreathed in white, with a gold halo round its form. It was a sad feeling, to watch it slowly growing smaller, looking less and less real and more like a map or a photograph in a book. Mother murmured, “If I forget you, O Earth,” and Uncle Isaac said something about Israel, and Uncle Robert and some of the other grown-ups cried. Then the ship turned, and we did not see Earth again.