A Million Suns: An Across the Universe Novel Read online

  That’s the question that brings me down here every day. The question that makes me open my parents’ cryo chambers and stare at their frozen bodies. Will we ever land? Because if this ship is truly lost in space with no chance of ever reaching the new planet . . . I can wake my parents up.

  Only . . . I promised Elder I wouldn’t. I asked him, about a month ago, what was the point of keeping my parents frozen? If we’re never going to land, why not just wake them up now?

  When his eyes met mine, I could see sympathy and sorrow in them. “The ship is going to land.”

  It took me a while to realize what he meant. The ship will land. Just not us. So—I keep my promise to him, and to my parents. I won’t wake them up. Not when there’s still a chance their dream of arriving at the new world is possible.

  For now I’m willing to let that chance be enough. But in another ninety-eight days? Maybe then I won’t care that the ship might still land. Maybe then I will be brave enough to push the reanimation button and let these cryo boxes melt all the way.

  I lean up so my eyes are level with my father’s, even though his are sealed shut and behind inches of blue-specked ice. I trace my finger along the glass of the cryo chamber, outlining his profile. The glass, already fogged from the heat of the room, smooths under my touch, leaving a shiny outline of my father’s face. The cold seeps into my skin, and I flash to the moment—just a fraction of a second—when I felt cold before I felt nothing.

  I can’t remember what my father looks like when he smiles. I know his face can move, his eyes wrinkle with laughter, his lips twitch up. But I can’t remember it—and I can’t envision it as I stare through the ice.

  This man doesn’t look like my father. My father was full of life and this . . . isn’t. I suppose my father is in there, somewhere, but . . .

  I can’t see him.

  The cryo chambers thud back into place, and I slam the doors shut with a crash.

  I stand slowly, not sure of where to go. Past the cryo chambers, toward the front of the level is a hallway full of locked doors. Only one of those doors—the one with the red paint smudge near the keypad—opens, but through it is a window to the stars outside.

  I used to go there a lot because the stars made me feel normal. Now they make me feel like the freak that nearly everyone on board says I am. Because really? I’m the only one who truly misses them. Of all the two-thousand-whatever people on this ship, I’m the only one who knows what it is to lie in the grass in your backyard and reach up to capture fireflies floating lazily through the stars. I’m the only one who knows that day should fade into night, not just click on and off with a switch. I’m the only one who’s ever opened her eyes as wide as she can and still see only the heavens.

  I don’t want to see the stars anymore.

  Before I leave the cryo level, I check the doors of my parents’ chambers to make sure they locked properly. A ghost of an X remains on my father’s door. I trace the two slashes of paint with my fingers. Orion did this, marking which people he planned to kill next.

  I turn, looking toward the genetics lab across from the elevator. Orion’s body is frozen inside.

  I could wake him up. It wouldn’t be as easy as pushing a reanimation button, like waking my parents would be, but I could do it. Elder showed me how the cryo chambers were different; he showed me the timer that could be set for Orion’s reanimation, the order of the buttons that needed to be pushed. I could wake him up, and as he sputtered back to life, I could ask the question that hollows me out every time I look at his bulging eyes through the ice.

  Why?

  Why did he kill the other frozens? Why did he mark my father as the next one to kill?

  But more importantly, why did he start killing now?

  Orion may believe that the frozen military personnel will force the people born on the ship to be soldiers or slaves . . . but why did he start unplugging them when planet-landing is impossibly far away?

  He’d hidden from Eldest for years before Elder woke me. He could have stayed hidden if he hadn’t started killing.

  So I guess my real question isn’t just why, but . . .

  Why now?

  3

  ELDER

  I STARE AT MARAE, MY MOUTH HANGING OPEN. “WH-WHAT the frex do you mean?” I finally stammer.

  Marae rolls her shoulders back, straightening her spine and making herself appear even taller. My eyes flicker to the other Shippers, but I notice that hers do not. She doesn’t need them to affirm who she is or what she believes. “You have to understand, Eld . . . Elder,” Marae says. “Our primary duty as Shippers is not to fix the engine.”

  My voice rises with anger and indignation. “Of course your frexing duty is to fix the engine! The engine is the most important part of the whole ship!”

  Marae shakes her head. “But the engine is only a part of the ship. We have to focus on Godspeed as a whole.”

  I wait for her to continue as the engine churns noisily behind us, the heartbeat of the ship.

  “There are many things wrong with Godspeed; surely you’ve noticed.” She frowns. “The ship isn’t exactly new. You know about the laws of motion, but have you studied entropy?”

  “I . . . um.” I glance around at the other first-level Shippers. They’re all watching me, waiting, and I don’t have the answer they want to hear.

  “Everything’s constantly moving to a more chaotic state. A state of disorder, destruction, disintegration. Elder,” Marae says, and this time she doesn’t stutter over my chosen name. “Godspeed is old. It’s falling apart.”

  I want to deny it, but I can’t. The whirr-churn-whirr of the engine sounds like a death rattle ricocheting throughout the room. When I shut my eyes, I don’t hear the churning gears or smell the burning grease. I hear 2,298 people gasping for breath; the stench of 2,298 rotting bodies fills my nose.

  This is how fragile life is on a generation spaceship: the weight of our existence rests on a broken engine.

  Eldest told me three months ago, Your job is to take care of the people. Not the ship. But . . . taking care of the ship is taking care of the people. Behind the Shippers are the master controls, monitoring the energy sources applied to the rest of the ship’s function. If I were to smash the control panel behind Marae, there would be no more air on the ship. Destroy another panel, no more water. That one, light. That other one, the gravity sensors go. It’s not just the engine that’s the heart of the ship. It’s this whole room, everything in it, pulsing with just as much life as the 2,298 people on this level and the one below.

  Marae holds her hand out, and Second Shipper Shelby automatically passes her a floppy already blinking with information. Marae swipes her fingers across it, scrolling down, then hands it to me. “This past week alone we’ve had to perform two major fixes to the internal fusion compartment of the solar lamp. Soil efficiency is way below standard specs, and the irrigation system keeps leaking. Food production has barely been sufficient for over a year, and we’ll soon be facing a shortage. Work production has decreased significantly in the last two months. It’s no small thing to keep this ship alive.”

  “But the engine,” I say, staring at the floppy, full of charts with arrows pointing down and bar graphs with short stumps at the end.

  “Frex the engine!” Marae shouts. Even the other Shippers break their immobile masks to look shocked at Marae’s cursing. She takes a deep, shaky breath and pinches the bridge of her nose between her eyes. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “It’s fine,” I mutter, because I know she won’t go on until I say this.

  “Our duty, Elder, is clear,” Marae continues, clipping her words and holding her temper in check. “Ship over planet. If there is a choice between improving the life aboard the ship and working on the engine to get us closer to Centauri-Earth, we must always choose the ship.”

  I grip the floppy, unsure of what to say. Marae rarely reveals what she’s feeling, and she never loses control. I’m not used to seeing anything on
her face beyond calm composure. “Surely we could make some sacrifices in order to get the engine back up to speed. . . .”

  “Ship over planet,” Marae says. “That has been our priority since the Plague and the Shippers were developed.”

  I’m not going to let this go. “That’s been . . .” I try to add up the years, but our history is too muddled by lies and Phydus to know exactly how long that’s been. “Gens and gens have passed since the ‘Plague.’ Even if the ship is the top priority, in that amount of time, we must have come up with some way to improve the engine and get us to the planet.”

  Marae doesn’t speak, and in her silence, I detect something dark.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” I demand.

  For the first time, Marae turns to look to the other Shippers for assurance. Shelby nods, a tiny movement that I almost don’t notice. “It was before I was named First Shipper. Before you were born. The First Shipper then was a man named Devyn.” Marae’s eyes flick to Shelby one more time. “Information about the engine has always been—selectively known.”

  Which means, of course, that as few people as possible know the truth.

  “I was apprenticing then,” Marae continues, “and I remember that Elder—the other Elder, the Elder before you—”

  “Orion,” I say.

  She nods. “Eldest sent him to do some maintenance on the ship, and when he came back, he didn’t report to Eldest. He went straight to Devyn. Whatever he said then . . . it made an impact on Devyn. All research ceased for a while after that.”

  “The Shippers went on strike?” I lean forward, shocked. Of everyone on Godspeed, the Shippers are the most loyal. I don’t know if it’s because we trusted them even without Phydus, or if it’s because they’re genetically engineered to be loyal, or if it’s simply because they, like Doc and a handful of others, like the Eldest system of rule, but whatever the reason, the Shippers are unswerving in their loyalty.

  “They didn’t strike exactly, not like the weavers did last week. They did all their duties as normal. Except for engine research.”

  “What made them start researching the engine problems again?” I ask. I’m vaguely aware of the other Shippers in the room, the deep silence, the uncomfortable way they hold themselves, but my attention is focused on Marae.

  “Elder died,” she says simply.

  She means Orion—when Orion was Elder, he faked his own death to avoid a very real death at the hands of Eldest.

  “After that,” Marae goes on, “First Shipper Devyn resumed research on the engine. Although . . . the research was even more closely hidden than before. Fewer Shippers were allowed access to the engine, and Devyn was not exactly, well, not exactly forthright with Eldest. When I took his place, I carried on as he trained me. But . . . I started to notice . . . irregularities.”

  “Irregularities?”

  Marae nods. “Things didn’t add up. Some of the engine’s problems seemed new—as if intentionally done, and recently. All records of past research were gone—destroyed, probably, as we’ve never been able to discover them.”

  So Devyn had misled his apprentice, Marae. Whatever Orion had told him had made Devyn change everything, even going so far as to hide information from his own Shippers and Eldest. Orion once told me that Godspeed was on autopilot, that it could get to Centauri-Earth without us. Why would he say that if he’s the one who knew the problems with the engine went deeper than anyone else thought?

  “Eldest started to realize this too, didn’t he?” I ask.

  Marae looks down at her hands. “The Eldest’s job is to take care of the people. The Shippers’ job is to take care of the ship. But before he . . . before he died, I think, yes. He’d realized something wasn’t right.”

  I rub my face with both my hands, remembering where I first heard those words. Remembering the way Eldest had spent more and more time on the Shipper level, in those last weeks before Orion killed him.

  How long has this been going on? Eldest told me my focus had to be on the people, but we can’t have been the only Eldests to realize that we had to focus on the engine too. What happened to them? It all connects at the so-called Plague, the beginning of the lies, the beginning of Phydus. Somewhere between the Plague and now, the truth was lost, and we, all of us, me and Eldest and the Shippers and everyone else, whether we were on Phydus or not, allowed ourselves to believe blindly what others told us.

  “I’m . . . done,” I say, throwing my hands back down. “I’m done with the lies, with the ways things used to be. What exactly is wrong with the ship’s engine? If it’s not a matter of fuel efficiency, what is it? Are we going too fast? Are we going too slow? What?”

  Now Marae slouches. “We’re not going too fast or too slow.” She looks sad, worry in her eyes. “We’re not going at all.”

  4

  AMY

  I CHECK THE CLOCK ON A FLOPPY WHEN I GET BACK TO MY room in the Hospital. Crap. It’s later than I’d thought it was. Every day I’ve been spending more and more of the morning in the cryo level. At first it was to run. But then I quit running. Now I just go and force myself to remember one thing I miss from Earth, one thing in as great detail as I can. And then, eventually, I force myself to say goodbye to my parents. Again.

  The solar lamp clicks on, illuminating the entire Feeder Level. Even though I have the metal shade pulled over the only window in my room, a sliver of light slices across the floor.

  Morning has officially sprung. Great.

  I slam my hand against the button on the wall by the door. Beep! A few moments later, a little metal door in the wall slides open, and a waft of steam floats into the room.

  “That’s it?” I say to the small pastry that lies inside. I pull it out. Wall food has never been very appetizing, but this is the first time I can say that it’s small. The whole thing fits in my palm in a flat, depressed sort of way. Two bites later, and breakfast is over.

  Someone knocks on my door. Even though the door is locked, un­reasonable panic flares in my heart.

  “Amy?”

  “Doc?” I ask as I zip open the door to my bedroom. His solemn face greets me.

  “I wanted to check in on you,” he says, stepping inside.

  “I’m fine,” I say immediately. Doc has offered, more than once, to give me pale blue med patches. They’re for “nerves,” he says, but I don’t want to bother. I don’t trust the little patches he doles out instead of pills; I don’t trust any medication made on this ship that also once made Phydus.

  “No,” Doc says, waving his hand dismissively. “I mean—well. Hrm. I’m worried about . . . about your safety.”

  “My safety?” I plop down on my unmade bed. Doc glances at the only chair in my room, the one at my desk, but he doesn’t sit down. A jacket is slung over the back of the chair, and floppies and books I’ve pilfered from the Recorder Hall clutter the desktop. He probably wouldn’t want to sit anywhere without an antiseptic wipe and some Lysol.

  Not that there is any Lysol here.

  Doc’s stance is awkward; he keeps his arms close to his body, and his back is too straight. But his face is very serious. “I’m sure you’ve noticed the increased . . . Well, it’s clear now that there are no more traces of Phydus in the people’s systems. And now we’re left with . . . The ship’s not especially safe at the moment, especially for someone who . . .”

  “Someone who looks like me?” I ask, flicking my long red hair over my shoulder.

  Doc flinches, as if my hair is a curse word shouted in church. “Yes.”

  He’s not saying anything new. I am the only person on this ship who wasn’t born here. And while the residents of Godspeed had the individuality bred out of them so they’re all monoethnic, I’ve got super-pale skin, bright green eyes, and red hair to mark how different I am. The former ship’s leader, Eldest, did me no favors, either, telling the residents that I was a genetic experiment gone wrong. At best, most people here think I’m a freak.

  At worst, they blame
me for the way things have been falling apart.

  Three weeks ago, I went for my regular morning run. I stopped near the chicken farm to look at the baby chicks. The farmer came outside with the feed—he’s a huge man, his arms as thick as my legs. He set the bucket of feed on the ground and just . . . just stared at me. Then he walked to the gate and picked up a shovel. He hefted it up, testing the weight of it and running one finger along the sharp and shiny blade. I started running then, looking over my shoulder. He watched me, shovel in hand, until I was out of sight.

  I haven’t been running since.

  “I’m not stupid,” I tell Doc, standing up. “I know that things aren’t exactly peachy around here.”

  I sling open the door to my wardrobe and pull out a long piece of cloth that’s such a dark shade of maroon it’s almost brown. The material is thin and a little stretchy. Starting behind my left ear, I drape the cloth over my forehead, then under my mass of red hair, then back around, wrapping up my hair so it’s completely hidden behind the dark cloth. When I get to the end, I twist the wrapped hair into a bun and tie the ends of the cloth into a knot. Then I grab the jacket from the desk chair and sling it over my shoulders, pulling the hood up over my head. The last thing I do is tuck my cross necklace under my shirt so no one can see it.

  “It’s not perfect,” I say as Doc inspects my apparel. “But if I keep my head down and my hands in the jacket pockets, it’s hard for anyone to notice how different I am unless they get up close.” And I don’t really plan on getting up close to anyone.

  Doc nods. “I’m glad you’ve thought of this sort of thing,” he says. “I’m . . . well, I’m impressed.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “But I don’t think it’s enough,” he adds.

  I push the hood out of my face and stare at Doc, making a point to meet his eyes. “I. Will. Not. Stay locked up in this room forever. I know you don’t think it’s safe, but I won’t be even more of a prisoner than I already am. You can’t keep me here.”