Across the Universe Page 8

Page 8

  “I’m not that different. ”

  “’Course you are. You know you are. ”

  I shrug. The elevator, now empty, returns to the lobby. I want to escape to it, and Doc, mercifully, lets me go.

  Inside the elevator, my hand hovers over the round number four, then slides down to three. If Harley’s off his meds, maybe I should check in on him before searching for the mysterious second elevator.

  My spirits lift with the elevator. Despite Doc, one of my favorite places to be is the Ward. All my friends are here. The elevator bobs to a halt, and the doors slide open to the third-floor common room. I grin so hard it hurts. The Ward feels more like home than any other place on the ship, even if it’s filled with crazy people.

  Paint splatters onto my sleeve; I look up and see that Harley is attacking a canvas, letting his brush flick off the side of it. There’s a ring of splattered red and blue paint all around where he’s sitting.

  “Hey Harley,” I say. “Doc’s looking for you. ”

  “Haven’t got time for him”—he spares a glance up at me—“49 and 267,” he says before turning back to the canvas and attacking it with his paintbrush again. I grin wryly. You can count on Harley to know exactly when the ship’s going to land. Most people—I mean, most people in the Ward—keep track of the time until the ship lands, but I bet if I asked, Harley would know not only the years (49) and days (267) before we land, but also the minutes and seconds.

  I dodge the flying paint and peer around to see what he’s painting. A koi fish floats in a sea of bright blue, but the light from the fish’s scales and the sparkles on the water’s surface intermingle, as if the fish is a part of the water and the water is a part of the fish. Harley’s used these amazing colors—colors that no one else would think of. The fish’s eyes are bright, bright green, almost yellow, like jade swirled with gold. The scales are shiny and bright, too, but they’re all edged in blood red that looks like it should clash with the lighter colors, but it doesn’t. The red makes it seem more real, somehow, as if the water could spill from the canvas and the fish could swim past our feet.

  “I like this,” I tell Harley after a long moment. “I mean it; this is frexing good. ”

  Harley grunts. He’s in his painting mood, and there’s not really much point in talking to him. Doc will have a hard time giving him his meds, even when he inevitably finds him.

  All around me, a subtle form of chaos flowers. This whole room is filled with creativity and art. It’s actually a pretty brilly place to be. Except now, when everyone’s all busy with their own stuff. I’m starting to feel like I’m a bit of a chutz just standing here while everyone’s so intent on their own work.

  “See you,” I say, but Harley doesn’t notice.

  A pang of guilt bites at my stomach as I reenter the elevator and head to the fourth floor. Eldest wanted me to research the third cause of discord, and I’m definitely not doing that.

  But lies are a cause of discord, too, I think sullenly as the elevator opens.

  The fourth floor is silent. I go past the doors on the left and right, straight to the end of the hall. I put my hand on the doorknob. It’ll be locked. All the doors on the fourth floor are locked. I’ve been here before, tried them all before.

  But the knob twists under my hand, just like Orion said it would, to reveal a small room that contains a desk, a metal box, and, against the far wall—

  Another elevator.

  Above the call button is a biometric scanner. I half expect to be blocked. Eldest has banned me from his chambers and the engine room on the Shipper Level. Even though I have total access to the rest of the ship, I can’t help but think that if he knew, Eldest would ban me from here, too. When I roll my thumb over the scanner, however, the doors slide open immediately.

  There are five buttons inside—one for each floor, and another one labeled “C. ” C? What does C stand for? I think back to the diagram Orion showed me. There was a section marked “Contingency,” but this elevator doesn’t go there; it goes to the area marked “Storage—Important. ” I put my finger on the C button, but I don’t push it in, just feel the curve of the letter. How could there have been a whole other elevator, a whole other level of the ship?

  I lean forward, letting my whole body weight push the button. The doors slide shut.

  The little light over the doors blinks with every floor. Three. Two. One.

  The light blinks out. I descend past the first floor. I start to count the seconds. I stare at the buttons by the door, but the “C” doesn’t light up yet. The elevator keeps sinking. It’s taken twice as long as it normally does to go from floor to floor in the Hospital. . . three times as long. A full minute passes. How big is Godspeed, really?

  With a slight bump, the elevator stops.

  The doors slide open.

  I take a deep breath and step out onto a level of the ship that isn’t supposed to exist.

  It’s dark. “Lights,” I say, pushing my wi-com, but nothing happens.

  The elevator door swishes closed, taking the dim glow of the elevator with it. I put my hand to the nearest wall so that I don’t get too lost, and my finger brushes against a stubby piece of plastic.

  A flickering fluorescent bulb switches on, then another, then another, like dominoes of light from the ceiling. Huh. A light switch. I’ve only seen them in floppies and vids of tech from Sol-Earth. The ship was rewired for wi-com control long before the Plague.

  It’s big, this place. Unusually big. It reminds me of the Keeper Level, actually—lots of space and no one filling it. Big enough for everyone on the ship to stand next to each other, just like the Great Room. There’s a closed door to the left, and a hallway branching off to the right. It’s all metal and hard edges. Apart from the vastness of it, there’s an odd shape to it, almost egg-like and tapering at the roof, making a dome. I’m not sure why the roof rounds—the Feeder Level above is flat ground—but I can see heavy iron pipes extending through the curves.

  This large room is filled with rows and rows of small metal doors. Like the old Sol-Earth bookshelves in the back of the Recorder Hall (locked away from the Feeders, of course), the rows stick out, ready to be browsed, but the contents are all hidden behind tiny square doors with heavily bolted hinges. The air feels cooler here, and the walls seem quieter. As if this is a place where only whispers are allowed, and few people.

  I start down the nearest aisle, small doors on either side of me. The doors are numbered, scribbled with sloppy white paint. Lined along the bottom are little rectangles engraved into each metal door. I squint—they’re flags, half a dozen of them, from Sol-Earth countries. At the end of the row of flags, three letters are engraved into the metal: FRX. The same letters on the star screen. This stuff is old. Part of the original design of the ship. I put my hand on a door—number 34—and start to turn the heavy lever when a flash of red catches my eye.

  One of the doors is already open. A long metal tray extends from the mouth of the door like a tongue, and on that tray is a narrow clear box filled with frozen water speckled with blue glitter. Floating immobile in the ice, as still and silent as this empty room, is a girl.

  It’s her hair that pulls me forward. It’s so red. I’ve never seen red hair before, not outside of pictures, and the pictures never caught the vivacity of these burnished strands tangled in the ice. Harley has a book of paintings he stole from the Recorder Hall, and one of the paintings is just a series of haystacks at different times of the day. He showed me the last painted haystack, the one covered in snow, the one at sunset. Harley went loons over it, saying how the artist was so brilliant to paint stuff with different light, and I said that was stupid, there’s light or there isn’t, and he said I was stupid, on Sol-Earth there were things like sunrise and sunset because the sun moves like a living thing and isn’t just an overrated heat lamp in the sky.

  This girl’s hair is more brilliant than the rays of the s
un on Sol-Earth captured by an artist Harley said was the most genius man ever to live.

  I reach out to touch the glass that traps her inside, and only then do I realize how cold it is. My breath is rising in little clouds of white. My fingertips stick to the glass.

  I stare down at her. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, but also the strangest. Her skin is pale, almost translucent white, and I don’t think it’s just from the ice. I lay my hand on top of her glass box, above her heart. My skin is a dark shadow over the luminescence of hers.

  This girl is definitely not monoethnic. She’s not like anyone else on Godspeed. Her skin, her hair, her age—my age!—her very shape. . . short, but slender with an enticing curve to her breasts and hips.

  How can this girl fit into the monoethnic no-differences-at-all world Eldest says provides perfect peace?

  My eyes devour her body, then drift back to her breasts. The ice is a little foggy there, teasing me, but I can see enough to know they’re lush, and even if they’re frozen, I imagine that if they were warmed up. . .

  “Elder!” I jump away from the clear box, as startled as I would have been if the beauty inside had suddenly awoken.

  But it’s just Doc.

  “What are you doing down here? And how did you get down here in the first place?” Pause. “How did you even know about this place?”

  “I took the elevator. ” I try to appear brilly, but my heart’s banging around in my chest.

  “You shouldn’t be down here. ” He frowns. He touches the wi-com button behind his left ear. “Com link: Eldest,” he says.

  “No! Don’t com Eldest! I’ll go!” I say, but I don’t want to go, I want to look more at the girl with sunset hair.

  Doc shakes his head at me. “It’s dangerous down here. Touch those buttons,” he nods toward a little black electrical box at the frozen girl’s head, “and you could wake her. ”

  I look at the box. It’s simple. On the top are three buttons: ELECTRICAL PULSE, CHECK DATA, and, under a clear protective case with a thumbprint scanner, a yellow button labeled “REANIMATION. ” Wires extending from it go back into the glass box; I follow the tubes with my eyes to her perfect cherry mouth.

  “I won’t touch it,” I say, but Doc’s already turned away from me.

  “Elder’s down here,” he says, and I know those words aren’t for me, but for Eldest, who must have connected to Doc’s wi-com. “Yes,” Doc says. Pause. “I don’t frexing know. ” He eyes me again, a cold, evaluating look I have not seen since the days I was his patient. Doc touches the wi-com, and Eldest is disconnected. I know it won’t be long before Eldest comes down here and drags me back to the Learning Center.

  “Who is she?” I ask. I want to know all I can, while I can.

  Doc narrows his eyes at me, but he bends down, looks at the front of the metal door. “Number 42. I was examining all the forties today, just a visual check that all is clear. ” He shakes his head. “I should have finished before going up to the Ward,” he mutters to himself.