A Million Suns atu-2 Read online

  My voice trails off, but Doc doesn’t answer right away. The more I speak, the more I realize how right I am. The Season is just a frexing loon method to rebuild a population.

  “Well, for some gens we had two Seasons,” Doc says defensively. “And we’ve engineered it so many couples have multiple births.”

  For a moment we both stare at each other.

  “It started a few gens ago,” Doc says finally. His voice is hollow; it’s like he’s confessing a sin to me. “We figured it would be best to slow the population growth. We’re having trouble producing enough food as it is.”

  “What happens when we can’t produce enough food?” I ask.

  Doc looks at me silently, and I can tell he’s evaluating whether or not he will tell me. With the Shippers, I can demand truth and be assured they’ll give it. But with Doc, I have to wait and hope. Doc was in favor of Eldest’s use of Phydus, and he was in favor of Orion’s methods — after all, he was the one who kept Orion alive when Eldest ordered him killed. But I don’t think Doc has made up his mind yet on whether or not I’m a good enough replacement for either of these men.

  Apparently, though, I can be trusted with the truth. At least in this case. He finally says, “Eldest had thought of that. We have in storage a supply of over 3,000 black med patches.”

  “Black?” I ask. I’d never seen patches that were black.

  Doc nods curtly. “In the event that the ship is no longer capable of sustaining life, the black patches will be distributed to the ship’s population.”

  And now I understand what the black patches are for. A quick death, rather than a slow one.

  16 AMY

  I PROP HARLEY’S LAST PAINTING UP ON MY BED AND STAND back. His laughing eyes are even with my own, but there’s no Mona Lisa — like illusion that he’s looking at me.

  “So,” I say aloud to painted Harley, “just where is this clue Orion says is here?”

  I’m hesitant to touch the paint — I don’t want to do anything to damage it. Instead, I scan the painting with my eyes, looking for some hidden message from Orion.

  I get lost in the image — there’s Harley’s face, and the stars, and the tiny koi fish swimming around his ankle. There are all the memories. How can someone I knew for so short a time have left such an indelible print on my soul? Seeing him look this way, so happy and free, makes me remember that something about Harley, that spark, that joy, that something that makes me wish he was still here, now.

  I force my eyes to unfocus, to look past the image and into the paint. But there’s nothing there.

  I run my hands along the paint-splattered sides of the canvas. Nothing.

  Then I flip it over.

  I’ve never really looked at the back of the painting before. But now that I do, I notice a faint, almost invisible sketch made with a piece of charcoal or pencil from the looks of it. I squint, lean in closer, then pick the whole painting up and hold it up to the light.

  A small animal — this isn’t Harley’s sketching; his pictures were much more realistic. This cartoonish creature looks a little like a hamster, but with huge, exaggerated ears… a bunny. And beside it, a circle… or, rather, a flattened circle that’s more of an oval. In the center of the circle is a tiny square that looks like one of those super-thin memory cards Mom had for her fancy camera. It’s stuck to the canvas with something tacky, but when I slip my fingernail under the edge of it, it pops right off.

  I hold the object up on the tip of my index finger. Black plastic encases a thin gold strip of metal woven with silver threads of circuitry. What is this? It seems so familiar. I turn it over, but the other side is just hard plastic.

  And then it hits me — I have seen something like this before. I rush to my desk and pick up the small screen that showed Orion’s first video. Connected to a small port in the corner of the screen is an identical piece of square black plastic. The thing from the back of Harley’s painting is like a memory card… if I could just figure out how to swap it with the one already there.

  I squint at the back of the painting again, hoping for some other clue. And there, just under the sketch, are tiny words, barely legible.

  Follow me down the rabbit hole.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” I say.

  It takes Elder about 2.5 seconds to reach my room after I com him.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks, skidding through the door.

  I laugh at the way his eyes search my room, looking for a dragon to slay for his damsel in distress. “How’d you get here so quick?”

  “I was in Doc’s office.”

  The laughter fades. In the quiet, I’m reminded of the name he called me, freak, and the shape of Elder’s lips as he formed the word.

  “Listen, Amy, I’m sorry.” I start to open my mouth, but Elder continues. “Seriously. I never meant to say that. I’m really sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too,” I say, looking down at my hands. It’s silly for me to dwell on one word said in anger when we have the whole ship to think of.

  Silence spreads between us, but at least he doesn’t look away from me.

  “So,” Elder says finally, “what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I say. “Just… strange. I found this.”

  I hold out the small black chip I peeled from the back of Harley’s painting and the screen I found in Dante’s Inferno.

  “A mem card and a dedicated vid screen!” Elder says, laughing. “I haven’t seen these in years! Floppies pretty much replaced them.”

  “How do you use this mem card thing?” I ask, offering it to him.

  “A dedicated vid is just a digital membrane screen,” Elder says as he gently pops out the original memory card and replaces it with the new one. The square chip snaps to the screen as if there was a magnetic pull between them. “It’s like a floppy, but you have to have a mem card in the back to make them work.” He places the old mem card on the edge of my desk, then flips the dedicated vid over and swipes his finger across the screen. A glowing square pops up.

  “Here, let me,” I say, taking the video screen from him and pressing my thumb onto it. The glowing box fades away, replaced with a video that starts playing automatically.

  “That’s… that’s the cryo level,” I whisper. The angle makes it look like security camera footage.

  Elder shakes his head. “That’s not possible; the cams down there were destroyed before Orion started to…”

  Started unplugging the other frozens.

  For several moments, nothing happens on the screen. I’m just about to ask Elder if it’s paused or broken when there’s movement at the corner of the video.

  A shadow first, snaking across the floor like a clawed hand.

  And then…

  “That’s me,” Elder whispers.

  I glance at him, unsure of why his tone is so high and worried.

  “Let’s — uh. Let’s not watch this. I don’t think we should watch this.” His hand moves to stop the video, but I snatch it away.

  “Why?” I demand.

  Elder bites his lip, worry smeared across his face.

  The Elder on the screen creeps forward. There’s no sound to the video, which makes it even weirder when on-screen Elder stops as if he’s heard something. After a moment, he turns to the square door that looks like it belongs in a morgue. He twists it open and slides the tray out.

  And then I’m not looking at Elder anymore. I’m looking at me.

  That’s me, frozen in ice. So still. I look dead. Horror curls my lip. That’s my flesh, my body. Naked. That’s Elder, looking at my naked body.

  “Elder!” I screech, and smack him upside his head.

  “I didn’t know you then!” he says.

  “I didn’t know you were such a creeper!” I shout back.

  “I’m sorry!” Elder ducks away from me.

  The Elder on the screen looks up suddenly, drawing our attention back to the video. But after listening, head cocked like a worried bird, the Elde
r on-screen dips his attention back to me. He raises a hand — I notice that it’s shaking slightly — and places it on my glass box, just over where my heart is. Then he jumps — clearly startled by whatever sound he’s hearing in the background — and dashes off-screen.

  “You just left me there?” I ask. I knew he had, he’d confessed it to me already — but to see it like that. To see me, left there so carelessly, helplessly.

  Elder looks miserable. He’s not watching the screen at all; he’s just watching me, this look on his face like he wishes I’d scream and punch at him and just get it over with.

  But I’m not mad anymore… at least, I’m not as mad as I am sad. And slightly disgusted. I don’t know how to put into words that sick, bile taste on the back of my tongue, so I don’t say anything, I just turn back to the screen.

  For several minutes, nothing happens. I watch as a thin trail of condensation leaks from the edge of my glass coffin and drops with a tiny, silent splash on the floor. I’m already melting.

  Suddenly, I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to watch myself wake up. I can’t relive drowning in cryo liquid, gagging on the tubes in my throat. I shut my eyes and turn my face away, even though it will take much, much longer for the me on-screen to melt all the way. But then Elder sucks in a breath of surprise, and my eyes fly back to the screen.

  There’s another shadow there, wider and longer, creeping slowly toward my frozen self. A shaft of light highlights the side of his neck, the part where a spiderweb of scars reaches behind his left ear.

  Orion.

  The first thing he does is slam me back into the cryo freezer. He locks the door shut and turns to leave.

  But then he pauses.

  He stares for a long moment off-screen, in the same direction Elder had walked away in, and he taps his fingers across the top of the cryo chamber, thinking. Then, slowly, deliberately, he pulls me back out of the cryo chamber. He looks down at me for a moment.

  And then he walks away.

  Orion told me that he got the idea to unplug the frozens from watching Elder unfreeze me. And this is it. This is the moment when he realized how easy it would be to kill people who can’t fight back.

  Static fills the screen.

  “That’s why he destroyed the cams in the cryo level,” Elder says.

  That’s one reason, anyway.

  Elder drops the vid screen on my desk and stands. Hair flops into his face, but I can still see his eyes shift to me. Waiting for me to react.

  But I don’t know how to respond. I don’t know how I feel about this. About the way Elder looked at me, about the way Orion didn’t. My brain can’t process this.

  “Amy?”

  Elder’s head whips up, panic in his eyes. He wasn’t the one who spoke.

  We both rush to the vid screen on the desk. The static has faded. Orion’s face fills the screen, so close up that the camera must have been just inches from him.

  Before the screen fades to black, Orion’s voice rings out clearly. “Amy? Are you ready for this? Are you ready to find the truth?”

  17 ELDER

  THE SCREEN GOES BLANK. ORION’S LAST QUESTION HANGS IN the air, but the image Amy saw of me pulling her out of the cryo chamber fills her eyes.

  “Amy?” I whisper, hesitant.

  She swipes her hand across her face. Her eyes are red.

  “Amy?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says, her voice cracking in the middle. “What’s done is done.”

  And that’s what kills me inside. Because what’s done was done by me. And as much as I wish Amy could see me the way I see her and want me the way I want her, she will never be able to forget the image of me pulling her out of her cryo chamber and walking away. No wonder she doesn’t want to be in the Keeper Level with me.

  I could punch whoever made Amy see this. My fists clench involuntarily. It’s not like I’m so brilly on my own, but I certainly don’t frexing need someone showing Amy what a chutz I was! “Who gave you this?” I demand.

  Her clear green eyes meet mine, her voice steady now. “Orion did.”

  “What?”

  “Orion did. Kind of. I mean, he left the wi-com for me. It has lettering on it, see?” She holds the wi-com out for me. “It’s from a book. The book led me to the painting, the painting led me to… this.”

  “Why did he leave messages for you? What’s he playing at?”

  Amy hesitates, then hands me the mem card that was originally attached to the vid screen. When she presses her thumb against the ID box, the video plays. Orion’s voice calls Amy his contingency plan, seeks her aid for a mission should he have failed, and — I can’t help but notice — if it looks like I am failing too.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “I told you,” Amy says. “Orion left me these clues.”

  “And you think — if you play his little game and solve these clues, then… what?”

  “I don’t know,” Amy says. “But the way he keeps saying someone from Sol-Earth has to make the decision, it makes me think…”

  I remember First Shipper Marae telling me about how Orion influenced the decision to hold back information about the ship’s dead engine, how Eldest tried to have Orion killed soon after. If he made these videos as a way to get the word out on whatever it was that he discovered that led to Eldest trying to kill him, then there really might be a way to get Godspeed flying again.

  This is huge. This — maybe at the end of this loons’ hunt for clues and codes is the solution for the ship’s engine! In which case…

  “We should wake him up,” I say.

  Amy looks at me as if I’ve suggested we give the ship another Season.

  “We could,” I insist. “Wake him. Force him to tell us what he knows.”

  “He doesn’t deserve to be woken.” Amy spits the words out with more vehemence than I’d have expected.

  “But Amy—”

  “Besides,” she adds quickly, “we couldn’t trust him if we do wake him. This”—she jabs a finger at the vid screen—“might be the closest thing to truth we’ll ever get from him.”

  I chew on my bottom lip. I know she wouldn’t like the way I think about Orion. That maybe he was partly right. Not in killing the others, not right like that. But right in attacking Eldest, in learning what he could about the ship and acting on that knowledge. That took chutz, and I sort of envy him for it.

  I’m glad Amy can’t read my mind.

  “This last video, it didn’t have a clue. I think we’re supposed to find the clue in this.” Amy picks up the canvas of Harley’s last painting and flips it over, showing me the sketch of the rabbit fields and the words Follow me down the rabbit hole.

  “You think he hid something in the rabbit fields?” I ask doubtfully. After all, the rabbits don’t burrow holes, they make nests — they’re larger than the rabbits native to Sol-Earth, closer to hares.

  “Yes, exactly,” she says. “Or, maybe he’s referring to another book.”

  Ah. There it is. I’m not a chutz. Amy doesn’t actually think the clue is in the rabbit fields at all — she’s just trying to distract me. She’s probably already got the book she wants in mind.

  But if she needs space, that’s the least I can give her, even if the space she needs spreads out between us like flooding water.

  I watch as Amy silently prepares to face the people outside the safety of her room. She wraps a long length of material around her hair and twists it in a low bun. She drops her cross necklace under her tunic with one hand while reaching for a long-sleeved hooded jacket with the other. She does all of this in a quick, fluid motion, as if she’s done it many times before. I hate the way that hiding who she is has become a habit for her. But I don’t tell her not to bother.

  We don’t really speak again until we’re on the path heading to the Recorder Hall. “Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?” I ask.

  “I’m sure,” she says, and I don’t know if her voice is small becaus
e it has to weave its way through the shadows under her hood or if it’s because she’s hiding her fear. Whatever it is she’s not telling me, though, she’s determined to meet it herself.

  Amy starts down the path toward the Recorder Hall, leaving me to go left, to search for rabbit holes when we both know Orion’s next clue is probably in whatever book she’s thinking of. She looks so… defeated, with her hood pulled up, her shoulders hunched, and her eyes on the ground.

  “No.” I stride forward and in a few steps am by her side. I grab her by the elbow.

  “No?” she asks.

  “I know you’re still mad at me,” I start.

  “No, not really—”

  “You are, and that’s okay, I deserve it. And I know you’re trying to show how strong you are, to prove that you don’t need me, but there’s no reason for us to split up. You’re being stubborn. And listen.” I falter, and my voice drops. “I also know you’re not telling me something. And it’s fine — keep your secrets. But whatever it is that you’re not telling me scares you, and I’m not going to let you be scared and alone. So you’re sticking with me, and I’m sticking with you.”

  Amy opens her mouth to protest.

  “No arguments,” I say.

  And for the first time in a long time, her smile reaches her eyes.

  We visit the rabbit field first, even though I’m fairly sure Amy thinks we’ll find the answers in the Recorder Hall. We don’t talk after my outburst, but somewhere between the soy and the peanuts, we ease into a kind of mutual, friendly silence. It’s not awkward or weird or anything — we’re just strolling along the path next to each other.

  The path narrows just before turning off to the rabbit field, and we both move toward the center at the same time. The back of my hand brushes hers. I snatch it away too quickly and shove it into my pocket, to make sure I don’t accidentally touch her again. When I glance down at Amy to see if she noticed, she glances up at me at the same time. She smiles, and I smile, and she bumps into my shoulder, and I bump into her shoulder, and we both sort of laugh without making a sound.