A Million Suns

I shake my head to clear my mind. This isn’t the time to get sentimental; it’s time to land the ship.



The Shippers cheer as I walk down the corridor toward the Bridge, my feet clanging against the metal grate floor. They reach for me—to shake my hand, to slap me on the back, to just touch me in awe and thanks. When I push through the Energy Room into the Engine Room, the scientists and Shippers give me a standing ovation.



I beam at them.



It’s everything I dreamed it would be.



First Shipper Shelby and the rest of her cadre stand in a line in front of the giant decorated doors that lead to the Bridge. They all salute me when I approach.



“I—uh,” I say, and it’s not until I’m uh-ing that I realize the room is completely silent and they now all want me to make a speech. A speech that consists of more than “uh.”



Frex.



“I—uh—I mean . . .” I swallow, shut my eyes.



“This is not our home,” I say. “We have lived on Godspeed all our lives, but it is not our home. We didn’t choose to be born on a ship, trapped by the walls that keep us safe. But we do choose to be the ones who decide it is time to land. We choose to take the risk, to leave behind this shell, and to see what the rest of the universe has to offer.



“We choose our future. Let’s go home.”



“Home!” Shelby booms, and everyone repeats her word and cheers.



And then it’s time.



Shelby opens the huge doors. She stands to the side, letting her crew—the remaining first-level Shippers—go first. There’s an air of ominous gravity to the whole production; we’re making history, and we’re all aware of it.



I watch them enter the Bridge solemnly, and it feels so wrong that Amy’s not among them. I knew when I first saw her, frozen, that she would change me forever. But she’s changed the whole ship too, the fate of everyone on board.



As the last Shipper enters the Bridge, Shelby turns to me, and she smiles, and I step forward.



“Sir!”



I turn. One of the Shippers runs up to me. “Sir,” he says, “the girl, the red-haired girl—she’s here.”



“Amy?”



He nods. “She’s beating on the Energy Room door, yelling for you.”



“Elder?” Shelby asks, her hand on the Bridge door.



I step back, away from the Bridge and toward the Energy Room door.



And then—



—an explosion rips open the ship.



It feels as if my eardrums have burst, and I lose my footing, crashing to the ground. My head cracks against the solid metal floor, but I’m moving—sliding toward what remains of the Bridge. Someone screams, and the sound is violently cut off. I twist around, and a chair soars across the room, the leg of it skidding across my shoulder, ripping my tunic and the skin underneath. There’s shouting all around, but the sound is drowned out by the ringing metal crashes as tables and desks fly up from the ground. A stab of pain shoots up my leg—a screwdriver is embedded in my calf. I reach down and yank it out, but I’m still sliding across the floor.



I lift my head as high as I can—



The window on the Bridge is gone.



The metal seam that connected the honeycombed glass is twisted, ripped apart, scraggly at the ends like the paintings from Sol-Earth of creepy dead trees in winter. The vacuum of space is sucking the air out of the Bridge and the Engine room so violently that we’re all caught up in its maelstrom, the chairs, desks, tables, tools—and people.



Shelby’s crew is hit the worst—some have caught onto the control tables or the bolted-down chairs, but I don’t see everyone. I do see blood and bone and organs at the front, near the hole—whatever blew apart the Bridge’s window also blew apart the people sitting closest.



A Shipper—Prestyn—tries to stand but stumbles, lunges, and flies through the doors. His body catches on the metal fingers of the broken seams, ripping through him. Great globs of blood float off him in crimson spheres.



I slam into the wall by the Bridge’s doors so hard my bones rattle, but the wall stops me from also flying out the window. I stand, pressing against the back wall for support, trying to breathe through the rushing wind. It won’t take long—minutes maybe—for the vacuum of space to suck out all the air from both rooms.



Clutching the metal supports on the wall, I twist my head around to peer inside the Bridge.



It’s too late—the gaping maw that was once the window has destroyed the Bridge. Shelby clings to a chair that’s bolted to the floor. Her hair is plastered back, and her eyes are red and streaming.



“Don’t!” she screams. “Don’t!”



She means the button. This one, here, by my hand.



The one that would seal the Bridge doors.



The one that would protect us from space—but leave her in it.



She’s reaching for me with one hand, straining, but she’s too far away, she’s just barely too far away, and I’ll never be able to get to her, it’s too late. Too late.



“No, no, no, no, no,” she pleads.



She reaches toward me. Her fingers are almost within reach. If I reached out—maybe I could pull her to safety before I seal the doors shut?



But I can’t take that chance. I can’t risk the whole ship to save one person.



“No,” she whispers.



But I push the button anyway.



The Bridge doors swing shut.



The violent winds die.



It takes a moment before everyone left can stagger back up. Some are bleeding—a few broken bones, a dislocated shoulder, a limp—from the debris that crashed into them. More than their physical injuries, though, is the horror that twists each face, a hollowed-out shocked expression that I doubt will ever fully fade.



It is silent here, but nowhere near as silent as the other side of the door.



58



AMY



I HAVE NEVER RUN SO HARD OR SO FAST AS WHEN I RACED from the Hospital to the grav tube. Still, I knew I would be too late.



And I was.



When I finally got to the Engine Room, I could hear the explosion from behind the door.



And the screams.



Now, the Shipper Level—already packed from the events of the day—falls into a sort of hushed horror. People crowd around me in the Energy Room. The door to the Engine Room dents inward, like a monster is trying to claw it out, but the steel reinforcements hold. We fall back against the far wall anyway, and some people race out of the Energy Room, heading for cover, as if they think Godspeed will continue to protect them even as it’s being ripped apart.



We all stare at the door, but it gives us no answers.



Red lights fade in and out along the edges of the floor and ceiling. The ship’s computer announces, “Breached hull: Bridge,” in a pleasant, cheerful sort of voice.



We wait. A woman opens her mouth to speak, but I quell her with a look. We’re all listening to the silence. Wondering if anyone still lives on the other side of the door.



If Elder survived.



Something smacks against the door. A woman behind me screams, and a man near the hallway shouts, “Frex!” The door moves again—not with the force of a tornado, like before, but instead with a rattle and shake.



Fingers pop out at the door edges.



“They’re alive!” shouts the same woman. And as one, we all rush to the door, prying our fingers into the open crack. Together we strain against the mechanics to slide the damaged door open. The door moves an inch. We all push harder. With a screeching metal-on-metal sound, the door finally, finally gives way.



I see the blood on him first—dripping from a gash in his shoulder, staining his dark skin red. Sweat makes his hair cling to his forehead. His arms strain to cast aside the remains of the door, and he staggers through.



“Elder,” I whisper. My voice cracks in the middle. I feel tears stinging my eyes, but they don’t fall. I almost lost him. Again. It wasn’t until I saw his body on the hatch floor yesterday that I realized how much I cared about him, but even then I couldn’t define my feelings.



A part of me has been holding back from him since I first started to see how devoted he was to me. That part of me wove words into my soul, words like doubt and can’t trust and lust and not worth it. All those words break, all at once, like strings ripped from torn cloth.



Now, though, staring at his grief-stricken face, I don’t think with words at all.



Beyond him, the Shippers are helping each other up. They cry in joy for those who lived and begin to mourn for those who died beyond the sealed Bridge door.



But I’m just looking at Elder, and he’s just looking at me, and everything else disappears.



My hands are shaking. My legs are too—in fact, I’m shaking all over. I want to rush to him, but I can’t. Instead, he’s the one who makes a move. He barrels through the mangled doorway (although he’s limping; why is he limping?) and wraps his arms around me. I collapse into him, but he supports me, lending me his strength when I don’t seem to have any more of my own.



“Oh, God, Elder,” I mutter into his chest, and it’s not much, but it’s the best prayer I’ve got.



He strokes my hair soothingly. The world continues around us—people rushing into or out of the Engine Room, more cries, more reunions—but we are a silent stalwart amid the chaos.



“How did you know?” Elder asks, his nose buried in my hair. The question is so the opposite of everything I am right now—logical words formed into a logical question—that it confuses me at first. I lean back and look up at him. Elder leads me past the remains of the door and through the crowd to a quiet corner in a room nearby. Beyond his shoulder I can still see the chaos of the explosion—Kit has arrived with a posse of nurses and taken charge, corralling the wounded to one area and commanding everyone else to leave. A group of engineers examines the seal-locked door of the Bridge, ensuring that there’s no more danger of exposure.



“The explosion,” Elder says, drawing me back to him. “You knew before, didn’t you? You came here to warn me.”



“I found another one of Orion’s videos. In the armory.”



“Orion—Orion did this?” Elder’s eyes are befuddled; he’s still reeling from the explosion.



“No, not Orion. But . . . someone else has his videos. Someone else knows the codes to the locked doors. I think Orion’s been trying to tell us the way off the ship all along, but someone else found out his secret before we did and they’ve been trying to stop us.”



I hand Elder the floppy with Orion’s video. In the first video I found, Orion seemed certain that there was a choice to be made and that I would make it. But by this last video, he sounds the same way he did in the video of him just after he ran away from Eldest—scared and unsure. Whoever found these videos of Orion clearly agrees that the planet isn’t worthwhile—and will murder anyone who tries to land the ship. The explosion on the Bridge is proof enough of that—it has ensured that even with Centauri-Earth so close, we’ll never land.



I can’t read Elder’s face as he watches the short video—grief, anger, doubt, something else, something empty and painful. But when he looks up at me, all that’s left in his eyes is a hollow sort of nothing.