A Million Suns

I stare up at frozen, immovable Orion, then glance back at the screen.



ORION: Amy, you’re going to have to make a choice. And soon. Look around you. The Eldest system has been dying for generations. I was not the first Elder to rebel, and Elder won’t be the last. Whatever control the Eldests had before is slipping away. The ship is dying. You can see that, can’t you? You can see the rust. You can see how the solar lamp isn’t as bright as it should be. How the plants take longer to grow . . . if they grow at all. How the only thing that had been keeping the people calm and in check was Phydus. I know Elder. I know he’s going to try to rule without Phydus. And nothing could be more dangerous. When the Feeders are off it, when they see what is becoming of their world—then you’ll have a true rebellion on your hands.



I think of the way Luthor’s voice rang, loud and angry, throughout the Recorder Hall. We can do anything we want!



ORION: Godspeed won’t last much longer. It wasn’t designed to last forever. It’s a miracle it’s lasted as long as it has. Here’s the thing—here’s why I need you, Amy, and I need you to make the choice that, for whatever reason, I can no longer make. I know you hate, you must hate me.



Orion leans forward, his face filling the entire screen.



ORION: But did you ever ask yourself why I was unplugging frozens now, of all times?



I suck in a shaky breath; I’d forgotten to breathe.



ORION: Why didn’t I just wait and let some future gen take care of that problem?



Even though he’s on the screen and not really here, I can feel the urgency in his voice all the way deep inside me, in my very bones.



ORION: The choice is coming! And it is a choice. And you—you must decide for everyone.



For a long moment, Orion pauses.



ORION: But I can’t tell you what it is. You’re going to have to find it.



Orion runs his fingers through his hair, in exactly the same way Elder does when he’s worried.



ORION: It took me years to discover the truth, and just as long to accept it. When I met you . . . I know you must hate me because I left people from Sol-Earth to die. . . .



Left them to die? It was so much more than that. He pulled them from their chambers and watched them die. There’s a big difference there. He killed them.



My eyes narrow so that Orion’s recorded face is nothing but a blur. I glance up at the real Orion, frozen behind the glass of the cryo chamber. You have no idea how much I hate you, I think. I could lay at his feet everything that’s wrong in my life now.



ORION: But Amy, you are so special. You’re from Sol-Earth. But you don’t have an agenda like the others . . . like your parents. You didn’t come here with a mission. You—and only you—will be able to determine what choice needs to be made, if the risks are worth it. I can’t trust anyone else to make this choice, not even Elder or those I once counted as friends. I’m going to hide the clues so that only you, someone from Sol-Earth, could find them. Trust no one, Amy. Not Elder, not Doc, not anyone from my past. They’re from Godspeed, not Sol-Earth. They won’t know—they can’t know—that there even is a choice to be made.



I don’t like the way Orion tells me not to trust Elder. I don’t like it at all. But—I think back to yesterday, and the way I have kept my darkest secrets from him. I am already doing what Orion wanted me to do before he asked it of me, and I hate myself a little for that.



ORION: You’ll need to begin with the first piece of the puzzle. But here’s the thing, Amy. I already gave it to you. So: go find it. Find all the clues I’ve left for you. And I have to hope that when you do, the choice you make is the right one.



Orion looks straight behind him, then back to me.



ORION: Because you’re running out of time.







13



ELDER



I FEEL ALONE.



I don’t mean I feel lonely; I mean I feel alone, the same way that I feel the blanket resting on my body, or the feathers of my pillow under my head, or the tight string of my sleep pants twisted up around my waist. I feel alone as if it were an actual thing, seeping throughout this whole level like mist blanketing a field, reaching into all the hidden corners of my room and finding nothing living but me. It’s a cold sort of feeling, this.



When I finally get out of bed, the only thing I want to do is to go straight to Amy and demand her forgiveness. Maybe we can at least go back to what we had before our fight, even if all we had was an awkward friendship punctuated by significant silences. I have to figure out what to do about the ship’s engines—if anything even can be done—but I can’t fix the ship without first fixing whatever I broke in Amy.



I’m so intent on this idea that it’s not until I’m halfway down the grav tube to the Feeder Level that I remember the look in her eyes as she left me yesterday—a combination of anger and hurt and sad—and I realize that she probably doesn’t even want to see me. The solar lamp clicks on as my feet land on the dais under the grav tube. I trudge down to the path. The morning mist evaporates before my eyes.



Instead of going to Amy’s room in the Hospital Ward, I veer left to the Recorder Hall. Maybe if I give Marae some of the books I’ve read on police forces and civics, she’ll have a better idea of how to organize the Shippers in this new duty. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. But the reality is I dread seeing Amy, knowing that she’ll still be mad at me. And that she has every right to be.



I’m surprised that when I enter the Recorder Hall, there are already people here, gathered around the wall floppies in the entryway. Most of them crowd around the Science section. Second Shipper Shelby points to the generator in a diagram of the ship’s engine as she lectures to the crowd gathered at her feet. She meets my eyes and nods at me. I knew Shelby had, with First Shipper Marae’s and my permission, begun a class for interested Feeders on the technical aspects of the ship, but it hadn’t occurred to me that these lessons would begin just fifteen minutes after lamp-on.



I hesitate before I go down the hallway into the book rooms. Isn’t Shelby’s lecture futile? The engine is dead, even if the Feeders don’t know it yet. Frex, we’re not even sure how far we are from Centauri-Earth. Even if these Feeders do garner enough information to get the ship moving again, chances are that they won’t see the planet in their lifetimes.



One of the Feeders listening to Shelby rubs her stomach in a slow circle. She’s three months pregnant now, but her tunic hides her rounding belly. Her movement, as unconscious as it is, reminds me—that’s what this is about. Shelby’s lectures aren’t meant to solve the engine problem—not really—but to give these people hope.



That’s the one thing Eldest did right. He may have lied—but in the end, he gave them a reason to keep going.



That’s what everyone’s missing now.



I duck silently into the hallway and head to the book rooms. I throw open the door of the room dedicated to works on civics and social studies.



“What the?” someone shouts from inside.



I jump back, startled, my heart racing. “You scared the shite out of me!” I exclaim, collapsing in the chair at the table across from Bartie.



Bartie’s laughing too hard at his own response to reply. For a moment, this feels like old times. Bartie and I were friends when I lived in the Hospital for the year before moving to the Keeper Level with Eldest. There was a whole gang of us, then: Harley, Bartie, Victria, Kayleigh, and me, counting my lucky stars that, for the first time ever, I had friends.



We would spend our days in the Hospital or the garden. Harley would paint while Bartie played guitar and Victria wrote. Kayleigh was always flitting around, trying to tinker with everything. She made a metal canvas stretcher for Harley that nearly bit his fingers off, and she once tried to figure out the old Sol-Earth schematics for an electric guitar that very nearly electrocuted Bartie.



Those times were all laughter and happiness.



The smile slips off my face, and Bartie’s grin fades. I don’t have to look at him to know we’re both thinking the same thing: everything changed after Kayleigh died. Kayleigh was the glue that held our friendship together, and with her gone, we were nothing. Harley spiraled into darkness that only Doc’s meds got him out of. By the time he’d started recovering, I’d moved to the Keeper Level, and Bartie and Victria had drifted in different directions. Victria spent her time in the Recorder Hall with Orion, and Bartie, as far as I could tell, found friendship only in his music.



“How have you been?” I ask, leaning forward.



Bartie shrugs. A stack of books surrounds him, but they’re all thick, regal-looking tomes from the civics section of the book room, not music books.



“It’s odd to see you without Amy,” Bartie says.



“I—it’s just—we—” I heave a sigh, running my fingers through my hair. Amy and I have spent a lot of time lately in the Recorder Hall, in this very room, actually, developing a plan for a police force. I know she’s wary of me, hesitant to trust me after I confessed to being the one to have woken her up, but . . . she’d quit flinching at my touch, she used to smile at me easier.



Until I called her a freak.



Frex.



“Everything okay?” Bartie asks, a hint of real concern in his face.



“Yeah,” I muttered. “It’s just . . . Amy . . .”



Bartie frowns. “There are more problems on this ship than a freak from Sol-Earth.”



“Don’t call her a freak!” I say, snapping my head up to glare at Bartie so violently my neck cracks.



Bartie leans back in his chair, throwing up both hands in a gesture of either defense or dismissal. “I was merely pointing out that you have more important things to worry about.”



My eyes narrow, reading the title of the thick book Bartie had been scrutinizing. On the cover is a woman with skin paler than Amy’s and a dress so wide I doubt she’d fit through the doorway. I read the title—a history of the French Revolution.



“Why are you reading that?” I ask. I try to laugh in a genial sort of way, but the sound comes out like a garbled snort. I look at Bartie with new eyes, wary eyes. A lot of time has passed since we would follow Kayleigh and Victria to the Recorder Hall and race rocking chairs across the porch.



And the French Revolution isn’t a topic I would have thought Bartie would study.



Was he interested in the frea—I stop myself from even thinking the word—was he interested in the unusual woman on the cover of the book? Or was he interested in the guillotine cutting off the king’s head? I mentally shake myself. I’m being paranoid.



“Food,” Bartie says.



“Food?”



He nods, pushing the volume closer to me and picking up a slender book bound in green leather. “I thought it was . . . interesting. That ‘let them eat cake’ bit—I wonder if they would have even revolted if there hadn’t been the shortage of food.”



“Maybe they were just revolting from dresses like that,” I say as I point to the voluminous swaths of silk pouring off the woman’s skirt on the cover of the book. I’m trying for levity again, but Bartie’s not laughing and neither am I—my mind is remembering the red line in the chart Marae showed me, the line that showed the decreasing food production. When the rest of the ship sees how quickly the food’s disappearing—that the ship is dead in the empty sky, and that soon we will be too—how long will it be till they, like the people in Bartie’s book, turn their farm tools into weapons and revolt?