Across the Universe

“There’s a hatch door. For the dead.”



Amy’s head snaps toward mine.



“Where is it?” Harley asks, an eager tone in his voice that reminds me of the last time he had what Doc called a “downward spiral.”



“It’s not on the Feeder Level.”



Harley sinks in on himself. He’s not one of the select few with access to the other levels and has spent his entire life here, on the Feeder Level.



“Can we see it?” Amy asks. “Can we see the stars?”



And, oh, I want to show her. I want to show her, but not him, not now, not with her. I want to be the one to give Amy back her stars.



But what would Eldest say? What would Eldest do? To me? To her?



“No,” I say. “Eldest wouldn’t like it.”



Amy’s eyes narrow into pinpricks of jade. “I met Eldest,” she says, disgust dripping from her voice.



Harley snorts, and Amy turns her glare on him. Eldest is not a laughing matter to her.



“What in the uni could he have said to make you not like him?” He laughs.



“You know that hatch Elder was talking about?” Amy holds back the rage in her voice, like a man holding back a snarling dog on a leash. “He wanted to throw me out of it, just so I wouldn’t create a ‘disturbance’ on the ship.”



Harley laughs. “He wouldn’t do that!”



Amy doesn’t crack a smile.



“Yes, he would,” I say. Harley’s laughter dies and he looks at me.



“Maybe he said something as a threat, but he’d never—”



“Yes,” I say as firmly as I can. “He would.”



Harley attacks the canvas with paint again, a frown creasing his forehead.



“He doesn’t like ‘disturbances,’” I tell Amy. “He doesn’t like anyone to be different at all. Difference, he says, is the first cause of discord.”



“He sounds like a regular Hitler to me,” Amy mutters. I wonder what she means by that. Eldest has always taught me that Hitler was a wise, cultured leader for his people. Maybe that’s what she means: Eldest is a strong leader, like Hitler was. The turn of phrase is unusual, another difference between us, another difference I’m sure Eldest would hate.



Amy hops up from her seat at the window. She twirls her hair into a quick bun and secures it with two dry brushes she snatches from the desk before Harley can protest. She paces the room, an animal unsatisfied with the smallness of her cage.



Harley snorts again, but images flash in my mind: Eldest, walking throughout the Feeder Level, showing all the farmers and workers his kind-grandfather face, and then going up to the Keeper Level with me, and snarling with distaste at their stupidity. Eldest, pounding lessons into me that stressed control above all else. Eldest, revulsion souring his face when I first came to the Keeper Level and did anything out of the ordinary. In my mind’s eye, Eldest’s face is growing twisted, just like I suspect his soul has become.



And I realize that, yes, this man who I have lived with for three years, who is leader of this entire ship, whose control over everyone on board is absolute... this man is capable of killing whomever, whenever.



He could have. “But why would he?” I ask.



“Dunno. And—why me? I’m not important. Why try to kill me?”



Harley’s brush is paused midair. Silence permeates the little room.



“You weren’t the only one,” I say, my words like arrows slicing through the air. “A man was killed. That’s where I saw the hatch—I was helping Doc and Elder send the body to the stars.”



“Who?” Amy breathes, terror in her voice.



“Mr. William Robertson.”



“I didn’t know him.” Amy sounds relieved. It is only then that I realize she was afraid it was one of her parents floating dead amongst the stars.



29



AMY



“WHAT KIND OF SECURITY IS THERE ON THIS SHIP?” I ASK, turning to Elder. “Do you guys have cops or anything?”



Elder and Harley look confused. “Cops?” Elder asks.



I nod. “You know, policemen. Cops.” They stare blankly at me. “People whose job it is to keep the bad guys under control.”



“That’s what Eldest is for,” Harley says, turning back to his canvas.



Great.



“We don’t have a need for ‘cops’ like on Sol-Earth,” Elder says. It takes me a moment to remember that the “Sol-Earth” he’s talking about is my Earth. “On Sol-Earth, there was more discord, because there were more differences. There aren’t differences on Godspeed, so there aren’t problems.”



I bristle. “The problems on Earth didn’t stem from people being different—”



“Slavery. The Crusades. Genocide. Civil rights violence. Apartheid. Differences were the main source of all of Sol-Earth’s greatest man-made disasters.”



My mouth hangs open, but I can’t refute the blemishes of my world’s history.



“Look at you being so smart,” Harley says. He winks at me. “Elder gets more education than the rest of us. Our education on Sol-Earth was mostly just farming methods and science. Elder’s the smart one.”



Elder flushes deeply.



I don’t have time for this. “What’s being done to find the murderer?”



Both guys look up at me, blankly.



“Is there a guard over the cryogenically frozen people? Is Eldest investigating the crime? Are there suspects? Is there any kind of security or surveillance there? What’s happening?”



Neither of them have thoughts on any of this, and it infuriates me. “You never even gave any of this a second thought, did you? Someone’s died, and you’re just going to sit back and let this happen? I thought you were the future leader of this ship,” I shout, pointing at Elder. “And you’re going to ignore this and hope it goes away? Some leader!”



“I... I...” Elder splutters.



“Don’t you realize that my parents are down there? Helpless? Frozen in a little box? You weren’t there. In the box. When it was unplugged. You don’t know what it felt like. That moment, when you’re finally awake, and you know you’re awake, and you want to vomit out those tubes, but you can’t, and you want to get out of that box, but you can’t, and you want to breathe. But. You. Can’t.”



“Okay, okay,” he says. “Calm down. Drink some water.” Elder uses this as an excuse to refill my empty cup from the bathroom tap.



“I don’t need water!” I say. Why is it so difficult for them to see what’s important?



Elder keeps thrusting the cup toward me anyway. I take it and gulp down a swallow. An odd bitter taste stays on my tongue. I wonder how often this water has been recycled and processed. Thinking that, my anger fades and I do actually feel calmer.



“How would you feel if it were your parents?” I ask Elder quietly.



Harley looks up at us both, then slowly puts his paintbrush down. He is more intent on Elder’s answer than on my ranting.



“I never knew my parents,” Elder says.



“Did they die?” The words come out harsher than I’d intended, but this world seems intent on making me more callous.



Elder shakes his head. “No. I just never knew who they were. An Elder isn’t allowed to know. He must feel as if he is a child of the ship.”



He speaks as if he’s reciting from a textbook, but there is also a sadness to his words that I am not sure even he recognizes. He seems very small and alone. His shoulders have hunched down, as if he wants his body to swallow him.



“Is that why you’re here?” I ask Harley.



“Nah. I know my parents. They’re weavers, in the City. My whole family has been weavers, ever since the Plague. I’d say my parents were disappointed that I didn’t uphold the family tradition, but I’m not even sure they noticed when I left. They couldn’t make me care about cloth, and I couldn’t make them care about anything else. So I moved here. It’s only Elder here without proper parents.”



“As it should be,” Elder says in a low voice without looking at either of us. “But right now,” he says, “if we can’t figure out who killed Mr. Robertson, let’s start with why.”



I stride across the room to Harley and his art supplies and take up his biggest brush and the cup of black paint.



“Hey!” Harley says, but before he or Elder can do anything, I scrawl my name in big letters across the wall beside the window.



“What are you doing to your wall?!” Elder sounds shocked.



“It’s not my wall,” I say. Nothing on this ship is mine.



Under my name, I add everything that I can think of that might make me a target for the killer. Girl, I write. Seventeen, Red hair, White, Average appearance,



“You’re beautiful,” Elder says quietly, but I ignore him.



Not part of any mission, I add.



“Okay,” I say, turning around. “What about Mr. Robertson?” I write his name on the wall next to my own.



Elder picks up the thin sheet of plastic off my desk that I’d wondered at before. When he runs his finger across it, it lights up like a computer screen. He starts tapping on it, and images flash across the screen.



“Eldest/Elder access granted,” a female voice says from the computer.



“Mr. William Robertson,” Elder reads from the screen. “Male. Fifty-seven years old, Hispanic, 212 pounds. Leadership specialist. Experience with United State Marines. Mission: offensive organization. Funded by the FRX. FRX?” He pauses. “I’ve seen that before. On a plaque in the Keeper Level...” His voice trails off.



“Financial Resource Exchange,” I say as I write the details about Mr. Robertson below his name. “Everyone in the military was funded by the FRX. It’s how Daddy got to join the mission.”



Elder rolls his finger on the screen. “That’s all there is.”



I look at that weird computer thing. “Does that say anything about me?”



Elder hesitates.



“What?” I say. “What does it say about me?”



“Er—”



Harley, who’s been watching us silently, snatches the computer thing from Elder. He scans it quickly, the laughter dying from his eyes.



“Oh.”



“What?”



“It’s nothing.” Harley moves to touch the screen—to turn it off, I’m sure. Before he can, I grab it from his hand.



There’s the picture they took of me a few days before I was frozen, during the health screening. My date of birth, blood type, height, weight. And, in tiny letters at the bottom: NONESSENTIAL CARGO.



Oh, that’s right. I’d forgotten.



I’m just extra baggage.



I drop the computer thing on the desk and turn back to the wall with my paintbrush. Under my name, I add nonessential.



“You’re not—” Elder starts, but I silence him with a look.



Stepping back, I look at my handiwork. I painted the lines too thick; trails of black trickle down from the letters, some of them making it all the way to the baseboard, streaking over the peeling old painted vines on the floor, made by whoever once lived in this room. Harley’s eyes are on the trailing black, watching the drips race one another over the hand-painted flowers.