Across the Universe

I wake to the smell of paint.



Harley, I think.



I struggle with the lab coats I am lying on. Their arms drag me down, but I eventually disentangle myself from them.



“Harley?” I ask, breathing deeply.



I turn from the elevator to the cryo chambers behind me.



At first I think it is blood, but as I step closer to the cryo chambers, I see that it is only red paint—thick, not-yet-dry red paint. Dripping giant Xs mark some, but not all, of the cryo chamber doors. I touch the one closest to me—number 54—and leave a red fingerprint in the paint. Looking down this row, I see six doors marked with Xs; the next row only has three, but the row after that has twelve.



My immediate thought is that this is the killer’s doing, that he has marked the people he plans to unfreeze next.



I shake my head. Could the killer have been down here, while I slept beside the elevator? No—it must have been Harley.



But just in case ...



I creep down each hall, looking for someone who might still be here, counting the marked doors. Thirty-eight doors are marked in total, and none of them give any indication of who painted them.



I envision the killer here, silently marking the doors of his victims while I slept. I shake my head again. Paint means Harley. This is Harley’s revenge for our shouting match last night; this is Harley trying to scare me or spook me, or he’s just being stupid.



Harley, it has to be Harley.



I can’t have let the killer stroll past me while I slept. I can’t have.



“Harley?” I call.



Nothing.



I run straight to the hallway, to the hatch, but before I get there, I know something is wrong.



The muslin-covered canvas is gone. Paint is splattered everywhere. For one sickening moment, I think that this is a crime scene and that the paint smears all over the floor and wall are blood splatters from a murder, but then I shake myself all over, and I whisper, “No,” because if this was a murder, then Harley would be dead, but he’s not here.



The control box beside the hatch door is broken.



The cover to the keypad has been pried off, and thin wires extend from the box through the shut door of the hatch.



Harley is inside the hatch, holding the keypad in his hand. He’s already tapping out the code.



I pound on the hatch door. Harley gives me a watery smile.



“I can get closer,” he says.



“Don’t!” I shout, banging against the glass.



Harley turns toward the hatch. He finishes the code on the keypad. The hatch slams open and Harley is sucked out into space.



For a moment, he looks back at me, and his farewell is in his smile. Then he turns to the stars.



And he is gone.



The hatch door swings shut, leaving emptiness.



Harley is gone.



69



AMY



I WAKE UP WITH THE PAINTBRUSH STUCK TO MY FACE. Harley would laugh if he could see me now, call me his Painted Fish.



By the door, there is a flashing red square of light. It’s the button to the small rectangle metal cubicle beside the food cubicle. When I push it, the tiny door zips open and a big blue-and-white pill pops out. So that’s what that door was for.



The Inhibitor medicine. The medicine that keeps me sane.



I stare at it, disgusted. It sticks in my throat as I swallow it. It burns going down, and fills my belly with a sense of revulsion and urgency that leaves me sick to my stomach. I push in the button to the food door, and it leaves me a pastry filled with something that is almost eggs and that oozes with something that is almost cheese. I’m done after a bite. I’m tired of almost. I want something real.



I return to my wall. Taking Elder’s advice, I ignore my name and my list of characteristics. What can I or anything about me have to do with murder?



With my name gone, I see it, standing out before me as brightly as if the words were written in different colored paint.



The military.



Each victim, even the woman who hadn’t died—all of them had worked for the military. Tactical specialists, offensive operations, bio-weaponry. They were frozen for their ability to kill—and they were the ones being killed.



But why me? Why was I unplugged? I have nothing to do with that.



Elder had said, Maybe you weren’t meant to be unplugged, maybe you were an accident or something.



An accident ...



Maybe the murderer had meant to unplug someone else ...



Someone else in the military.



Like Daddy.



I jump up and race to the door, my heart thudding. Everything falls into place if the killer meant to kill Daddy, not me. He’s killing people with fighting backgrounds.



The door slides open, and I crash into Orion.



I start to mutter my apologies and step around him to go to the cryo level and tell Elder what I’ve figured out, but Orion grabs my wrist with viselike strength.



“Let me go,” I say. He’s gripping me just where the men held me down before Harley saved me, his fingers pushing into the same bruises.



“Harley painted this,” Orion says in his soft voice. I stop trying to pull away from him and notice the muslin-covered canvas in his hands. “He told me to give it to you when I gave him some wire.”



“What is it?” I ask, curious.



“A painting. For you.”



Orion releases my wrist and presses the canvas into my arms. As I look down at it, he fades into the shadows.



I step back into my room, set the canvas up on my desk, and peel off the muslin, which sticks a little to the still-wet paint. It is the most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen. It’s a self-portrait—Harley floats in the center of the canvas, surrounded by sky and stars, his face upturned in an expression of rapturous joy, his arms spread wide as if he’s about to wrap me in a hug. A tiny koi fish swims amongst the stars around his ankles.



My fingers tremble as I touch the painted Harley’s face, but I snatch them back: the paint isn’t fully dry. In his face, I see something I’ve only ever seen once before, and that was when he was talking about Kayleigh.



Somewhere, hidden under the paint, I understand what Harley meant by giving me this.



He was saying goodbye.



So when Elder bursts into my room a moment later to tell me that Harley has killed himself, I am not surprised.



70



ELDER



THERE IS SOMETHING WITHIN AMY BEYOND TEARS. SHE NODS mutely, as if she already knows it has happened. She grows dimmer, but she does not break as she did last night. She steps back to let me into the room.



And then I see it.



“Harley,” I breathe. My hands are trembling.



“Orion gave this to me,” Amy says. “Harley ... I guess he did it before ...”



It is so realistic, more realistic than Amy can ever know. When the hatch pulled him out, the rush of movement had flattened his hair more, and there was more surprise in his face, and yes, pain—but in that brief second before the hatch door had closed and before the ship had moved beyond him and before space extinguished him, that was the look on his face, exactly that joy.



“You can have it,” Amy says. “You were closer to him than I was. I’m not sure why he gave it to me and not you.”



I notice the little fish swimming at the painted Harley’s feet.



Amy always thought Harley called her Little Fish because her red-orange hair matched the colors of the koi he was painting when he met her, but he never told her the reason why he painted the koi in the first place—the reason why his room was filled with koi paintings—which was that it was Kayleigh’s favorite animal.



“He wanted you to have it,” I say. “You reminded him of someone he knew.”



We stand a moment in silence, absorbing the painting, absorbing what Harley has done, how he has left us. Alone, still standing while he flew away.



“I figured it out,” Amy says, pointing to the wall and dragging me back to now. “The connection between them. People who have background in military fighting. Those are the ones who were killed.”



I examine the chart.



“My father has a military background. What if the killer pulled me out instead of him by accident?” Her voice quakes, and I wonder if it is because of fear for her father, or because Harley’s gone, or both.



“When I woke up this morning, someone had marked dozens of the little cryo chamber doors. At first I thought it was Harley ... but the killer could be marking his victims ....”



“Was my father’s door marked?” Amy asks urgently, dropping her notebook.



“I ... don’t remember.” I hadn’t been looking for her father’s door—I’d been looking for Harley.



“We’ve got to go check!” Amy heads for the door.



I pause just long enough to snatch the floppy off her desk. As we race down the hall, I scan my thumb and tap in my access code. The computer chirps, “Eldest/Elder access granted” as the elevator opens. While we rise, I bring up the wi-com locator map.



“What are you doing?” Amy asks, her eyes on the numbers above the door.



I slide the timer back, looking for the dots marking where and when everyone was.



On the map for last night is Harley’s dot, beeping softly, mostly where the hatch door is, but sometimes pacing up and down the hall and once, all around the cryo floor. No one else is on the entire level—until I show up. There I am, running; there’s where I stop. My glowing dot merges with Harley’s, and I remember our fight, our last fight.



Amy hovers over my shoulder, watching. My dot leaves Harley’s, and now it blinks near the elevator in front of the cryo floor. Harley’s doesn’t move from the hatch door. I wonder what he was doing in those last moments. Painting? Planning?



I fast forward. Around morning, Doc and Eldest’s dots show up, but they don’t linger—they go straight to the lab on the other side of the cryo level. I look up at Amy sheepishly.



“I fell asleep,” I say. I wonder if Doc and Eldest noticed me.



Amy shakes her head. “It wasn’t them, though, was it? They didn’t go near the cryo chambers.”



We turn back to the wi-com locator map. My dot moves quickly up and down the aisles of cryo chambers—discovering the painted Xs.



And then my dot goes to the hatch.



There I am; there he is.



Then his dot is gone.



A hard lump forms in my throat. My eyes blur at the moment when it happens, when his dot suddenly jerks off the map and doesn’t come back.



Amy sucks in a gasp, but doesn’t let the air back out for a long time, and then it’s just a hushed, “Oh.”



“No one else came down there,” I say as the door opens to the fourth floor. “It must have been Harley.”



“But Harley never left the door, not after you showed up.”



I meet Amy’s eyes. Harley couldn’t have painted the Xs.



“That thing,” Amy says, pointing at the floppy, “it can only track people through their ear buttons, right?”



I nod.



“It couldn’t see me, could it?”



I shake my head.



“What about Orion? He’s the one who brought me the painting. He had to have been down there, but that means he doesn’t have an ear button, doesn’t it? He’s got long hair to cover it, but I’ve seen that scar on his neck—that creeps up past his hair. I bet he doesn’t have an ear button. He’d be invisible.”

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