Shades of Earth

And Orion, panting, on the table, holding on to life for this one moment.



When Elder pushes the table around the hallway toward the bridge door, Orion’s body slides on the metal surface. He gasps, something rattling in his chest, his blind eyes open wide as he spits blood. It’s not just the sides of his mouth bleeding now; there’s something inside him broken too.



We’d left the bridge door open when we’d entered, but I have to go through first, lifting the edge of the table and pulling it over the lip of the seal-lock door. If Orion’s guessed that there’s someone else with him beyond just Elder, he makes no mention of it.



Once we’re outside, he tips his face toward the suns. They’ve risen higher in the sky, just above the trees. His body seems smaller, shrunken in relief against the dull metal table, but his eyes are still wide and darting around, straining to see what’s happening. I pity him in this moment, but then I remember the way Theo Kennedy’s eyes were bloated and bulging in death, and the pity sours in my heart.



Orion raises his arm, reaching, his fingers splayed. He breathes deeply, tasting the fresh air. His body seems to be an extension of his flared nostrils; everything is centered on his sense of smell. A warm breeze swirls around us, and he tilts his head toward it. The wind makes the leaves of the forest rustle and shake, and Orion shifts his ears to the sound.



His body is focused on every sense left to him, absorbing this world as completely as he can.



His arm slowly lowers. The corners of his mouth curl up.



He sighs—and with that sigh, the last bit of life escapes.



What little light remains in his faded eyes slowly disappears.



22: ELDER



“He’s gone.”



Amy says the words, but they still don’t register.



He can’t be gone. His blind eyes still stare, still try to absorb the world he can never see.



I don’t have the heart to close them.



“He was me, you know.” A me who faced the truth by himself. A me who did what he did to protect my people. Everything good in my life came from him, and I gave him nothing in return. “Technically, I mean.”



“I know,” Amy replies.



“I’m sorry,” I whisper to Orion, because even though he was a murderer, he didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve to have the planet given to him and then stolen away.



I don’t meet her eyes as I sink to the floor and roll my head against the hard metal of the shuttle. It’s hopeless. We should have never come. We should have stayed on Godspeed.



“We’ll figure it out,” Amy says. “We won’t let everyone die.” She sits down next to me and rests her head against my shoulder. For a few minutes, we just sit there in silence—me coming to grips with the realization that I can’t save my people if I don’t know what it is I need to protect them from, Amy leaning against me, serving as a reminder of everything Orion didn’t have.



“Elder,” Amy says after a while, “what was that he called you?”



“What are you talking about?”



“He gave us a clue,” she says, wonder filling her voice. “Before he died . . .” Her voice trails off as she jumps up, excited.



“What do you mean?” I ask, my heart thumping. My knees are weak with hope as I stand up.



“A clue! I don’t know if he meant to or not, but he gave us a clue.”



“A clue? What clue?”



“Think about it,” Amy says, her eyes flashing. “Think about the trail of clues we went on.”



My mind skips over that time. Harley’s painting. Amy’s wi-com. Shakespeare and Dante. And another book . . .



“You’ve forgotten—of course you have, you were distracted by the space suits at the time.” Her eyes are wide and gleaming.



“Space suits?”



Amy grabs my hand and drags me back toward the shuttle door. “Remember when we discovered the room with the suits? There was a book there, just like the other books Orion left for us, but there wasn’t a clue inside the book. Do you remember what book that was?” Her voice is manic, urgent.



I shake my head. My only thought had been to go outside Godspeed and see the universe that had been blocked out by steel walls all my life.



“I remember it,” Amy says, smirking. “That book. It was The Little Prince.” She whirls around to face me, the ends of her hair whipping her neck. “And what did he call you just now?”



“A little prince,” I answer automatically. For one brief moment, the hope Amy’s exuding infects me. But no— “That can’t be a clue,” I say. My eyes dart to Orion’s body, still staring vacantly up into the blue sky. “He was just making fun of me, saying that I was, you know, the leader, but not any good at it. Besides, we already found that book and the clue in it.”



Amy frowns, thinking. “What was that clue?” she asks.



I shrug. “Just some underlined text.”



“No, I mean, what did that clue show us? Every single clue Orion left for us had a reason. Each one led to something else, each piece was important. How was that clue important?”



“It was where the space suits were.”



Amy shakes her head. “But it’s not how we found the suits—that clue came from the sonnet.”



“So?”



“So we missed something,” Amy says. “Orion knew something else, something about the ship or the mission that we should have discovered then . . . but we didn’t. We missed a clue.”



She’s right. When we discovered that little book, I was distracted by the space suits, then by the planet. And Amy was distracted by the way I nearly died. Everything happened so quickly . . . and we missed something. Some last clue, something that will explain what we’re up against on Centauri-Earth.



I head straight to the space suit room, the first door after the bridge. It’s still packed to the brim with supplies we brought from Godspeed. I stare at the crates of food, the boxes of cloth and medical supplies and everything else we thought we’d need.



And that’s when it hits me: “There’s no way the book is still here.” Stupid of me to come here and look, really. I knew it was gone. We cleared out this room. Crammed it full of farm equipment and livestock. At any point in time anyone could have picked up the slender volume of The Little Prince and tossed it away. It could be on Godspeed. It could be thrown away. Destroyed.



Maybe there was one more clue in The Little Prince. But whatever it was, it’s long gone now.



Amy laughs. “Oh ye of little faith,” she says. “I was in here while they packed this room. I was going to take the book back up to the Recorder Hall, but . . . ” She stares hard at the crates in the way. “Give me a leg up, will you?”



“What?” I ask, incredulous.



“Give me a leg up.” She puts both hands on the nearest crate, testing her weight against it. When I cup my hands under her foot, she pushes off, scrabbling to clamber on top of the crates.



“What are you doing?” I call.



She climbs over the crates, occasionally slipping and once falling through a box of cloth and cursing. “I know we agreed that we shouldn’t waste space on anything we didn’t need to survive, but . . . ” Her voice trails off as she reaches the wall, her eyes even with the broken monitor that was supposed to show how the space suits worked. “But I just couldn’t let this book go.”



Amy pries her fingers under the glass monitor embedded in the wall, and it slides off its hook. She pulls out a thin volume with a hand-drawn image of a little boy standing on a cratered moon. Amy crawls back over the boxes, then leaps down, tossing me the book. The Little Prince is emblazoned on the cover, followed by an unpronounceable name.



I flip through the pages until I find the clue Orion had left, the underlined text Amy saw but neither of us thought to explore.



“I,” replied the little prince, “do not like to condemn anyone to death.”



“It’s a warning,” I mumble, reading it.



Amy reads over my shoulder. “There has to be something more. Orion wouldn’t have left a clue that didn’t go anywhere, and he wouldn’t have brought it up, not as he was dying, not as you were telling him we were at the planet and it was dangerous. He might have been psycho, but he was careful with his clues. There has to be something here that links to why Centauri-Earth is dangerous, what it is we’re really facing.”



I’m not sure how much of this is logic and how much of it is just wishful thinking, but it’s the only chance we have.



I flip the book closed, examining the cover. Orion called me a little prince, but I have to admit, I do not think I have anything in common with this one. This little prince stands on top of his dry, dusty rock of a kingdom, and he does not know what it is like to have a thousand people relying on him. He could step off his planet and bounce throughout the universe from place to place—and, as I start to scan the pages of the book, I see that’s just what he does. He must not feel the weight of gravity on such a small planet, but there is much more than gravity that drags me down.



I start to try to read the story, but Amy’s impatient, and I can’t concentrate on the words. It seems silly—there’s a hat and a rose and a fox, and little of it makes sense. When we get to the end, I hand the book back to Amy. “There’s nothing here,” I say again.



She shakes her head, opening the book again. “There has to be.”



She doesn’t start at the beginning of the book this time; she starts near the middle, where Orion underlined the text. Her fingers trace the circles and underlines, grooves cut deep by a heavy pen. She turns a couple of pages, running her fingers over the illustration there, a fat man in a star-strewn cape, towering above a planet even smaller than the Little Prince’s.



Amy gasps.



“What is it?” I ask, leaning forward.



“Look.” She holds the book out to me. I stare at the page. “Look.”



And then I see it.



The clue isn’t in the text—it’s in the illustration. The man in the picture sits on a throne. “He’s the king,” Amy says. “He thinks he’s the king of the stars.” His cloak wraps around him and trails along the sides of the planet, cloth billowing out across the surface. A dozen or more yellow stars decorate the robe, giving him the appearance of being wrapped in the universe. He wears a golden crown and a scowl, and for reasons I cannot explain, his wrinkled face reminds me of Eldest.



And—right over where the king’s heart should be—there’s a star. It’s part of the original design and is one of many decorating the robe, but inside the star, in very faint black ink, is a hand-drawn heart that definitely was not a part of the book’s illustration.



“And look here,” Amy says, pointing to the bottom of the small planet the king uses as a throne. In tiny print is one sentence, curving along the edge of the planet:



Who are the real monsters?



23: AMY



Who are the monsters. Not what. Who.



Elder sighs and slams the book shut.