by Beth Revis
This is Orion’s punishment. For the murders of the frozens and for the death of Eldest. When—if—the ship lands and the other cryogenically frozen people awake, they are to judge him for his murders and do with him as they see fit. That is the sentence Elder laid on him when he pushed the button to freeze him. But I know—in ways that no one else on this ship does—the real punishment is in being frozen. My mind remembers what it’s like to be asleep but not asleep. My body recalls the way my muscles wouldn’t—couldn’t—move. My heart will never forget what it’s like to fade in and out of time, to never know if one year or a thousand have passed by, to torture yourself with the idea of your soul trapped behind ice for all eternity.
I know what torture there is behind ice.
Behind the glass window in the cryo tube, I can see the red veins popping in Orion’s eyes. I imagine myself mirrored in his pupils, but he’s blind. His hand is pressed against the tiny window in the cryo freezing tube. For a moment, I place my warm, living hand over his. Then I glance at his eyes and snatch my hand away.
In my other hand, I still hold the small floppy thing I found in the Recorder Hall. I look at the handprint I left on the glass in front of Orion’s face, then back at the box on the screen and the words across it: RESTRICTED ACCESS. Some information on the floppy network is restricted—Elder has to use his thumbprint, like on the biometric scanner, to unlock it. I doubt my thumbprint will be enough, but . . .
I press my thumb against the glowing box.
The entire screen lights up.
And I find myself looking into Orion’s face.
<
On the screen, Orion looks exactly as I remember him just before he was frozen: unkempt dark hair that could do with a wash, eyes that seem oddly kind given his quickness to kill, and an easygoing, friendly curve of his lips that belies the lines in his face. He sits on the bottom of a staircase so large that it extends past him well out of view, up and up. I’ve never seen that staircase before, a fact I find oddly comforting. I like that there are still some things about Godspeed I don’t know.
The image wobbles as Orion adjusts the camera.
ORION: If you’re seeing this, then something went wrong.
I glance up at the frozen Orion. Yeah, something went wrong. The ship is stopped, Elder’s already hiding the truth from everyone else, and I don’t know how much longer we can survive.
ORION: I hope that no one ever sees this. I hope that all went as I had planned, that Elder joined my side, and that together we defeated Eldest and started a new system of rule on Godspeed based not on tyranny, but on working together.
Orion sighs heavily.
ORION: But I’m not certain Elder’s on my side, and I know Eldest isn’t, and there’s too much at stake to leave anything to chance. I have to have a contingency plan. And Amy—you are my contingency plan.
Orion turns toward me, as if he knew I’d be a little to his left, his eyes boring into mine.
ORION: I hope Elder’s the leader I need him to be—that this ship needs him to be. But if he isn’t and if I’m . . . well, if I can’t be there to help, all that I have left is this video and the hope that you, someone from Sol-Earth, will know what to do. I can’t leave this information for just the shipborns. They don’t know enough. They can’t make a choice about what to do when they only know one thing. But you—Amy—you know both the ship and a planet. You can be objective. You will know which is the greater evil. When you know all that I know, all that Eldest tried to keep hidden, then you will also know what to do.
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?
Bartie doesn’t answer me, just flips open the smaller green book. His eyes don’t move over the letters, though, and I get the feeling he’s waiting for me to say or do something. I’m not so sure I’m just being paranoid anymore.
“Something’s going to have to change, and soon,” Bartie says, his eyes on the book. “It’s been building for months, ever since you turned them.”
“I didn’t—” I say automatically, defensive even though there was no real accusation in his voice. “I just . . . I mean, I guess I changed them, but I changed them back. To what they’re supposed to be. What they are.”
Bartie looks doubtful. “Either way, they’re different now. And it’s getting worse.”
The first cause of discord, I think, is difference.
Bartie turns the page of the slender green book. “Someone’s got to do something.”
The second cause of discord: lack of a strong central leader.
What does he think I’ve been doing? Sh
ite, all I do these days is run from one problem to the next! If it’s not a strike in one district, it’s complaints from another—and every problem is just a little worse than the one before it.
Bartie glares at me. There’s no question about it now: there’s contempt and anger in his eyes, although his voice remains soft-spoken. “Why aren’t you stepping up? Why aren’t you keeping the order? Eldest might’ve been a chutz, but at least you didn’t have to worry about getting through the day when he was in charge.”
“I’m doing what I can,” I protest.
“It’s not enough!” The words bounce around the room, slamming into my ears.
Without thinking about it, I pound my fist onto the table. The noise startles Bartie; the shock of it makes me forget my anger. I shake my hand, pain tingling up my arm.
“What are you reading?” I growl.
“What?”
“What are you frexing reading?”
When I glance up, Bartie’s eyes meet mine. Our anger melts. We’re friends—even without Harley, we’re still friends. And even if the ship hasn’t exactly been a friendly place lately, we can still hold onto our past.
Bartie lifts the smaller book for me to see the title: The Republic, by Plato.
“I read that last year,” I say. “It was confusing as frex. That bit about the cave made no sense at all.”
Bartie shrugs. “I’m at the part about aristocracy.” He pronounces it “a-risto-crazy.” Eldest told me it was “ah-rista-crah-see” but he probably got it wrong too, and besides, what’s the difference?
I know the part he’s talking about well—it was the center of the lesson Eldest had prepared for me. It was also, essentially, the base of the entire Eldest system. “An aristocrat is someone born to rule,” I say. “Someone born with the innate talent to guide everyone else.”