by Beth Revis
I nod and follow him silently into the elevator. When it reaches the third floor, we both get off, leaving Kit and Evie to continue to the fourth floor. Doc leads me to his office. I pause at one door—Amy’s. I want to turn right and go to her. I just want to give her my apology over and over until she accepts it. But instead, I turn left and enter Doc’s office.
“The Hospital’s been so busy lately,” Doc says. “This is the first time I’ve had a chance to come to my office in two days. I’m sorry for the mess.”
I snort. The office looks immaculate, but that doesn’t stop Doc from immediately straightening the papers on his desk.
The Hospital has been busier than usual, though. Bruises and cuts from fights. Injuries from farm equipment when the operators were distracted from their jobs by senseless daydreaming that never would have happened had they still been on Phydus. A few people just doing stupid things to show how much chutz they had. And some . . . some pretty strange cases. Where people hurt themselves or each other, just because they suddenly had the capacity to feel, and they didn’t care what they felt as long as it was something.
Amy said that she could mark how quickly the effects of Phydus wore off the Feeders by how many more people would come to the Hospital each day.
My gut twists at the thought of Amy. She’s just down the hall, probably sitting in her room, hating me.
“My report,” Doc says, sliding a floppy across the desk as he sits down.
Before I look at it, I say, “Will Evie be okay?”
Doc nods. “The Phydus patch is just like any other med patch—it’s just that the meds inside it are a variation of Phydus. It’s strong enough to act quickly, but I’ve also developed an antidote patch, just in case.”
I’m still hesitant about using Phydus in any form, but at least there’s an antidote. I let the subject drop.
For a moment, I consider telling Doc what I now know about the ship, how we’re stopped. If Eldest had known, he would have told Doc. But I’m not Eldest, and Doc’s not my friend. Instead of speaking, I examine the report Doc handed me.
SHIP HEALTH EVALUATION REPORT
Previous ship population: 2,298
Current ship population: 2,296
Fluctuations in population: -2
Jordy, Rancher: suicide
Ellemae, Greenhouse Keeper: complications in external injuries
Disease and injuries:
+3 infection due to previous wounds
+18 gastroenteritis due to improper food preparation
+6 workplace injuries
+9 self-inflicted injuries and violence
+43 alcohol-related problems (poisoning, injuries, etc.)
+24 malnourishment
+63 overfeeding
Psychological and health issues
-1 depression
+8 hoarding
+6 hypochondria
+2 deviant sexual behavior
Medical notes:
+2 pregnancies
I click on the deaths and read the names carefully, memorizing them. Because here’s the simple truth—if I hadn’t taken the ship off Phydus, people like Jordy and Ellemae would still be alive. And while I could say that a shorter life with feelings is better than a longer life without, the dead can’t tell me their side.
I pause at the malnourished and overfed. Some of this is linked with the hoarding, I’m sure. People are afraid they won’t have enough food later, so they’re saving it now rather than eating it. Or they’re eating as much as they can before supplies run out.
I can’t help but think of Bartie’s warning. The way to a revolution is through people’s stomachs.
When I get to the end of the report, I ask, “Two new pregnancies?”
Doc takes the floppy back and reads over it, even though he must know what’s on it. “Oh, yes,” he says. “Both had lived in the Ward and chosen not to participate in the Season. They have, however, since decided to procreate.”
“Doc,” I say, curiosity making my voice rise. “If we wanted to increase the ship’s population, then the Season’s not very effective, is it?”
Doc swipes the floppy off and sets it on his desk, poking one side until it’s square with the desk mat. “I, er, why do you say that?”
I lean forward, sitting on the edge of my chair. “I used to think that the Season was just the way things were, like how the animals mate on schedule. But it’s pretty obvious now that the Season isn’t natural. And if it’s something engineered by you and Eldest, and if we’re still trying to rebuild our population from the so-called Plague . . . well, the Season doesn’t make sense, does it? One mating Season per gen? That would reduce our population, not recoup it. . . .”
My voice trails off, but Doc doesn’t answer right away. The more I speak, the more I realize how right I am. The Season is just a frexing loon method to rebuild a population.
“Well, for some gens we had two Seasons,” Doc says defensively. “And we’ve engineered it so many couples have multiple births.”
For a moment we both stare at each other.
“It started a few gens ago,” Doc says finally. His voice is hollow; it’s like he’s confessing a sin to me. “We figured it would be best to slow the population growth. We’re having trouble producing enough food as it is.”
“What happens when we can’t produce enough food?” I ask.
Doc looks at me silently, and I can tell he’s evaluating whether or not he will tell me. With the Shippers, I can demand truth and be assured they’ll give it. But with Doc, I have to wait and hope. Doc was in favor of Eldest’s use of Phydus, and he was in favor of Orion’s methods—after all, he was the one who kept Orion alive when Eldest ordered him killed. But I don’t think Doc has made up his mind yet on whether or not I’m a good enough replacement for either of these men.
Apparently, though, I can be trusted with the truth. At least in this case. He finally says, “Eldest had thought of that. We have in storage a supply of over 3,000 black med patches.”
“Black?” I ask. I’d never seen patches that were black.
Doc nods curtly. “In the event that the ship is no longer capable of sustaining life, the black patches will be distributed to the ship’s population.”
And now I understand what the black patches are for. A quick death, rather than a slow one.
16
AMY
I PROP HARLEY’S LAST PAINTING UP ON MY BED AND STAND back. His laughing eyes are even with my own, but there’s no Mona Lisa–like illusion that he’s looking at me.
“So,” I say aloud to painted Harley, “just where is this clue Orion says is here?”
I’m hesitant to touch the paint—I don’t want to do anything to damage it. Instead, I scan the painting with my eyes, looking for some hidden message from Orion.
I get lost in the image—there’s Harley’s face, and the stars, and the tiny koi fish swimming around his ankle. There are all the memories. How can someone I knew for so short a time have left such an indelible print on my soul? Seeing him look this way, so happy and free, makes me remember that something about Harley, that spark, that joy, that something that makes me wish he was still here, now.
I force my eyes to unfocus, to look past the image and into the paint. But there’s nothing there.
I run my hands along the paint-splattered sides of the canvas. Nothing.
Then I flip it over.
I’ve never really looked at the back of the painting before. But now that I do, I notice a faint, almost invisible sketch made with a piece of charcoal or pencil from the looks of it. I squint, lean in closer, then pick the whole painting up and hold it up to the light.
A small animal—this isn’t Harley’s sketching; his pictures were much more realistic. This cartoonish creature looks a little like a hamster, but with huge, exaggerated ears . . . a bunny. And beside it, a circle . . . or, rather, a flattened circle that’s more of an oval. In the center of the circle is a tiny square that looks like one of th
ose super-thin memory cards Mom had for her fancy camera. It’s stuck to the canvas with something tacky, but when I slip my fingernail under the edge of it, it pops right off.
I hold the object up on the tip of my index finger. Black plastic encases a thin gold strip of metal woven with silver threads of circuitry. What is this? It seems so familiar. I turn it over, but the other side is just hard plastic.
And then it hits me—I have seen something like this before. I rush to my desk and pick up the small screen that showed Orion’s first video. Connected to a small port in the corner of the screen is an identical piece of square black plastic. The thing from the back of Harley’s painting is like a memory card . . . if I could just figure out how to swap it with the one already there.
I squint at the back of the painting again, hoping for some other clue. And there, just under the sketch, are tiny words, barely legible.
Follow me down the rabbit hole.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” I say.
It takes Elder about 2.5 seconds to reach my room after I com him.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, skidding through the door.
I laugh at the way his eyes search my room, looking for a dragon to slay for his damsel in distress. “How’d you get here so quick?”
“I was in Doc’s office.”
The laughter fades. In the quiet, I’m reminded of the name he called me, freak, and the shape of Elder’s lips as he formed the word.
“Listen, Amy, I’m sorry.” I start to open my mouth, but Elder continues. “Seriously. I never meant to say that. I’m really sorry.”
“I’m sorry too,” I say, looking down at my hands. It’s silly for me to dwell on one word said in anger when we have the whole ship to think of.
Silence spreads between us, but at least he doesn’t look away from me.
“So,” Elder says finally, “what’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I say. “Just . . . strange. I found this.”
I hold out the small black chip I peeled from the back of Harley’s painting and the screen I found in Dante’s Inferno.
“A mem card and a dedicated vid screen!” Elder says, laughing. “I haven’t seen these in years! Floppies pretty much replaced them.”
“How do you use this mem card thing?” I ask, offering it to him.
“A dedicated vid is just a digital membrane screen,” Elder says as he gently pops out the original memory card and replaces it with the new one. The square chip snaps to the screen as if there was a magnetic pull between them. “It’s like a floppy, but you have to have a mem card in the back to make them work.” He places the old mem card on the edge of my desk, then flips the dedicated vid over and swipes his finger across the screen. A glowing square pops up.
“Here, let me,” I say, taking the video screen from him and pressing my thumb onto it. The glowing box fades away, replaced with a video that starts playing automatically.
“That’s . . . that’s the cryo level,” I whisper. The angle makes it look like security camera footage.
Elder shakes his head. “That’s not possible; the cams down there were destroyed before Orion started to . . .”
Started unplugging the other frozens.
For several moments, nothing happens on the screen. I’m just about to ask Elder if it’s paused or broken when there’s movement at the corner of the video.
A shadow first, snaking across the floor like a clawed hand.
And then . . .
“That’s me,” Elder whispers.
I glance at him, unsure of why his tone is so high and worried.
“Let’s—uh. Let’s not watch this. I don’t think we should watch this.” His hand moves to stop the video, but I snatch it away.
“Why?” I demand.
Elder bites his lip, worry smeared across his face.
The Elder on the screen creeps forward. There’s no sound to the video, which makes it even weirder when on-screen Elder stops as if he’s heard something. After a moment, he turns to the square door that looks like it belongs in a morgue. He twists it open and slides the tray out.
And then I’m not looking at Elder anymore. I’m looking at me.
That’s me, frozen in ice. So still. I look dead. Horror curls my lip. That’s my flesh, my body. Naked. That’s Elder, looking at my naked body.
“Elder!” I screech, and smack him upside his head.
“I didn’t know you then!” he says.
“I didn’t know you were such a creeper!” I shout back.
“I’m sorry!” Elder ducks away from me.
The Elder on the screen looks up suddenly, drawing our attention back to the video. But after listening, head cocked like a worried bird, the Elder on-screen dips his attention back to me. He raises a hand—I notice that it’s shaking slightly—and places it on my glass box, just over where my heart is. Then he jumps—clearly startled by whatever sound he’s hearing in the background—and dashes off-screen.
“You just left me there?” I ask. I knew he had, he’d confessed it to me already—but to see it like that. To see me, left there so carelessly, helplessly.
Elder looks miserable. He’s not watching the screen at all; he’s just watching me, this look on his face like he wishes I’d scream and punch at him and just get it over with.
But I’m not mad anymore . . . at least, I’m not as mad as I am sad. And slightly disgusted. I don’t know how to put into words that sick, bile taste on the back of my tongue, so I don’t say anything, I just turn back to the screen.
For several minutes, nothing happens. I watch as a thin trail of condensation leaks from the edge of my glass coffin and drops with a tiny, silent splash on the floor. I’m already melting.
Suddenly, I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to watch myself wake up. I can’t relive drowning in cryo liquid, gagging on the tubes in my throat. I shut my eyes and turn my face away, even though it will take much, much longer for the me on-screen to melt all the way. But then Elder sucks in a breath of surprise, and my eyes fly back to the screen.
There’s another shadow there, wider and longer, creeping slowly toward my frozen self. A shaft of light highlights the side of his neck, the part where a spiderweb of scars reaches behind his left ear.
Orion.
The first thing he does is slam me back into the cryo freezer. He locks the door shut and turns to leave.
But then he pauses.
He stares for a long moment off-screen, in the same direction Elder had walked away in, and he taps his fingers across the top of the cryo chamber, thinking. Then, slowly, deliberately, he pulls me back out of the cryo chamber. He looks down at me for a moment.
And then he walks away.
Orion told me that he got the idea to unplug the frozens from watching Elder unfreeze me. And this is it. This is the moment when he realized how easy it would be to kill people who can’t fight back.
Static fills the screen.
“That’s why he destroyed the cams in the cryo level,” Elder says.
That’s one reason, anyway.
Elder drops the vid screen on my desk and stands. Hair flops into his face, but I can still see his eyes shift to me. Waiting for me to react.
But I don’t know how to respond. I don’t know how I feel about this. About the way Elder looked at me, about the way Orion didn’t. My brain can’t process this.
“Amy?”
Elder’s head whips up, panic in his eyes. He wasn’t the one who spoke.
We both rush to the vid screen on the desk. The static has faded. Orion’s face fills the screen, so close up that the camera must have been just inches from him.
Before the screen fades to black, Orion’s voice rings out clearly. “Amy? Are you ready for this? Are you ready to find the truth?”
17
ELDER
THE SCREEN GOES BLANK. ORION’S LAST QUESTION HANGS IN the air, but the image Amy saw of me pulling her out of the cryo chamber fills her eyes.
; “Amy?” I whisper, hesitant.
She swipes her hand across her face. Her eyes are red.
“Amy?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, her voice cracking in the middle. “What’s done is done.”
And that’s what kills me inside. Because what’s done was done by me. And as much as I wish Amy could see me the way I see her and want me the way I want her, she will never be able to forget the image of me pulling her out of her cryo chamber and walking away. No wonder she doesn’t want to be in the Keeper Level with me.
I could punch whoever made Amy see this. My fists clench involuntarily. It’s not like I’m so brilly on my own, but I certainly don’t frexing need someone showing Amy what a chutz I was! “Who gave you this?” I demand.
Her clear green eyes meet mine, her voice steady now. “Orion did.”
“What?”
“Orion did. Kind of. I mean, he left the wi-com for me. It has lettering on it, see?” She holds the wi-com out for me. “It’s from a book. The book led me to the painting, the painting led me to . . . this.”
“Why did he leave messages for you? What’s he playing at?”
Amy hesitates, then hands me the mem card that was originally attached to the vid screen. When she presses her thumb against the ID box, the video plays. Orion’s voice calls Amy his contingency plan, seeks her aid for a mission should he have failed, and—I can’t help but notice—if it looks like I am failing too.
“Where did you get this?”
“I told you,” Amy says. “Orion left me these clues.”
“And you think—if you play his little game and solve these clues, then . . . what?”
“I don’t know,” Amy says. “But the way he keeps saying someone from Sol-Earth has to make the decision, it makes me think . . .”
I remember First Shipper Marae telling me about how Orion influenced the decision to hold back information about the ship’s dead engine, how Eldest tried to have Orion killed soon after. If he made these videos as a way to get the word out on whatever it was that he discovered that led to Eldest trying to kill him, then there really might be a way to get Godspeed flying again.