A Million Suns (Across the Universe #2)

A Million Suns (Across the Universe #2) Page 5

The Shippers gather close to the screen. They look worried—Haile and Jodee start whispering to each other, and Brittne’s hand moves to her wi-com. Shelby’s eyes keep reading the phrase over and over, mouthing the words silently.

“Calm down,” Marae snaps, and I—and every Shipper—focus our attention on her. “This is our first task as poe-leez. And we will not fail the Eldest.”

She hands the floppy to Fourth Shipper Prestyn. “This is a good hack,” he says after a moment of examination. “I’ll get my group started on breaking it right away.”

Marae nods curtly, and Prestyn heads to the door, already barking orders into his wi-com.

“I’ll check all our security feeds,” Second Shipper Shelby says.

“And we’ll need to start researching methods to add increased security to the floppy network,” Marae says. The rest of the Shippers break away from the group, a buzz of activity already drowning out the sounds of the churning engine behind me.

Marae touches my elbow and draws me aside. I can still see the bright white words on the floppy, mocking me.

“What are you going to do, Elder?” she asks.

I meet her eyes. “I really don’t know.”

6

AMY

THIS WI-COM IS SUPPOSED TO CONNECT ME TO THE SHIP, BUT all it does is make me feel even more disconnected from my past. But . . . I do need it, like Doc said. Because I’m not safe here.

My hand clenches around my wrist. The bruises are long gone, but other hands once held my wrists, forcing me down to the ground. . . .

I release my hand and suck in a huge breath of air. I won’t let myself think of that. I can’t let myself think of that.

Instead, I look at the wi-com. I imagine the braided wires slithering apart, sliding under my skin, burrowing through my flesh. I’m wearing something that was once inside someone else. It’s like wearing a tooth on a necklace or making earrings from toenails. It’s even worse that it came from Orion. I want nothing more than to rip this thing that was once his off my wrist and destroy it . . . but something stops me.

At least, with the wi-com, I can reach Elder. In the past few weeks, I’ve seen him less and less—and I get it, really I do, I know he’s busy. But . . . I can’t help but smile. It will be nice to be able to talk to him.

I push the button on the wi-com and say Elder’s name. I raise it to my ear, waiting to hear his voice. Beep! “Com link denied,” a pleasant female computer voice says.

Well, it would be nice to talk to Elder. If he’d actually answer my com.

I look closer at the wi-com—small black letters are printed along one of the wires. I wouldn’t really notice them if I wasn’t inspecting the wi-com so closely. I dig my finger into the braided wires, separating the red wire from the others so I can see the letters more clearly.

It’s one phrase, three words repeated over and over and over in tiny print: Abandon all hope.

My first thought is, how did Doc miss this? He said he cleaned the wi-com. But, I suppose, this is just another mark of how disturbed—by which I mean downright psycho—Orion was. I wouldn’t be surprised if Doc saw the message and gave the wi-com to me regardless—words printed on a wire don’t actually change whether or not the stupid thing works. Doc cares more about practicality than whatever leftover bits of Orion’s insanity are braided up into the thing.

Beyond that, the phrase is apt. If there’s one thing I don’t have any more of, it’s hope. It’s almost like Orion left that message just for me.

And then I realize: he did.

Doc said the wi-com came with a note. It is, in a way, my inheritance.

My mind spins. Orion doesn’t have to tell me there’s no more hope for me aboard Godspeed; I figured that out on my own. But . . . maybe he meant something more . . . Because—I know where this phrase comes from. It is, according to my tenth-grade English teacher Ms. Parker, one of the most recognizable lines in literature, right up there with Rhett not giving a damn about Scarlett and Hamlet waffling on about whether to be or not to be. Abandon all hope is the phrase written above the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno.

And, since books were pretty much off-limits until Elder took over as ruler of Godspeed, that’s not something Doc would have known. Of everyone on the ship, I’m probably the only one who knows about books from Earth.

Other than Orion, that is, who spent most of his life hidden in the Recorder Hall with only words and fictional characters for company.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am. These aren’t just some casual words Orion doodled somewhere. “Abandon all hope” is a specific phrase from a specific book written on a wi-com that Orion left specifically for me.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this. It’s probably nothing. But I’ve had “nothing” for far too long, and I’m ready for something. Anything. I’d rather go to the Recorder Hall and look up the phrase in Dante’s Inferno than just sit here and stare at the walls some more. I zip my jacket all the way up, leave my room, and head to the elevator. I’m excited, and my legs want to run . . . but instead, when I get outside, I remember how running only makes me more noticeable and walk with my head down and the hood of my jacket pulled up. As I mount the stairs to the Recorder Hall, I glance up out of habit. In a cubby by the door hangs a painting of Elder, one of Harley’s last works. This is the closest I’ve come to seeing Elder in days; the more time that passes, the more wrapped up he is in running Godspeed. In a lot of ways, he’s more trapped than I am.

Painted Elder peers out from the hall at his enclosed kingdom, and I turn, following the path of his painted eyes.

The solar lamp’s glare blinds me for a moment, and in that split second of darkness, I realize something I didn’t know before: I don’t need to see the landscape to know every inch of the Feeder Level spread out before me. I close my eyes, and I can still see the rolling fields in perfectly spaced hills. I know the precise pattern of colors of the trailers that make up the City on the far side of the ship. I know the exact point in the metal sky when the rivets holding the roof together get so far away, I can’t really see them anymore. I know the shape of each painted cloud.

I try to dig into my memories for what my house looked like in Colorado, but I can’t remember exactly. The shutters on the windows—were they more brick red or burgundy? What kind of flowers did Mom plant in the front yard?

I know Godspeed now better than I can remember Earth.

“Outta the way, freak,” a hefty woman says, shouldering past me as she leaves the Recorder Hall. I must look like even more of a freak than normal—wearing a jacket when everyone else has short sleeves, standing in the doorway of the Recorder Hall like an idiot.

A young man, slender and tall, stares at me openly as he follows the woman toward the path leading to the Hospital. I pull my hood farther down. He turns his head to look at me as he steps off the stairs, and something in his eyes makes me turn on my heel and rush into the Recorder Hall.

Godspeed has not just replaced Earth in my mind; it’s replaced my home. And it’s inhabited with people who hide dark thoughts behind staring dark eyes.

I shake my head, willing thoughts of both my old home and the man to fall from my cluttered mind. There’s no use thinking about either.

Inside the Recorder Hall is dark and quiet. There are people here, but they ignore me in a way they wouldn’t outside, where the false sunlight streams across my pale skin and the red hair peeking out from under my scarf. They’re focused on the information they’re seeing and understanding for the first time. They’re not concentrating on me.

That’s why I like it here.

There are crowds of people at each of the giant digital screens hanging from the walls. Even though Elder has opened up the entire Recorder Hall to everyone on board, most Feeders stick to examining the floppies—if they come at all. Few venture into the rooms past this one, filled with books; fewer still go to the second and third floors to visit the galleries.

Here, each of the wall floppies is labeled with a different subject—History, Agriculture, and Science are the most popular ones. A crowd of nearly a dozen people peer up at a diagram of a nuclear reactor on the Science wall floppy, arguing in soft tones about some detail in the schematics.

The least popular wall floppy is Literature. Only a handful of young women are scrolling through a copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. They’re struggling with the language more than my classmates did in ninth grade, but I wonder if, when they do get past the thees and thous and I bite my thumb at you, sirs, will they walk away thinking that is love? I consider pausing here and telling them about the debate we had in class where I argued that Romeo and Juliet weren’t really in love. In ninth grade, I was so sure of myself I won the debate (and a prize of a free homework pass), and I remember shooting down the opposing side so passionately that the entire class was in an uproar. But now . . . now I can’t remember a single argument from the debate on either side, and I can think of nothing to say to these people. How can I argue that Romeo and Juliet doesn’t really show love to a group of people who have no concept of what love really is? When I don’t know what love really is—just what it isn’t.

Suddenly, all the wall floppies go black.

“Hey!” one of the girls reading Shakespeare shouts.

“What’s going on?” a burly man at the Agriculture wall floppy growls.

Giant words in bright white letters scroll across the darkened screens, filling the hall with one phrase, repeated over and over.

LEAD YOURSELF

My eyes widen, and I pull my hood even farther down over my face, so hard that the seams strain against the back of my head. While everyone else is distracted, reading the words and puzzling about how they flashed on their floppies, I rush to the back of the hall, toward the book rooms. Something like this was bound to happen. Elder’s been spending all his free time with me in the Recorder Hall, reading up on civics and police forces, but I don’t think he really understood that some people are going to want to rebel just because, for the very first time, they can.

“Who did this?” A male voice cuts through the mutterings of the crowd. He sounds wary, scared even, but also aggressive, as if he’d like to find and punish whoever hacked the floppy network.

“What does it mean?” a woman near me says. Her friend shakes her head violently, her hair whipping her cheeks, her eyes wide with fear.

A woman at the Science floppy starts tapping the screen, trying to make the message go away. The crowd around her starts whispering uneasily as nothing she does changes the message. Whoever hacked the floppies did a good job, apparently.

“Eldest needs to fix this,” the first man says. It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about Elder. Many of the people around him nod, their eyes on the screen, their mouths gaping.

“Those floppies didn’t change until the freak walked by,” one of the women who had been reading Romeo and Juliet says in a clear, loud voice. She starts searching the crowd in the entryway for me. I duck my head and run into the back hall.