by Beth Revis
Bartie spins away from me. But just as I take a step toward Doc, who’s standing on the curb, too shocked to do anything, Bartie turns back and shoves me hard so that I slam against the side of the cart again.
“You’re worse than Eldest, you know that? At least he treated us all the same. You’re just picking us off as you choose.”
He turns to go, shaking his fist out.
“Wait a frexing minute!” I shout. Bartie stops but doesn’t turn; his back is stiff and straight, and his fingers curl into fists again. “I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“Didn’t do anything wrong?” Bartie sneers without turning around. “Tell that to Lil.”
He strides off. The people on the street are silent, watching us. As soon as Bartie turns the corner, they start whispering.
“Lil?” I ask Doc as I gather up the patches from the ground, stuffing them into my pockets. They may be scattered throughout the rest of the ship, but at least I can make sure these don’t fall into the wrong hands.
Doc’s face is creased in a dark frown, but he’s glowering at where Bartie walked off, not at me. “She’s the one Kit found dead.”
I rush up the stairs to Harley’s childhood home. I don’t know what I expect to find there—his mother is already dead. Lil’s trailer is exactly as it was before—messy and slightly smelly. When I enter her bedroom, Lil’s just where Amy and I left her, sprawled on the bed.
Across her forehead are three pale green patches. One word on each patch.
Follow the leader.
“You know what that means, don’t you?” Doc asks. When I don’t answer, he adds, “This was murder. Someone killed Lil. For you.”
“For me?” I can’t take my eyes off her body. It seems to melt into the bed.
“Follow the leader. It’s a warning to others—to those who don’t.”
“But Lil wasn’t rebelling. She wasn’t involved with Bartie’s group, and she never spoke against me—”
“She wasn’t working,” Doc says. He sits beside Lil on the bed, peeling the patches off one by one. They cling to her skin, lifting it up a little and making a schlick sound as they pop off her. “Anyone not working, anyone not fulfilling the needs of the ship . . . they’re not following you.”
Doc waits until I tear my eyes away from Lil’s body. “She was murdered for you,” he says clearly, slowly, as if to make sure that I understand the weight of her death rests on my shoulders.
34
AMY
I CAN’T KEEP STILL. I MAY HAVE GIVEN UP RUNNING, BUT I can’t think cramped up on the cryo level, with all the locked doors mocking me. I have to move. When I get to the Hospital lobby, though, I’m surrounded by shouting patients, angry nurses, and a crowd that seems to grow by the minute.
“It’s safe!” Doc’s apprentice, Kit, tells a woman loudly. “Just one is fine!”
“How do I know that?” the woman asks. Her voice is thick, like she’s been crying.
“Well, look at yourself,” Kit says, exasperated. “You’re fine, aren’t you?”
“I think so . . . but . . .”
Kit growls in frustration and marches off, nearly crashing into me.
“Sorry,” she says.
“No prob. What’s going on?”
“Those frexing med patches. People are worried they’re dying, but if they’d had the overdose, they’d already be dead. Try to convince them of that, though.”
“What med patches?”
Kit reaches into her lab coat and shows me a square green patch. “Doc developed them for the depressed patients. Works, too. If you have only one. Problem is, word’s gotten out that three or more will kill you.”
“What’s in them?”
“Phydus.” She says it matter-of-factly, but she waits for my reaction before continuing.
Phydus. I thought we were through with that.
Part of me is angry. Very, very angry. I thought Elder and I agreed. I thought he had promised. No more Phydus. But another part of me can’t forget the crowd that turned into a mob in the City.
“We’re all going to die!” the woman Kit had been arguing with shouts. She grabs Kit by the lapels of her coat, her knuckles turning white.
Kit wraps one hand around the woman’s wrist, and, surprisingly, the woman easily releases her. Her arms drop to her sides, and her whole body relaxes.
“There, isn’t that better?” Kit asks gently.
The woman doesn’t answer. And then I notice the pale green patch on the back of her hand.
Kit leads the woman to a chair against the wall and deposits her there. She turns back to me with a satisfied look on her face. And—I can’t help but smile back at her. That worked. Maybe if Elder had had some patches in the City yesterday, things wouldn’t have gotten so out of hand. And maybe if I had had one in the fiction room when Luthor burst in . . .
“Can I have some of those patches?” I ask Kit.
She narrows her eyes at me. “Didn’t you hear? They’re not safe. We’re trying to get all the ones that were stolen back. Only Doc, the nurses, and I are supposed to use them.”
Interesting. The patches were stolen.
“Can I just have one, then?” I ask.
Something in Kit melts. I think she thinks I’m depressed about being the only freak on the ship—she’s always been nice to me in the way that some people are super-nice in a suffocating sort of way to people who are handicapped.
“Don’t tell Doc,” she whispers, slipping me a patch. I hide it in my pocket, next to the floppy I found in the armory.
I pull my jacket hood up before I leave the Hospital, but, armed as I am with a Phydus patch, I don’t bother with the scarf around my hair. I head directly to the Recorder Hall. It’s a long shot, but Orion left the clues—the real clues—for me. Even if the last clue was tampered with, Orion’s had a pretty solid plan to make sure I’ve gotten where I needed to go. So far, the clues have come from Harley’s paintings or the Recorder Hall. Maybe the next one will too.
Yeah. Right. It’s going to be so easy to find one clue out of all the book rooms, art galleries, and artifact rooms in the Recorder Hall—if the clue is even there. For the first time ever, Godspeed actually feels . . . huge. I’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell to find this thing.
I can’t help but smirk. After all, Dante’s hell was made of ice.
As I approach the Recorder Hall, I see a group of people standing in a tight cluster on the porch. I pull my hood lower and slip my hand into my pocket, fingering the Phydus med patch.
“The ship needs guidance,” a man says.
I stop near the handrail, hesitant to go up the steps. Instead, I turn around so, if the group looked at me, they’d only see the back of my jacket.
“Bartie?” a woman asks. “Maybe Luthor?”
“Maybe one of them. But not necessarily. Just someone . . . older. More experienced.”
I try to look casual and uninterested as I strain to hear more.
“Elder’s been training for this his whole life,” a female voice says. I want to cheer—at least someone’s sticking up for Elder.
The first man’s laugh is harsh and mirthless. “Elder never listened to Eldest. They’re too different.”
I think of the giant cylinders hidden on the cryo level, filled with clones of Eldest. They’re more alike than the man could guess. Part of me thinks that, perhaps, Elder should have told them about the cloning. It was one of the few things he kept secret, and I don’t begrudge him this—after all, the only person this secret affects is him.
“Haven’t you noticed how slim the rations are getting? There wasn’t even lunch today. Elder thinks if he controls our food, he can control us. And if that doesn’t work, he’ll patch us. Those patches are dangerous—they’ve already killed.”
“I’d like to know how those frexing patches got everywhere,” a woman with a deep voice says. “I half think Elder did it after the trouble at the Food Distro. He might not be putting that frexing drug in
our water anymore, but he’s making sure the troublemakers get it somehow.”
“Doc said the patches were stolen,” the first woman, the only dissenter in the group, says.
“He says,” the man shoots back. “But Doc’s always brownnosed the Eldest. I bet Elder told him to make sure anyone causing trouble gets patched.”
“Yes, but—” the woman starts to say.
I’ve had enough. “Are you really going to stand here and spread lies about Elder?” I demand, whirling around and striding up the steps toward the group. “You’re going to start a rebellion, talking like that.”
The man in the center of the crowd turns, but he doesn’t seem to care much that I’ve overhead him. If anything, he’s proud.
“This isn’t about rebellion,” he says gently, as if explaining something to someone very young. “Have you read Bartie’s manifesto?” He waves the floppy at me, but I don’t take it. “This is about doing what’s best for the ship. About keeping everyone safe and happy.” He pauses. “The ship is more important than any one person. Even Elder.”
“Happy?” I shoot back. The kinder the man’s voice is, the angrier I’m becoming. “What has Elder done to make you unhappy?”
The woman with a deep voice shakes her head. “It’s not that Elder’s bad. It’s that he wasn’t our choice.”
“Bartie lists all kinds of books in the Recorder Hall,” the man says, waving the floppy at me again. I still don’t take it. “All those governments on Sol-Earth. They had systems. Voting and elections, things like that. Things where people could choose and have a voice.”
“Taking the ship from Elder isn’t the right thing to do,” I insist. They seem so—I don’t know, logical—that I think if I could just sit them down, show them how hard Elder’s working, how much he really cares, maybe they wouldn’t be so willing to trash him.
“I’m sorry,” the man says. “But we can’t trust you either.”
“And why not? I live here too!”
He shakes his head. “But you’re not one of us.” His eyes drift down to my red hair spilling from the jacket. I try to stuff it back under the hood. The man smiles smugly. He looks perfectly at ease, as if he’s in complete control. In contrast, I can already feel my face is hot. “All I know,” he says, “is that we didn’t need police before you. Everything was fine before you.”
I back down the first two steps. “Maybe Elder would be the leader we need him to be if he didn’t have any distractions,” the deep-voiced woman says in a conversational tone, as if she’s not talking about eliminating me as a distraction.
I back down the next two steps. “It did all start with her,” the other woman says.
I’m gripping the Phydus patch in my pocket, deeply aware that one won’t subdue everyone in the group. Why did I bother trying to say anything? I should have known better.
Orion’s list brushes against the back of my hand.
No. I won’t let them scare me away from the chance to find the next clue.
I storm up the stairs and shoulder past the woman with the deep voice. The man steps out of my way, but he does so with an eerie twist on his lips, watching me as I push open the doors to the Recorder Hall and enter. I don’t like that look. It reminds me too much of the way Luthor looks at me, as if I’m a thing, not a person.
Inside, the Recorder Hall is mostly deserted. A single man, tall and skinny, reads an essay by Henry David Thoreau on the Literature wall floppy, and four people are bunched together, reading about the Boxer Rebellion. But no one’s looking at the Science floppy at all. That’s strange. This is the first time since Elder took the ship off Phydus that no one’s analyzing the engine diagram, trying to improve efficiency, not knowing that the engine hasn’t moved us forward in years.
I make my way quickly to the book rooms. I don’t think the group on the porch is going to bother following me in here, but I’d rather get done as quickly as possible.
I bypass all the nonfiction rooms. Orion left this clue for me, and even if someone else has hidden it, I still think my best chance of finding it is either in fiction or art.
I have to have a chance of finding it. I have to.
Someone probably changed the last clue—deleted parts, probably added that text—but Orion left me a much more elaborate path. He’s put so much care and planning into hiding each clue. There has to be something else, some way to figure out the next step.
I trail my fingers along the shelf, looking for something that might hint at Orion’s next clue. I flip through Dante’s Inferno again, and then Paradiso and Purgatorio. I look through everything by Lewis Carroll, including that stupid poem Ms. Parker made us diagram, “Jabberwocky.”
This is useless. Orion may have left the next clue in a book, but he didn’t leave it in a book he’s already used.
I collapse into the chair in front by the metal table in the center of the room. A copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets lies in the middle, just where I threw it after finding it misshelved by Dante a few days ago. I guess the new Recorder, Bartie, is too busy writing manifestos and trying to start an unneeded revolution to bother with doing his actual job.
Sighing, I snatch up the book and head for the S shelves. There’s just enough room to squeeze the sonnets between King Lear and Macbeth.
I head for the door—might as well see if there’s anything attached to any of the rest of Harley’s paintings.
I pause. Orion had a contingency plan for everything—why not make sure the clues are close together, just in case someone tampered with one? I’m the only one who ever really bothers with the book rooms—and before me, there was only him. What are the chances of someone else putting a book on the wrong shelf—right next to the book that held the first clue?
I rush back to the S shelf, my hands shaking as I reach for the poetry book. The pages are glossy and thick, dotted with illustrations from the Elizabethan era. On the first page is a color portrait of Shakespeare. The Bard wrote about star-crossed love, but I doubt he ever realized his works would one day be soaring through the stars.
I frown. We’re not exactly soaring now, are we?
I flip through the pages quickly, creasing them in a way that I know Elder would frown upon. But . . . there’s nothing here. I force myself to slow down, reading each poem even though they make little sense to me.
I take a deep, shaking breath. Part of me wants to throw the book against the wall. I’d gotten my hopes so far up.
Maybe Elder’s right. Maybe this whole thing is pointless.
Still, I take the book with me as I head back to my room in the Ward.
The Hospital’s still busy even though it’s nearly time for the solar lamp to turn off, but the third floor is almost empty. Only Victria sits in the common room, staring out the window. I start to say something to her, but I remember the angry look she gave me when she found me in Harley’s room and in the cryo level, so I move straight to the glass doors leading to the hallway. She glances up at me as I pass, but not with an angry glare.
She’s been crying.
I think of saying something to her, but I doubt she’d care to speak to me. I hear her sniffle as I reach for the door. She hates me. There’s a muffled sound behind me, like she’s holding in a sob. But I hear anyway.
I let the glass doors close and head over to the couch.
“Go away,” she says, but there’s no heart in her voice.
“What’s wrong?”
She turns back to the window.
I lean into the seat cushion and cross my legs. “I’m just going to stay here until you tell me.”
She waits a long moment, as if testing me. When I don’t move, she finally speaks, her words fogging the glass of the window, “I just miss him. The worse things get, the more I think about what he might have done.”
“Is this . . . is this about Orion?” I ask.
She chokes out a laugh, a wet sound marred by her angry tears. She swipes her arm across her face. “It’s stupid really,” sh
e says, still talking to the window more than to me. “He . . . he was older than me. I was just some stupid little kid to him. But . . . I’ve always loved stories. Books. And I’d go to the Recorder Hall, and he’d be there.”
My lips twitch up in a small smile, and I think back to what I knew of Orion before I discovered he was a murderer. He wiped my face and hands clean when I’d been crying once, and I sort of wish I could do the same for Victria now.
“The thing that makes me so upset,” Victria continues, “is that I never had a chance to tell him. I mean, I think he knew, but I never actually said the words. I’d go to the Recorder Hall almost every day, and we’d talk and joke, but . . . I never said what I wanted to. And now it’s too late.”
It’s sad how much Victria and I have in common—she wants to reveal her deepest secrets to people who are nothing but ice, too.
“I think,” I say slowly, “that if you really loved him, he probably knew, whether you said it or not.”
She finally turns to look at me, and there’s a hint of a smile on her lips. Her eyes are mostly dry now. “I just wish I had a choice,” she says.
“A choice?”
“If I could, I’d make myself not care anymore.”
We’re both silent for a long moment.
If I could quit caring about my parents, frozen below, would I? It would make things easier. I wouldn’t wake up every morning with a hollow ache inside of me.
And then I think of Elder. It’s the question I ask myself every time he looks at me with those soft eyes of his, every time he jumps to do something just because I asked it: do I love him? I don’t know. But I do know that I can at least tell myself I don’t.
“I think love is a choice,” I say. That’s why I can’t love Elder. Because I don’t have anyone else to choose from.
“But who,” Victria asks, “would choose this?”
