Across the Universe (29 page)

69

AMY

I WAKE UP WITH THE PAINTBRUSH STUCK TO MY FACE. Harley would laugh if he could see me now, call me his Painted Fish.

By the door, there is a flashing red square of light. It’s the button to the small rectangle metal cubicle beside the food cubicle. When I push it, the tiny door zips open and a big blue-and-white pill pops out. So that’s what that door was for.

The Inhibitor medicine. The medicine that keeps me sane.

I stare at it, disgusted. It sticks in my throat as I swallow it. It burns going down, and fills my belly with a sense of revulsion and urgency that leaves me sick to my stomach. I push in the button to the food door, and it leaves me a pastry filled with something that is almost eggs and that oozes with something that is almost cheese. I’m done after a bite. I’m tired of almost. I want something real.

I return to my wall. Taking Elder’s advice, I ignore my name and my list of characteristics. What can I or anything about me have to do with murder?

With my name gone, I see it, standing out before me as brightly as if the words were written in different colored paint.

The
military
.

Each victim, even the woman who hadn’t died—all of them had worked for the military. Tactical specialists, offensive operations, bio-weaponry. They were frozen for their ability to kill—and they were the ones being killed.

But why me? Why was I unplugged? I have nothing to do with that.

Elder had said,
Maybe you weren’t meant to be unplugged, maybe you were an accident or something
.

An accident ...

Maybe the murderer had meant to unplug someone else ...

Someone else in the military.

Like Daddy.

I jump up and race to the door, my heart thudding. Everything falls into place if the killer meant to kill Daddy, not me. He’s killing people with fighting backgrounds.

The door slides open, and I crash into Orion.

I start to mutter my apologies and step around him to go to the cryo level and tell Elder what I’ve figured out, but Orion grabs my wrist with viselike strength.

“Let me go,” I say. He’s gripping me just where the men held me down before Harley saved me, his fingers pushing into the same bruises.

“Harley painted this,” Orion says in his soft voice. I stop trying to pull away from him and notice the muslin-covered canvas in his hands. “He told me to give it to you when I gave him some wire.”

“What is it?” I ask, curious.

“A painting. For you.”

Orion releases my wrist and presses the canvas into my arms. As I look down at it, he fades into the shadows.

I step back into my room, set the canvas up on my desk, and peel off the muslin, which sticks a little to the still-wet paint. It is the most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen. It’s a self-portrait—Harley floats in the center of the canvas, surrounded by sky and stars, his face upturned in an expression of rapturous joy, his arms spread wide as if he’s about to wrap me in a hug. A tiny koi fish swims amongst the stars around his ankles.

My fingers tremble as I touch the painted Harley’s face, but I snatch them back: the paint isn’t fully dry. In his face, I see something I’ve only ever seen once before, and that was when he was talking about Kayleigh.

Somewhere, hidden under the paint, I understand what Harley meant by giving me this.

He was saying goodbye.

So when Elder bursts into my room a moment later to tell me that Harley has killed himself, I am not surprised.

70

ELDER

THERE IS SOMETHING WITHIN AMY BEYOND TEARS. SHE NODS mutely, as if she already knows it has happened. She grows dimmer, but she does not break as she did last night. She steps back to let me into the room.

And then I see it.

“Harley,” I breathe. My hands are trembling.

“Orion gave this to me,” Amy says. “Harley ... I guess he did it before ...”

It is so realistic, more realistic than Amy can ever know. When the hatch pulled him out, the rush of movement had flattened his hair more, and there was more surprise in his face, and yes, pain—but in that brief second before the hatch door had closed and before the ship had moved beyond him and before space extinguished him, that was the look on his face, exactly that joy.

“You can have it,” Amy says. “You were closer to him than I was. I’m not sure why he gave it to me and not you.”

I notice the little fish swimming at the painted Harley’s feet.

Amy always thought Harley called her Little Fish because her red-orange hair matched the colors of the koi he was painting when he met her, but he never told her the reason why he painted the koi in the first place—the reason why his room was filled with koi paintings—which was that it was Kayleigh’s favorite animal.

“He wanted you to have it,” I say. “You reminded him of someone he knew.”

We stand a moment in silence, absorbing the painting, absorbing what Harley has done, how he has left us. Alone, still standing while he flew away.

“I figured it out,” Amy says, pointing to the wall and dragging me back to now. “The connection between them. People who have background in military fighting. Those are the ones who were killed.”

I examine the chart.

“My father has a military background. What if the killer pulled me out instead of him by accident?” Her voice quakes, and I wonder if it is because of fear for her father, or because Harley’s gone, or both.

“When I woke up this morning, someone had marked dozens of the little cryo chamber doors. At first I thought it was Harley ... but the killer could be marking his victims ....”

“Was my father’s door marked?” Amy asks urgently, dropping her notebook.

“I ... don’t remember.” I hadn’t been looking for her father’s door—I’d been looking for Harley.

“We’ve got to go check!” Amy heads for the door.

I pause just long enough to snatch the floppy off her desk. As we race down the hall, I scan my thumb and tap in my access code. The computer chirps, “Eldest/Elder access granted” as the elevator opens. While we rise, I bring up the wi-com locator map.

“What are you doing?” Amy asks, her eyes on the numbers above the door.

I slide the timer back, looking for the dots marking where and when everyone was.

On the map for last night is Harley’s dot, beeping softly, mostly where the hatch door is, but sometimes pacing up and down the hall and once, all around the cryo floor. No one else is on the entire level—until I show up. There I am, running; there’s where I stop. My glowing dot merges with Harley’s, and I remember our fight, our last fight.

Amy hovers over my shoulder, watching. My dot leaves Harley’s, and now it blinks near the elevator in front of the cryo floor. Harley’s doesn’t move from the hatch door. I wonder what he was doing in those last moments. Painting? Planning?

I fast forward. Around morning, Doc and Eldest’s dots show up, but they don’t linger—they go straight to the lab on the other side of the cryo level. I look up at Amy sheepishly.

“I fell asleep,” I say. I wonder if Doc and Eldest noticed me.

Amy shakes her head. “It wasn’t them, though, was it? They didn’t go near the cryo chambers.”

We turn back to the wi-com locator map. My dot moves quickly up and down the aisles of cryo chambers—discovering the painted Xs.

And then my dot goes to the hatch.

There I am; there he is.

Then his dot is gone.

A hard lump forms in my throat. My eyes blur at the moment when it happens, when his dot suddenly jerks off the map and doesn’t come back.

Amy sucks in a gasp, but doesn’t let the air back out for a long time, and then it’s just a hushed, “Oh.”

“No one else came down there,” I say as the door opens to the fourth floor. “It must have been Harley.”

“But Harley never left the door, not after you showed up.”

I meet Amy’s eyes. Harley couldn’t have painted the Xs.

“That thing,” Amy says, pointing at the floppy, “it can only track people through their ear buttons, right?”

I nod.

“It couldn’t see me, could it?”

I shake my head.

“What about Orion? He’s the one who brought me the painting. He had to have been down there, but that means he doesn’t have an ear button, doesn’t it? He’s got long hair to cover it, but I’ve seen that scar on his neck—that creeps up past his hair. I bet he doesn’t have an ear button. He’d be invisible.”

And—
oh
—she’s right.

Orion.

71

AMY

THE DOOR AT THE END OF THE HALLWAY IS LOCKED.

“How are we—?” I stammer. “What are we going to do?”

Elder kicks the door in.

He rolls his thumb on the scanner, punches the button, and then we’re going down, down, so achingly slow.

I rub my pinky until it hurts, thinking about all the promises I made with Daddy. “What are you doing?” I ask Elder as we sink past the first floor.

“Checking the biometric scanner log-ins,” Elder says. He taps on the floppy. “Harley came down midday yesterday. I came down after dark. This morning, Doc and Eldest came down, and it looks like they’re still there, in the other lab. But look—there’s no record of Orion scanning the elevator pass—it just shows Eldest’s log-in again, but he was in the lab then.”

He passes me the floppy. Sure enough, Eldest/Elder is recorded once after Doc and then, fifteen minutes later, it shows up again.

“He figured out a way to trick it,” I say. Could this elevator go any slower?!

“You can’t,” Elder mutters, stuffing the floppy into his pocket. “It scans your DNA. You
can’t
trick it.”

The doors slide open.

Cold hits us like a blast.

Dozens and dozens of frozens lie exposed, their trays pulled out, the condensation already fogging the glass coffins, obscuring the bodies frozen inside. All the doors swinging open have freshly painted Xs on them. Elder was right. The killer was marking his victims, preparing for one last kill, one fell swoop to kill every frozen person in the military.

I have only one thought.

“DADDY!” I scream, knocking past Elder and racing to the cryo boxes. I rush to the aisle with the forties, and there, midway down, is my father’s frozen body. I wipe away the condensation and stare at his face for just a moment.

I am gripping the cold glass lid, and I’ve got enough adrenaline inside me to pick it up and throw it down on the concrete floor. I want to. I want him to wake up, to break him out of the ice, to make him hold me against his warmth.

I
want
this
.

I glance at the electrical box near his frozen head. The light is green, not red. Orion just pulled the trays out, he didn’t unplug them as he had unplugged me.

Thuds and crashes surround me. Elder is running up and down the aisles, cramming all the other frozens back into place and slamming the doors shut behind them. I push Daddy’s frozen slab back into the cryo chamber and swing the door shut. The red X painted on the door mocks me. I turn the handle down and lock it in place. I allow myself one last look at the door labeled 41, then I sprint down the aisle to the next exposed frozen.

It doesn’t take long. The doors are shut, all the frozens safely returned to their frozen state.

And no Orion in sight.

“Why did he do this?” I ask, panting from the effort.

Elder’s breath rises in faint clouds from his lips. “I was in the way.” He’s thinking as he speaks, realizing the truth as he answers. “Pulling out all the doors while I was here ... that would have woken me up—that would have been much noisier than marking the doors with paint. And once they were marked ... of course I’d run to you, and he’d have plenty of time to just pull out the frozens he’d already marked ....”

“But
why
?” I say. “Why bother? Surely he knew we’d go straight here, see what he did ... He didn’t even really unplug them, but pulled them all out.”

Elder pauses. “It’s almost like he was testing us.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s showing us his plan. He’s waiting to see what we do. Would we let them melt, or shove them back in?”

“Of course I wouldn’t let my daddy melt!”

Elder stares at me. “I don’t think the test was for you.”

72

ELDER

“SHH!” I HISS AT AMY. “DO YOU HEAR THAT?”

“Hear what?” she whispers, but I wave my hand to silence her.

It’s soft, but there’s a
whirr-churn-whirr
sound that reminds me of the engine room. But it can’t be—we’re two levels below the engine.

“It’s coming from the laboratory.”

I lead Amy across the cryo level. She casts a nervous look back. “We’ll leave the door open,” I say, because I can tell she’s worried about leaving her father behind.

“What is this place?” she asks as we step inside the lab. She’s whispering, and I can barely hear her as the whirring noise grows louder.

“The lab.” I whisper, too. Something about the lab invites secrecy, and I’ve not forgotten that Doc and Eldest are in here, if the wi-com map’s correct. We stick close to the walls.

“I’ve seen those needles before.” Amy points to the big tubular syringes labeled with characteristic traits that Eldest wants the inhabitants of the ship to have.

“That’s what they do here.”

“What’s that?” She points to the big amber-colored tube extending from floor to ceiling and filled with tiny bubbles of stuff floating in it. “That almost looks like ...” She tilts her head. “Like embryos?”

I look at the debris floating in the amber liquid, and am surprised Amy could identify it so quickly. The only fetus I’d ever seen was one of a miscarried cow, and it was larger and bloodier and not really anything like these tiny round toe-sized bubbles.

I lead Amy to the back of the lab where, hidden by the way the room bends in a right angle, is the giant pump Eldest showed me the first time I was here. That’s what’s making the
whirr-churn-whirr
noise; the pump is on, shuddering and complaining as its internal mechanics heave Phydus and stars know what else into the water system.

Eldest stands at the pump, holding a bucket of clear viscous liquid.

Doc stands opposite him.

I grab Amy and we whirl back around the corner of the room. Neither of them has seen us—yet. I put my finger to my lips, and Amy nods. We both duck low and peer around the corner to watch them. A chair blocks our vision, but also gives us some level of cover.

“I’m sorry!” Doc shouts over the noise of the pump.

“You shouldn’t have let her see!” Eldest storms toward Doc, his uneven gait making the bucket in his hands swing. Doc eyes it nervously.

“I thought it would make her more willing to behave.”

“Nothing short of Phydus will control her. Why did you give her the Inhibitor pills?”

Eldest sets the bucket down.

“They’re talking about me,” Amy breathes in my ear.

Doc says something else, but his back is to us, and I can’t catch it.

“Well, we’ll just get her tonight and take her to the fourth floor,” Eldest says, picking the bucket back up and lugging it to the pump.

“I don’t think—”

Eldest throws the bucket down. The clear liquid inside sloshes, but it’s denser than water, like syrup, and it doesn’t spill over the side.

“You know what?” Eldest shouts, striding toward Doc. “I don’t really care what you think. If you’d just listened to me the first time, with the other one, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“What do you—”

“You know what I mean!” Eldest roars. “Elder! You let Elder live!”

Amy grabs for my arm. I had been leaning forward, dangerously close, trying to catch their words.

“Elder is fine,” Doc says.

“Not this Elder. The other Elder.”

Doc stares at Eldest, his face emotionless and cold, but I can tell he’s restraining himself. There’s a thin line of white around his lips, and his jaw clenches.

Eldest is oblivious to Doc’s reaction. “The Elder before this one! The Elder that is supposed to be assuming his duties
now
so that I can retire instead of wasting the last of my life on a teenager who’s thinking with his chutz and not his head!”

“You told me to take that Elder to the fourth floor, and I did.” Doc stands straighter, defiant.

“But you didn’t kill him like I told you, did you?”

“I thought—the Phydus—”

“I think
you
should take some more Phydus.” Eldest growls. “Are you protecting him, even now? Are you hiding him?”

“I thought ...” Doc looks small and scared. “He disappeared off the wi-com map. I thought he killed himself.”

Eldest snorts. “You never did check to make sure, did you? Now look where we are. Frozens being killed, one of them awake.”

“He’s dead, Eldest. I swear he’s dead.”

I don’t know if Eldest believes him or just wants to believe him. He turns around and picks up the bucket again.

“What is that?” Amy whispers, jerking her head slightly toward the pump.

“It connects to the water supply,” I say, my mind racing. And in that bucket . . .

Phydus.

I stand up. Amy tries to hold me back, but I shake her off. I can’t let Eldest drug them anymore. I can’t let any more Phydus sink into the water. I’ve
got
to destroy that pump.

I grab the chair Amy and I had been crouched behind.

“What are you doing here?” Eldest asks with a sneer, catching sight of me.

I raise the chair over my head.

“What are you doing?” Eldest’s voice rises.

My hands shake. I can see the future laid out in front of me—a future with me as leader, not Eldest. And no Phydus.

Do I really want to rule without Phydus?
I think of the fading bruises on Amy’s wrist, of the conflicts I’ve seen in the Ward, amplified over the whole ship.
Can
I rule without Phydus?

Then I think about Amy’s eyes when she was drugged.

I hurl the chair at the pump. It clatters against the metal and bounces onto the floor. The water pump continues to
whirr-churn-whirr
.

“What are you doing?” Eldest screeches. “You’ve gone mad! Just like the Elder before you!”

“What are
you
doing?” I yell back. “That’s Phydus, isn’t it? Just getting ready for another day of manipulation and mind-control?”

“YOU ARE NOT FIT TO BE ELDER!” Eldest screams. His white hair flies behind him, and he is the one who looks mad. “If you cannot do this, you cannot lead the ship! You are not strong enough to be leader! You never will be good enough!”

In three strides, I cross the room to Eldest and punch him right in the face. Eldest drops the bucket and falls flat on the ground. His nose is bleeding; the thin skin on his cheek is red and broken. I bend down, grab him by the shirt, and yank him back upright. He opens his mouth to speak, so I punch him again, but I still hold his shirt with one hand so he doesn’t fall.

“I am not weak,” I say. My voice is shaking, not with fear, but with suppressed rage. “I am strong enough to know that Phydus is wrong, and that your attempt to control people with it is nothing but weakness. If you were really strong, you’d lead this ship without drugs to do your dirty work.”

It is not until I am done talking that I realize my voice is the only sound in the room.

“What have you done?” Eldest screams, but not at me—at Amy.

I look up. While I was punching and yelling at Eldest, Amy snuck around the pump, found a tiny door in the side of it, and quite simply ripped out all the wires.

She holds the brightly colored wires in her hand. “Well, that did the trick,” she says, smiling.