A Million Suns

20 AMY

“WHO WOULD TAKE IT?” I ASK. “SOMEONE CLOSE TO HARLEY?”

“He didn’t have many friends. Me — Bartie, Victria.”

“One of them?”

Elder shakes his head. I believe him — Bartie’s too serious to think of stealing a painting, and while Victria would have no qualms about it, she’d pick a painting of Orion, not Kayleigh, judging by the sketch she stole from Harley’s room. “And I know Doc wouldn’t.”

I snort. No, Doc wouldn’t.

“Unless…”

“Yeah?” I ask.

“Harley’s parents might have… ”

For some reason, this surprises me. I didn’t really think of Harley having parents. He just… was. And while I know that the people living in the Ward were separated from the rest of the Feeders on purpose, it just didn’t occur to me that there was anything of Harley outside of the Hospital and the stars.

“Come on,” Elder says. “Let’s try it.”

In all my time on Godspeed, I don’t think I’ve ever actually walked the entire length of the ship. I’ve run it dozens of times — or at least, I did before the Phydus wore off — but I’ve never walked it.

We start down the same path we took to get to the rabbit fields. When we reach the fork in the road, we go left instead of up and over to the fields. I glance back — the fence has been repaired, and the entire area looks undisturbed. I can see a couple of rabbits, lazily hopping about, sniffing the ground where their owner lay dead just a few hours before.

“Tell me about the painting,” I say, desperately trying to replace the image in my mind of the rabbit girl’s death with anything else.

“It’s really frexing good,” Elder says. “But, I don’t know… weird, I guess. Usually Harley paints real-life things, but this one is… different. It’s a picture of Kayleigh right before she died.”

Somehow, it doesn’t surprise me that the painting Harley did in memory of Kayleigh’s death is weird — after all, the only other surreal painting he did was of his own.

“Her death — it surprised us all. Of all of us, I always thought that it would be Harley… ”

“You thought Harley would kill himself?” I ask.

“He’d tried a couple of times. Once before Kayleigh. Twice after. Three times after,” he adds.

He’d forgotten the third attempt, the one that actually worked.

“Right after Kayleigh died,” Elder says, “Harley started that painting. I mean, right after she died — he began stretching the canvas the same day we found her body, painted through the night. Eventually, Doc drugged him with a med patch. Once he was asleep, I lifted the wet brush from his hand. His fingertips were dented from his grip.” Elder’s voice is far away.

Freshly hatched puffy yellow baby chicks cheep up at us as we pass them. The solar lamp is bright and straight above us, making our shadows disappear on the dusty path. The City is far enough in front of us that while I can see people bustling about, I can’t make out their faces, and the Recorder Hall and Hospital are far enough behind us that I don’t feel their beady stares. I lower the hood of my jacket and unwind the strip of cloth around my hair, relishing the cool air against my scalp.

Here, in this one small part of the ship, with no one here but Elder, I’m not afraid.

Elder plods along down the path, his eyes down and his face troubled. I know the way silence and secrets can eat at you from the inside.

I touch his elbow and he stops, startled.

“Tell me how she died,” I say.