A Million Suns

2 AMY

A DROP OF WATER SPLASHES AGAINST THE METAL FLOOR.

I keep my eyes squeezed shut, ignoring the cold and focusing instead on the black behind my eyelids. “Riding in the car down a long empty highway,” I say aloud, my voice echoing, bouncing off the high, rounded metal walls. “With the windows down. And the music playing. Loud.” I struggle to remember details. “So loud that you feel the music vibrating the car door. So loud that the image in the rearview mirror is blurry because it’s vibrating too. And,” I add, my eyes still clamped shut, “sticking my arm out the window. With my hand flat. Like I’m flying.”

Another drop of water splashes, this time against my bare foot, sending a shiver all the way from my toes to the roots of my hair.

“Riding in the car. That’s what I miss the most today,” I whisper. My eyelids flutter open. My arms, which I’d raised foolishly while imagining driving down the road, flop to my sides.

There are no more cars. No more endless highways.

Just this.

Two melting cryo chambers on a spaceship that grows smaller every day.

Drip. Splash.

I’m playing with fire here, I know it. Or, rather, ice. I should shove my parents back into their cryo chambers before they melt any further.

But I don’t.

I fiddle with the cross necklace around my neck, one of the few things I have left from Earth. This — sitting on the floor of the cryo level and staring up at my frozen parents and remembering one more thing I miss — is the closest I can come to prayer now.

Elder mocked me for praying once, and I spent an hour berating him for that. He ended up throwing up his hands, laughing, and telling me I could believe whatever I wanted if I was going to hold onto my beliefs so hard. The ironic thing is that now everything about me, including whatever it was I once believed in, is slipping through my fingers.

It was simpler before. Easier. Everything was all laid out. My parents and I would be cryogenically frozen. We would wake up after three hundred years. The planet would be there, waiting for us.

The only thing on the agenda that actually happened is that we were all frozen. But then I was woken up early — no. No. He woke me up earlier. Elder. I can’t let myself forget that. I can’t let myself ever forget that the reason I’m here is his fault. I can’t let the three months that have passed between us wipe out the lifetime he took away.

For a moment, I think of Elder’s face — not handsome and noble like I know it now, but blurry and watery like the first time I saw him, as he crouched over my naked, shivering body after pulling me from the dredges of the glass coffin where he found me. I remember the warm cadence of his voice, the way he told me everything would be okay.

What a liar.

Except… that’s not true, is it? Of everyone on this ship, even the frozen bodies of my parents, Elder’s the only one who handed me truth and waited for me to accept it.

The watery image of Elder comes into sharp focus in my mind’s eye. And I’m not seeing him through the cryo liquid anymore; I’m remembering him in the rain. That night on the Feeder Level, when the sprinklers in the ceiling dumped “rain” on our heads so heavy that the flowers bent under the force, when I was still scared and still unsure, and droplets trailed from the ends of Elder’s hair across his high cheekbones, resting on his full lips…

I shake my head. I can’t hate him. But neither can I… Well, I can’t hate him, anyway.

The one I can hate? Orion.

I wrap my arms around my knees and look up at the frozen faces of my parents. The worst part of being woken up early, without your parents, on a ship that’s as messed up as this one is, is that there’s nothing to fill your days but time and regret.

I don’t know who I am here. Without my parents, I’m not a daughter. Without Earth, I barely even feel human. I need something. Something to fill me up again. Something to define myself by.

Another drop splashes down.

It’s been ninety-eight days since I woke up. Over three months. And what should have been fifty years before we land has become nothing but a question mark. Will we even land?

That’s the question that brings me down here every day. The question that makes me open my parents’ cryo chambers and stare at their frozen bodies. Will we ever land? Because if this ship is truly lost in space with no chance of ever reaching the new planet… I can wake my parents up.

Only… I promised Elder I wouldn’t. I asked him, about a month ago, what was the point of keeping my parents frozen? If we’re never going to land, why not just wake them up now?

When his eyes met mine, I could see sympathy and sorrow in them. “The ship is going to land.”

It took me a while to realize what he meant. The ship will land. Just not us. So — I keep my promise to him, and to my parents. I won’t wake them up. Not when there’s still a chance their dream of arriving at the new world is possible.

For now I’m willing to let that chance be enough. But in another ninety-eight days? Maybe then I won’t care that the ship might still land. Maybe then I will be brave enough to push the reanimation button and let these cryo boxes melt all the way.

I lean up so my eyes are level with my father’s, even though his are sealed shut and behind inches of blue-specked ice. I trace my finger along the glass of the cryo chamber, outlining his profile. The glass, already fogged from the heat of the room, smooths under my touch, leaving a shiny outline of my father’s face. The cold seeps into my skin, and I flash to the moment — just a fraction of a second — when I felt cold before I felt nothing.

I can’t remember what my father looks like when he smiles. I know his face can move, his eyes wrinkle with laughter, his lips twitch up. But I can’t remember it — and I can’t envision it as I stare through the ice.

This man doesn’t look like my father. My father was full of life and this… isn’t. I suppose my father is in there, somewhere, but…

I can’t see him.

The cryo chambers thud back into place, and I slam the doors shut with a crash.

I stand slowly, not sure of where to go. Past the cryo chambers, toward the front of the level is a hallway full of locked doors. Only one of those doors — the one with the red paint smudge near the keypad — opens, but through it is a window to the stars outside.

I used to go there a lot because the stars made me feel normal. Now they make me feel like the freak that nearly everyone on board says I am. Because really? I’m the only one who truly misses them. Of all the two-thousand-whatever people on this ship, I’m the only one who knows what it is to lie in the grass in your backyard and reach up to capture fireflies floating lazily through the stars. I’m the only one who knows that day should fade into night, not just click on and off with a switch. I’m the only one who’s ever opened her eyes as wide as she can and still see only the heavens.

I don’t want to see the stars anymore.

Before I leave the cryo level, I check the doors of my parents’ chambers to make sure they locked properly. A ghost of an X remains on my father’s door. I trace the two slashes of paint with my fingers. Orion did this, marking which people he planned to kill next.

I turn, looking toward the genetics lab across from the elevator. Orion’s body is frozen inside.

I could wake him up. It wouldn’t be as easy as pushing a reanimation button, like waking my parents would be, but I could do it. Elder showed me how the cryo chambers were different; he showed me the timer that could be set for Orion’s reanimation, the order of the buttons that needed to be pushed. I could wake him up, and as he sputtered back to life, I could ask the question that hollows me out every time I look at his bulging eyes through the ice.

Why?

Why did he kill the other frozens? Why did he mark my father as the next one to kill?

But more importantly, why did he start killing now?

Orion may believe that the frozen military personnel will force the people born on the ship to be soldiers or slaves… but why did he start unplugging them when planet-landing is impossibly far away?

He’d hidden from Eldest for years before Elder woke me. He could have stayed hidden if he hadn’t started killing.

So I guess my real question isn’t just why, but…

Why now?