A Million Suns

55 ELDER

I DIDN’T MEAN TO FALL ASLEEP — I MEANT TO JUST TAKE A quick nap, then get Amy and give her a private viewing of the planet on the Bridge. Instead, I awake the next morning with a smile on my lips but a foul taste in my mouth.

This is it.

This is finally it.

I dress quickly, but before I rush out of my room, I look behind me.

I’ve lived in this room over three years, ever since Eldest took me from the Feeder Level and began training me to be his successor. I have hated this room, when Eldest would lock me inside after I did something stupid, or later, after his death, when it reminded me of how alone I was. But I have loved this room, too. I smile, remembering the way Amy bounced on my bed when she woke me up here. I can’t wait to hand her the one thing she’s always wanted, the one thing I thought I’d deprived her of forever.

But — as eager as I am to move forward, I can’t help but think of all I’m leaving behind.

I remember:

The first night I was here, lying awake, scared. And Eldest came in, sat on the edge of the bed, right there, and he told me he remembered feeling the same way the first night he started his training.

I remember:

Eldest and I got in a fight once — this was early on, when I was angry at Eldest but not yet afraid of him — and he yelled at me and I yelled back, and he raised his hand and struck me across the face. I’d run from the Learning Center to my room — it felt like I’d put miles between us — and hid between the bed and the nightstand for over an hour, until the smell of roast chicken and mushroom leaked into the room and up my nose. When I eventually crawled out, Eldest let me eat supper on the floor of the Great Room, using a projector to show me an old movie from Sol-Earth.

I remember:

When I was four or five or six, the family I was living with then, they were canners, decided to throw me a party. It was a going-away party — I was moving to another family the next day, but I was young enough to not really understand what that meant.

The mother of the family, Evie, she must not have been on Phydus, because she was funny and charming and she always knew what to say and do to make everything wonderful. Very different from the way I know her now, barely surviving with a green patch on her arm.

The day before I left her family, there was a feast in celebration — lamb and mint jelly, roast corn, biscuits and honey, baked sweet potatoes with brown sugar, berries sprinkled with sugar. And in the end, a cake.

It was a giant cake, so dense that Evie had to use both hands to cut it. The whole thing was iced in thick, crusty white icing, and Evie had written across the top We love you, Elder! She cried when she handed me the piece with my name on it.

An old man walked into the kitchen just as I was about to take the first bite. I didn’t know who he was, but everyone else seemed to, and they all slowly put their forks down and pushed away from the table. I did the same, even though I didn’t know why.

“I’m not here to interrupt!” the old man had said, laughing, and the tension broke like glass.

Evie cut a piece of cake for the old man — he got the piece that said love. Then he pulled up a chair beside mine. He was kind and funny — he acted like he didn’t know how to use a fork and let me show him how. He kept dropping it, or using the wrong end of it, or trying to balance the cake on the handle instead of piercing it with the tines.

I remember everyone at the table laughing — true, hooting, uncontrollable laughter — as the old man just gave up and ate the cake with his fingers.

He nudged me. I grinned — there was icing on his nose, I recall — and I scooped up a handful of cake in one hand and crammed it in my face.

And then we were all eating cake with our hands, not even bothering with plates as we reached for more. Crumbs and icing were everywhere — smearing the tablecloth, in our hair, under our fingernails — and no one cared at all.

It was the happiest day of my life.

The next morning, Evie woke me up and helped me pack my few belongings in a bag. I would be spending the next year with the butchers, and there would be no cake at all that year.

“Who was that man who came yesterday?” I asked.

Evie was crying as she folded my clothes, but she laughed at my question. “Silly! That was Eldest, of course!”

•••

I close my eyes and think of the way my teeth cracked the paper-thin crust on the top of the creamy icing, the way the cake filled my mouth as I chewed.

I glance at my bed, at the threadbare old blanket I had as a child that Eldest kept for me — or for himself. I pick up the blanket from the edge of my bed, press it against my face, and think about all Eldest was, and all he wasn’t. All this ship has been, and all it will never be.

For a moment, I forget that today is the day I leave the ship, shut my eyes, and breathe in the scent of a thousand dreams.

Before heading to the Shipper Level, I re-activate the wi-com system for the rest of the ship. Within sconds, Shelby coms me.

“We’re prepped and ready to begin planet-landing, sir,” she says in my ear.

I smile as I walk away from my room. “Let’s go home.”