Across the Universe

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.