A Million Suns

Now, when Elder rolls the body in the field over so we can see the face, I can see that, once again, the girl at the rabbit farm has empty eyes.

I drop to my knees beside her. Elder has his hand on his neck; he’s comming Doc and his police force, but it’s already too late. Much too late.

My mind takes note of the details in a detached way, even though the revulsion is bubbling up inside of me. The girl’s arms are spread wide, with deep purple bruises at her wrists. Finger marks encircle her throat. Her skirt has been pulled up. Her eyes are wide and stare unblinkingly at the metal sky. A large rabbit nuzzles her bare foot. The bottoms of her feet are grass-stained, her knees muddy, as if she ran and fell more than once.

I gently pull down the hem of her skirt so that it rests straight against her knees, almost covering the mud, and then I push her eyelids closed.

“Who would do this?” Elder asks.

We can do anything we want, Luthor said.

I open my mouth to speak, but no words come out. I try to force them from me, but all that comes out is an almost inaudible sound of fear.

“What happened?” Doc calls as he rushes forward through the field. His assistant Kit follows him.

Doc starts to examine the body. I’m in the way, I know it, but I can’t seem to move until Kit puts her hand on my elbow and pulls me up. She draws me away from the body and faces me toward the walls, away from death.


“Here,” she says, offering me something. A small green med patch.

“No,” I say automatically. I never trust any of the medicines made on this ship.

“It will calm you,” Kit insists.

“No.”

I turn back to the body. Elder and Doc are both kneeling beside the girl, talking in urgent tones. Arguing.

“Elder!” A voice calls from the other side of the field. I see a female Shipper—tall and slender with immaculately cut hair—running toward us.

Elder stands. “Marae, thank you for coming.”

“You told me to come,” she says simply.

The three of them stand over the body without a second glance at me. Elder and Doc discuss an autopsy as Marae taps on a floppy rapidly, her fingers dancing across the screen. Kit runs off at Doc’s order to begin preparing an examination room. Soon other people come—each wearing the crisp, dark clothing that the top-ranking Shippers wear. They consult with both Elder and Marae before moving off to obey orders—one goes to gather the rabbits that got loose, another fixes the fence, another brings an electric cart and starts to load the girl’s body.

The whole time, I stand to one side. I can’t help but stare at the girl’s face, at her closed eyes, and remember how once she cried and didn’t know why.

Elder moves with swift efficiency. He’s the youngest person on the whole ship, younger even than me by almost a year, but every time he gives a command, the people rush off to obey. Even though I’ve been so sure that Elder’s the leader Godspeed needs, I’ve never actually seen him take charge. Not like this. And while this only proves that he can lead this entire ship like I always said he could, it also makes me feel even more detached. I don’t know him. Or—I know him, but only one him. I know the Elder who’s kind and almost like a puppy dog in his devotion, but I don’t know this Elder who commands people older than him, who issues orders that are immediately obeyed. This Elder has never been more alien to me.

“I will try to collect as much DNA as I can during the autopsy,” Doc says as two Shippers lift the body onto the electric cart.

I want to say: I think I know who did this.

“Do you think there will be enough to identify the murderer?” Elder asks. “I’ll grant you access to the biometric scanner database.”

Doc starts to follow the cart. “There might be something under her fingernails I can use. If not, I believe there will be seminal fluid present in this case. It may take a couple of days to process and run it through all the records.”

I want to say: I only met her once, but I feel like I knew her better than any of you.

As Doc leaves, Elder gathers the Shippers together. “Shelby, see if there’s any kind of vid feed of this area from when the girl was attacked. Buck, I’d like you to track down any Feeders in the area and question them; maybe there were witnesses to what happened here.”

I open my mouth. I want to say: I’m breaking, and I need someone to hold me together.

But no sound comes out. I feel the hands around my throat, crushing my windpipe. I swallow dryly. He’s not here. Not anymore. He killed her and left.

I try to speak again. I should speak, I have to speak.

But I can’t.

Instead, I run.

My body thrills at this—I haven’t run in ages. I’ve been too scared to go on my daily runs, but now I’m not running as I would for exercise. I’m running as if the force of the wind whipping around my body will be enough to keep all the pieces of me from crumbling.

Past the fence, down the path, past the soy fields. When I get to the main road that connects the Recorder Hall and the Hospital, I go straight to the Hall. I don’t know why. I should hate this place. The last time I saw Luthor, it was here, in the Recorder Hall. But I’m certain, more certain than anything else, that the clue Orion left for me is here, and maybe if I can find that clue, I can also find something to make things right again.

I’m still running as I enter the Hall, pass the groups of people pouring over the wall floppies, and head straight to the fiction room. I throw open the door so hard that it bounces off the wall, and I don’t pause until I reach the shelf that holds the book I’m looking for.

I slide the heavy book off the shelf, panting in an effort to catch my breath. An image is pressed into the front cover. A girl, a tree, and a smiling cat. The binding is cracked with age, the illustration faded. My heart races as I carry the book to the table in the middle of the room. I collapse into a chair and let the book thunk heavily on the metal tabletop. I can imagine Elder’s look of disdain at the way I let it slam against the surface. He treats books like treasured, rare things, and I guess they are, but my father used to dog-ear books and read them until they fell apart, and I like his method better.

I flip the book open and read the title page.

 

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

by

Lewis Carroll

Collector’s Edition

Annotations & Literary Criticism © 2022

I’ve seen this book before. Not this exact one, but copies of it. It was required reading for the AP Literature class at my high school in Colorado. I planned on taking that class my senior year.

We left Earth before I had a chance to finish eleventh grade.

Those textbooks were brand new at school. Now this one is falling apart from age, despite the climate-controlled room it’s stored in.

I snap the book shut, and a tiny cloud of dust rises up. As I breathe in the musty scent of old pages and dry ink, the thing inside me that I’ve been trying to keep together breaks.

I let my head fall down to the book, pressing my face against the illustration of the Cheshire Cat’s wicked grin, and I sob, great, gulping sobs that choke me. And I think about the last time I choked, on tubes as I emerged from the slushy ice when I melted, and then, later, as Luthor’s arm pressed into my neck. And then all I can think about is how the girl at the rabbit farm choked too. And suddenly, I can’t get enough air into my lungs, just like she couldn’t get enough air into hers.

She died, alone and scared. I’m not dead, but I’m still alone and scared.

19

ELDER

“FOUND YOU,” I SAY, PUSHING OPEN THE DOOR.

Amy sits in the middle of the gallery on the second floor of the Recorder Hall. Her knees are pulled up to her chin and her arms wrap around her legs. A thick, old book rests beside her, open-faced but ignored. The art room is cluttered, sculptures and paintings from last gen’s artists stacked on one side and rows of canvases propped up on the other—mostly from Harley, but a few from some other artists. Art isn’t exactly respected here on Godspeed, and although Orion had made something of an attempt to turn the collection into a proper gallery, he’d been much more focused on books than paintings.

“How did you find me?” Amy asks as I plop down beside her.

I tug at the wi-com around her wrist. “They have locaters, you know.”

She nods silently. Her head falls against my shoulder, her long red hair spilling down my arm.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” I say.

“I’m just sorry it happened. Do you . . .” Amy doesn’t look at me as she says this. “Do you know who did it?”

“We have some suspects. Second Shipper Shelby said she saw a Feeder shouting yesterday in the Recorder Hall. Something about doing whatever he wanted . . .”

I watch her closer. Shelby also said that the person the Feeder was shouting at was Amy. She gives no indication of that now, although I can see the secret behind her eyes, clawing to get out.

“Why did you run off?” I ask softly.

The last I’d seen of her was a blur of brown clothing. I didn’t like the idea of Amy running off alone, but I couldn’t abandon the investigation, not in front of the Shippers, and not before I knew they had everything they needed to find the killer. I tracked the location of her wi-com until I could escape.

“I thought I’d go ahead and get started on that clue Orion left me,” she says, her voice cracking.

“Did you find anything?” I ask, pretending not to notice that she’s been crying. The death of the girl in the rabbit fields seems to have affected her more than it did the shipborns.

Amy shoves the book over to me. I wince at the idea of a book—a book! From Sol-Earth!—being pushed across the floor, but I pick it up silently. I read the title and flip through some pages. “Why would there be a clue here?”

“Alice follows a rabbit down a rabbit hole,” she says, turning the pages in my hand to a chapter near the beginning. She somehow avoids touching me, just as she’s shying away from eye contact. “I thought it fit. But I guess not.”

I look at the illustration that accompanies the chapter: a girl in a poufy skirted dress, staring curiously down a hole under a tree.

“Why did you come to the gallery?” I ask, closing the book and setting it gently beside me.

”No one else comes here,” she says softly. “I didn’t want to stay in the fiction room, and I figured nobody would find me here.”

I wonder if she includes me as a nobody.

Amy twists the wi-com round and round her wrist. Her skin is pink there. I want to reach out and stop her. Instead, I turn the book over in my hands. I can’t figure Amy out, but maybe if I can figure out the clue, I can take her away from whatever place in her mind she’s retreated to.

“Huh,” I say.

Amy jerks her attention to me. “What? Huh, what?”

I hold up the back of the book to her. “‘Other works by Lewis Carroll,’” I read aloud. “Through the Looking-Glass.”

“So?” Amy eyes me curiously.

“The first clue was on the back of a painting, right?” I ask. Amy rolls her hand for me to go on. “Well, maybe the second clue is too.”