Across the Universe

Other lab? I think, shooting Doc a look. I bite back the question—I’ve got to be careful what I say, or they won’t tell me anything. “Why?” I ask instead. “Who cares who knows about this place—why would anyone want to do this? Why would anyone intentionally kill someone frozen?”

Silence.

Then: “Why it happened doesn’t matter. What’s important is to find out who—and to take it from there.” Eldest’s voice is cold and horrible.

“But—”

Doc steps in front of me, drawing Eldest a few steps away. “Promise me,” he hisses. “Promise me this isn’t some sort of sick test you’ve devised for Elder.”

Eldest gives Doc a quelling, disgusted look, as if he’s affronted Doc would even think it.

But he doesn’t answer.

“Let’s take care of this,” Eldest says to me. He shoves past Doc and fiddles with a latch near the table that I’d not seen before. The table breaks away from the little door that had held the dead man’s box, and Eldest wheels the table down the aisle. The cryo liquid sloshes back and forth with his pace, spilling bubbles of sparkling liquid onto the ground. I can hear a soft thump, swish, thump over the thuds of Eldest’s feet, and I know it’s from the body hitting the glass, muffled by the liquid.

“Come on,” Doc says. We follow the splatters of liquid like bread-crumbs in that Sol-Earth children’s tale.

Past the rows and rows of little doors. Past three rows of narrow metal lockers, each with a simple combination lock on the door. Past a series of tables with papers and diagrams on them. Down a hallway. And at the end of the hallway: a hatch door, made of thick metal painted a dull yellow, with a round bubble glass window in the center.

The lock on the door looks old—it’s a keypad, not a thumb swipe. It must be original to the ship; we’ve upgraded a lot over the years. I watch as Eldest types in the code. It’s simple enough to remember: Godspeed.

Eldest swings open the door and pushes the table inside.

“What are you—” I start, but Eldest has already lifted the edge of the table and let the thick glass coffin and the body inside it crash to the floor. Mr. William Robertson, Number 100, bounces as half the liquid sloshes out. His body hangs over the edge of the box, twisted around in a position that would have hurt if he were still alive. His open eyes stare at the ceiling, and both his hands curl up from the floor.

Eldest shoves me back out into the hallway and slams the hatch door shut after him.

“What are you doing?” I say again.

Eldest pushes the button on the keypad, the big red one without any markings on it.

Through the bubble glass window, I see the hatch door on the opposite wall fly open, and then Mr. William Robertson, Number 100, is sucked out into the stars. And I see them—the stars—real stars, millions of pinpoints of light, like glitter thrown into the air by a child. Now that I have seen these, I can never be deceived by lightbulbs again.

These stars, these real stars, are the most beautiful things I have ever seen. The stars make me believe there is a world out there beyond this ship.

And for just a moment, I envy Mr. William Robertson, Number 100, who is floating in a sea of stars.

21

AMY

THE WALLS OF THE ROOM CAVE IN AROUND ME. WITHOUT realizing it, I have begun to pace, back and forth, back and forth, but this room is too tiny to contain me. The window is solid, thick, and cannot be opened. I begin stretching my calf muscles without realizing what I am doing. My body has decided for me: I need to run.

I wasn’t kidding when I told the doctor I liked running. I joined the cross-country team as a freshman, but what I really wanted to do was run marathons. Jason used to laugh at me—he could never understand why anyone would want to run when there are video games to play and TV to watch. The closest he came to exercise was VR games.

I smile, but almost as soon as the corners of my mouth curve up, they sink again.

I can’t let myself think about Jason.

I need to run.

The clothes I am wearing are wildly inappropriate for running: loose trousers and a looser tunic paired with thin moccasin-like shoes. I smile. My mom, at least, would be happy. I always ran in these really short, tight running shorts and a sports tank, and it drove her mad. She would say it was like I was inviting the wrong sort of attention, but I just did it because I ran better in those clothes. We had a fight about it, once, a real screaming, yelling fight. It got so bad that Daddy had to jump in the middle and say I could run naked if we’d both just shut up about it. It was such a stupid thing to say that all three of us just laughed and laughed.

It hurts to think about that now.

On Earth I had short socks and Nikes. I always ran with a wide hair band on my head and music plugged into my ears. This wardrobe has only more of the same handspun clothes. I stretch my foot—the moccasins are certainly not $200 running shoes, but at least I have flexibility. It would have to do. I braid my hair and wrap the end with a bit of string I yank from one of the more raggedy pairs of trousers.

It takes me a couple of wrong turns to find my way out, but I soon discover a large room with glass walls and a pair of heavy glass doors. It’s a common room of sorts; there are tables and chairs scattered casually around the room. There’s only one person in the room, a tall man with biceps as big as my head. His gaze devours me, and his eyes pause too long in places I don’t want him looking. I glare back at him until he turns back toward the window, but I can tell he’s staring at my reflection. I don’t breathe properly until the elevator doors close.

Seeing the way the tall man looked at me reminds me of the doctor’s warning about leaving the Hospital.

No. I won’t be a prisoner.

The elevator has buttons for four floors, and I am on the third. I force myself to remember this, to map out where my room is in my mind. I don’t want to be lost and have to ask anyone for directions.

The elevator doors open to a lounge-like room, where a heavyset nurse sits at a desk tapping information on a thin screen. My muscles are taut, ready to go. I am already running before I reach the door, my moccasins making soft pat pat pat noises on the cold tile floor.

The air hits me like a wall, and I stop a few feet from the door. It smells processed, cool against my nostrils, just like the air-conditioned hospital. I’d expected mechanical, industrial-cold air inside. That air felt natural, because it was just like every other air-conditioned house back on Earth, with that falsely cool, slightly stale feel to it. But outside... the air is still the same. This is not air that has ever felt a breeze. This is air that has been used and reused for centuries. I breathe deeply, but cannot get over how it still tastes inexpressibly like indoor air.

I look around me. The hospital opens up to a flower garden. The path under my feet is not made from natural mulch, but some sort of rubbery-plastic. I step over to the grass and jog a bit in place, warming up. Out of the corner of my eyes, I can see the steel-gray metal of the walls that curve over this level of the ship, trapping us inside a metallic bubble.

I run with my back to the closest wall, straight out into the green fields. This ship’s level is vast, but not so wide that I cannot see the wall on the other side. Maybe three or four kilometers in diameter, less than the 5K track I ran for cross-country. Still, it’s small enough to make me claustrophobic, but large enough to make me marvel at its size.

A road winds around the area, but I ignore it. I run through rows of corn that are as tall as my shoulders; I race along the fence dotted with white puffs of sheep and goats who keep their distance from the low fence surrounding the pasture. I startle a group of fat chickens that have wandered onto my path. They flutter up, chattering at me, but when I turn my head to look back at them moments later, they’ve already forgotten me.

A sheen of sticky sweat films over my arms, pooling in the creases of my elbows and at my neck. I suck in the cool, recycled air. I can almost imagine that I’m just in an elaborate gym, that when I’m done running, I can leave, and Mom will be there, waiting for me in the car, and we can go home. The thought of it makes me stop, almost brings me to my knees. I breathe deeply, not because of running now, but because if I don’t, I’ll start sobbing.

They’re so close.

And so, so far away.

I run again. I cannot let myself think about anything. I can only run.

My legs pump up-down, I force myself to take longer and longer strides, to use my arms to make my entire body fall into the race. My muscles strain and burn, but I revel in the pain. Although the doctor must have done something to make my muscles not atrophy, they still feel unused, not as well-oiled as before I was frozen.

I turn a corner and see someone kneeling on the ground, hunched over some plants. I slow down, and the man looks up.

“’Lo,” he says in greeting.

“Um,” I say.

His eyes rove up and down, soaking in my pale skin, red hair, green eyes, and he instantly turns wary. I can see it in his face—his eyes narrow in suspicion, his mouth tightens. His grip on the trowel shifts, and it’s more a weapon than a gardening tool.

I nod and continue running. When I turn back, he’s still watching me, still clutching the trowel.

Run. Run harder.

When I reach that moment—when everything in my body is focused only on racing forward—that is when my mind is finally silent, when I can forget about everything the doctor said, when I don’t have to remember all that I’ve lost and will never have again.

It’s the zone. It’s why I run. That feeling of being nothing but movement. I tried to explain it to Jason once. He even went on a jog with me. He didn’t get it, but he got that I like it, and that was good enough. We walked back to his house after jogging less than a quarter mile. We didn’t talk, we just held hands, and even though I hadn’t broken a sweat with that baby run, my heart was still racing when I looked at him—

Don’t think of that.

Don’t think at all.

Run.

My thick braid swishes against my neck. I am aware of a trickle of sweat down my face, nothing else. I stop when the fields fade to gravel, then pavement. This is the city I saw from my window, although it is significantly smaller than any city I’ve ever seen on Earth. Mom once gave a speech to the biological engineering department at North Carolina State University, and they took us on a tour of the campus. This city is about the size of the old part of the campus, with stacked up metal trailers instead of dorms and college buildings. A thin tube of plastic hugs the curving metal wall behind the city. I stare at it curiously, panting from my run, then gasp aloud as I see a figure zooming up through the tube. A second later, another zooms up. People—people!—are being sucked up from that tube into another level of the ship, like the tubes of money sucked up in the drive-through bank teller line. How cool! It must be like flying! So much better than an elevator! I stare at the tube, open-mouthed, for so long that I don’t notice how close I have come to other people, not until I start to hear their whispers.

My gaze drops from the people-tube to the people who are slowly starting to gather around me. A dozen or so. My eyes flick to the trailers. There are at least a couple hundred people on the streets of the makeshift city. I feel vastly outnumbered.