Across the Universe

Everything is fine.

Elder snaps his fingers in front of my face.

“Amy, Doc thinks you need medicine,” he says loudly.

“She’s unbalanced, not deaf,” the doctor says.

Elder reaches over and grabs the bottle on the doctor’s desk. “These are Inhibitor pills, mental meds. I’m going to give you one, okay, and we’ll see if that fixes you.”

I open my mouth. The pill sits on my tongue, a bitter taste seeping into my mouth.

“Swallow it,” the doctor reminds me.

I swallow.

“Do you remember the night we met?” Elder says. “You were thrashing around in that cryo liquid, and you fought us every step of the way. I had to hold you down so Doc could give you the eyedrops that made you not go blind. And now you just sit there, swallowing the pill like an obedient dog. Don’t you see how that’s just sad?”

“No,” I say. What was there to be sad about?

“How long will it take to work?” Elder asks the doctor.

“I’m not sure,” the doctor says. “Like I said, her mental state is more extreme than many other Feeders. If it will work at all, it should only be a few hours.”

“If?” Elder asks, choking on the word.

 

His voice drones on and I fade out.

56

ELDER

I LEFT HER WITH DOC FOR THE NIGHT.

Believe me, I didn’t want to. But Doc wanted to give her some meds intravenously, and they knocked her out. She was just sleeping; it wouldn’t do me any good to watch her sleep. I walk around for most of the night, drifting off once in the garden by the pond, but I’m just avoiding the inevitable.

I need to see Eldest.

I take the grav tube up before dawn. The Keeper Level is empty now, but it still smells crowded. Sweat and dirt linger in the air.

Eldest is on the floor, leaning against the wall by his door, staring at the false stars.

“Feeling proud?” I snarl, remembering the last time I found him here, like this.

Eldest doesn’t look at me. “No,” he says simply.

“How can you stand to do it?” I shout. “Lie to them like that?”

“Shaddup,” Eldest snarls, standing up to face me. And then I smell it. That harsh, stringent smell. I don’t see the bottle, but I know it’s got to be somewhere—and it’s probably empty now. But why? Why get drunk now? He’s told his terrible truth, and the people still love him. This is his moment of triumph. What does he have to mourn with liquor?

“Ya don’ know what iz like. But ya will. Ya will.” He leans in close, and his breath burns my nose hairs.

I don’t have time for this drunken stupidity. “What happened to Amy?” I say, leaning in even closer to him. I don’t intimidate him, I can tell, but I don’t back down, either.

Eldest snorts, a great honking wet noise that he’d never allow himself to make when he was sober. “Amy, Amy, Amy,” he mocks. “Throw one pale-skinned freak your direction and your chutz shoots up to tha stars! You’ve forgotten ’bout the ship, ’bout your ’sponsibility!” He stresses every syllable of the last word, jabbing a finger into my chest each time.

“What’s wrong with her?” I roar.

“What’s wrong with you?” Eldest says, still mocking. “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with this whole frexing ship?”

“Just tell me. Did you do it?”

“Do what?” he asks warily.

“Did you give her something to make her sick?” He’s not above it. I know that much. He gave the Feeders extra hormones before the Season to make them lusty. He gives babies goo to make them who they are. What did he give Amy? And how?

Eldest throws back his head and laughs at me.

So I punch him.

He stops laughing, a red mark already blossoming on his cheek.

“You’d do it too,” he hisses, the stink of his breath making me gag. “You’re more like me than you think.”

I leave. There are no answers to be had from this drunk fool.

Across the Universe

When I get back, Amy’s awake.

Sort of.

She lies on her bed with her back perfectly straight, her arms to her side, her toes pointing up, her eyes staring at the ceiling.

I wonder how long it will be until the mental meds kick in.

I don’t use the word Doc used. If.

Tapping the bottle of pills against my leg, I pace around the small room. Finally, I sit at the desk and pick up the floppy on it. The wi-com locator map only shows Harley on the cryo level, standing still in the hallway where the hatch is. Part of me wants to com him and tell him to guard the frozens, but I don’t feel like having another fight. They’ll be fine.

It worries me, though, how obsessed he is with the stars. He hasn’t been this way since Kayleigh died, since Doc upped his mental meds.

I glance at Amy, wondering when the mental meds will fix her.

If.

I turn my back on her, and look at the wall Amy painted the list of victims on. She’s updated the roster, adding Number 63, the woman who didn’t die, and Number 26, the man who did. She’s only been able to add what information she knew at the time—Number 63 is female, black, survived. Number 26 is Theo Kennedy, male, white, bio-weaponry specialist, from Colorado. And dead.

After looking up their files on the floppy, I grab the brush and paint on Amy’s wall to add more details. Number 63 was named Emma Bledsoe. She was thirty-four and worked in the Marines as a tactician. I add Mr. Kennedy’s age—sixty-six—and that his spot aboard Godspeed was funded by the Financial Resource Exchange.

I step back and examine the wall. Lines snake from one victim to the other, but no line connects them all. Mr. Robertson and Mr. Kennedy are both male, but Amy’s not. There’s at least a decade in each of their age differences. None of them were born in the same month. The similarities that are there are weak. I add a line from Emma Bledsoe’s Marine experience to William Robertson’s. Both Amy and Mr. Kennedy are from Colorado. I hesitate at Amy’s chart, the thick black paint dripping from my brush and down the wall before I can make myself draw the line connecting them. It feels wrong to paint this line. It’s weird to see Amy’s name connected to the dead man’s. But nothing connects all four victims. From the scribbles and crossings out that Amy has streaked the wall with, I can see she’s come to the same conclusion I have, that it all might just be random. There is both too much and too little. Too many insignificant details line up, but nothing important enough for murder.

I turn to ask Amy what she thinks.

But she’s still staring at the ceiling.

I’ll ask her when she’s better.

If.

Replacing the paintbrush on Amy’s desk, a flash of blue catches my eye: the notebook Amy took from her father’s trunk. Bells jangle in my mind when I reach for the book. Privacy is valued on this ship of limited space, and I’ve never consciously violated someone’s privacy before. I smirk. Except when I broke into Eldest’s room.

Amy seems to inspire me to be all kinds of different.

Eldest’s lesson reverberates through my mind: Difference is a cause of discord. Fine. This ship could do with some discord.

On the first page of the book is a list of names. At the top is Eldest’s. She’s written over that name repeatedly, making it stand out in bold, and she’s underlined and circled it dozens of times. Under it is “the doctor” and a question mark, followed by several tiny streaks on the paper, as if she tapped the end of the pencil against the page while thinking. Beneath Doc’s name, a hasty list of names and descriptions of people is scribbled: me, Harley (although his name has been crossed out), Luthe (underlined so hard that her pencil ripped through the paper), “that mean girl” (surrounded by question marks and a doodle of a frowny face), and Orion (also crossed out).

I stare at the list of names, wondering at their importance and why Amy would bother writing them down in her special notebook.

Then it hits me.

This is her list of suspects.

My lips tighten as I stare down at it. She’s eliminated Harley and Orion, and seems unsure about “that mean girl” (Victria? Maybe). But she hasn’t marked me off. She still thinks I might be a suspect, or at least she did when she wrote her list.

I wonder what Harley’s done to get his name marked off, what I need to do to have that same honor.

When she wakes up, I’ll prove my worth to her.

If.

This is just another test, one which I have failed. I have proven myself, somehow, as unworthy in Amy’s eyes, just as Eldest always sees me as unworthy to be a leader.

“Uhr ...” Amy moans.

I drop the book and pencil onto her desk and rush to her. Her fingers pinch the bridge of her nose between her eyes, and when she drops her hand, I can see that the light has returned to her eyes.

“I’ve got a killer headache,” Amy groans, shutting her eyes. There is more expression on her face now than I’ve seen from her all day.

“What happened?” she asks.

“What do you think happened?”

“Lord, I don’t know. I remember when you got that all-call. And we rode in that tube thing. That was fun. But by the time we got to that big room with the lights, I was starting to feel kind of ... woozy.”

“Doc said that you’ve had a reaction to the ship. He’s put you on ment—on the Inhibitor pills.”

“Inhibitor pills? The same pill you and Harley and everyone ‘crazy’ takes?” Amy pushes me aside to sit up straight.

“Well—yes.”

“Gah!” Amy screeches. She leaps off the bed, pacing, her hands curling into fists. “This ship is so effing messed up! I’m not crazy! You and Harley aren’t crazy!”

I don’t say anything because I half believe her. She takes my silence, however, for contradiction.

“What happened to make you and everyone else on this stupid ship think that things like—like screwing around with anything that walks, like being mindless drones—what made you think that—that—was normal!?”

I shrug. It’s the way it’s always been. How can I explain to this girl, who was raised among differences and lack of leadership and chaos and war that this is the way a normal society is run, a peaceful society, a society that doesn’t just survive, as hers did, but one that thrives and flourishes as it hurtles through space toward a new planet?

Amy marches to the desk and picks up the floppy. “How do you make this freaking thing work?” she demands, fiddling with it. “This thing is like a computer, right? Doesn’t it have information on Earth? Let me show you what real people, normal people, are like! Let me show you how weird this place is!”

She’s not doing it right—she’s swiped her finger across the screen and brought up the wi-com locator map I showed her before, but she doesn’t know how to access anything else. She taps it, then jabs it, then balls her hand into a fist and pounds it against the table. I stand, walk to her, and gently take the floppy from her hands. There are tears in her eyes.