Beth Revis - A Million Suns

“Listen, Amy, I’m sorry.” I start to open my mouth, but Elder continues. “Seriously. I never meant to say that. I’m really sorry.”

“I’m sorry too,” I say, looking down at my hands. It’s silly for me to dwell on one word said in anger when we have the whole ship to think of.

Silence spreads between us, but at least he doesn’t look away from me.

“So,” Elder says finally, “what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I say. “Just… strange. I found this.”

I hold out the small black chip I peeled from the back of Harley’s painting and the screen I found in Dante’s Inferno .

“A mem card and a dedicated vid screen!” Elder says, laughing. “I haven’t seen these in years! Floppies pretty much replaced them.”

“How do you use this mem card thing?” I ask, offering it to him.

“A dedicated vid is just a digital membrane screen,” Elder says as he gently pops out the original memory card and replaces it with the new one. The square chip snaps to the screen as if there was a magnetic pull between them. “It’s like a floppy, but you have to have a mem card in the back to make them work.” He places the old mem card on the edge of my desk, then flips the dedicated vid over and swipes his finger across the screen. A glowing square pops up.

“Here, let me,” I say, taking the video screen from him and pressing my thumb onto it. The glowing box fades away, replaced with a video that starts playing automatically.

“That’s… that’s the cryo level,” I whisper. The angle makes it look like security camera footage.

Elder shakes his head. “That’s not possible; the cams down there were destroyed before Orion started to…”

Started unplugging the other frozens.

For several moments, nothing happens on the screen. I’m just about to ask Elder if it’s paused or broken when there’s movement at the corner of the video.

A shadow first, snaking across the floor like a clawed hand.

And then…

“That’s me,” Elder whispers.

I glance at him, unsure of why his tone is so high and worried.

“Let’s — uh. Let’s not watch this. I don’t think we should watch this.” His hand moves to stop the video, but I snatch it away.

“Why?” I demand.

Elder bites his lip, worry smeared across his face.

The Elder on the screen creeps forward. There’s no sound to the video, which makes it even weirder when on-screen Elder stops as if he’s heard something. After a moment, he turns to the square door that looks like it belongs in a morgue. He twists it open and slides the tray out.

And then I’m not looking at Elder anymore. I’m looking at me .

That’s me , frozen in ice. So still. I look dead. Horror curls my lip. That’s my flesh, my body. Naked. That’s Elder, looking at my naked body.

“Elder!” I screech, and smack him upside his head.

“I didn’t know you then!” he says.

“I didn’t know you were such a creeper!” I shout back.

“I’m sorry!” Elder ducks away from me.

The Elder on the screen looks up suddenly, drawing our attention back to the video. But after listening, head cocked like a worried bird, the Elder on-screen dips his attention back to me. He raises a hand — I notice that it’s shaking slightly — and places it on my glass box, just over where my heart is. Then he jumps — clearly startled by whatever sound he’s hearing in the background — and dashes off-screen.

“You just left me there?” I ask. I knew he had, he’d confessed it to me already — but to see it like that. To see me, left there so carelessly, helplessly.

Elder looks miserable. He’s not watching the screen at all; he’s just watching me, this look on his face like he wishes I’d scream and punch at him and just get it over with.

But I’m not mad anymore… at least, I’m not as mad as I am sad. And slightly disgusted. I don’t know how to put into words that sick, bile taste on the back of my tongue, so I don’t say anything, I just turn back to the screen.

For several minutes, nothing happens. I watch as a thin trail of condensation leaks from the edge of my glass coffin and drops with a tiny, silent splash on the floor. I’m already melting.

Suddenly, I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to watch myself wake up. I can’t relive drowning in cryo liquid, gagging on the tubes in my throat. I shut my eyes and turn my face away, even though it will take much, much longer for the me on-screen to melt all the way. But then Elder sucks in a breath of surprise, and my eyes fly back to the screen.

There’s another shadow there, wider and longer, creeping slowly toward my frozen self. A shaft of light highlights the side of his neck, the part where a spiderweb of scars reaches behind his left ear.

Orion.

The first thing he does is slam me back into the cryo freezer. He locks the door shut and turns to leave.

But then he pauses.

He stares for a long moment off-screen, in the same direction Elder had walked away in, and he taps his fingers across the top of the cryo chamber, thinking. Then, slowly, deliberately, he pulls me back out of the cryo chamber. He looks down at me for a moment.

And then he walks away.

Orion told me that he got the idea to unplug the frozens from watching Elder unfreeze me. And this is it. This is the moment when he realized how easy it would be to kill people who can’t fight back.

Static fills the screen.

“That’s why he destroyed the cams in the cryo level,” Elder says.

That’s one reason, anyway.

Elder drops the vid screen on my desk and stands. Hair flops into his face, but I can still see his eyes shift to me. Waiting for me to react.

But I don’t know how to respond. I don’t know how I feel about this. About the way Elder looked at me, about the way Orion didn’t. My brain can’t process this.

“Amy?”

Elder’s head whips up, panic in his eyes. He wasn’t the one who spoke.

We both rush to the vid screen on the desk. The static has faded. Orion’s face fills the screen, so close up that the camera must have been just inches from him.

Before the screen fades to black, Orion’s voice rings out clearly. “Amy? Are you ready for this? Are you ready to find the truth?”

THE SCREEN GOES BLANK. ORION’S LAST QUESTION HANGS IN the air, but the image Amy saw of me pulling her out of the cryo chamber fills her eyes.

“Amy?” I whisper, hesitant.

She swipes her hand across her face. Her eyes are red.

“Amy?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, her voice cracking in the middle. “What’s done is done.”

And that’s what kills me inside. Because what’s done was done by me . And as much as I wish Amy could see me the way I see her and want me the way I want her, she will never be able to forget the image of me pulling her out of her cryo chamber and walking away. No wonder she doesn’t want to be in the Keeper Level with me.

I could punch whoever made Amy see this. My fists clench involuntarily. It’s not like I’m so brilly on my own, but I certainly don’t frexing need someone showing Amy what a chutz I was! “Who gave you this?” I demand.

Her clear green eyes meet mine, her voice steady now. “Orion did.”

“What?”

“Orion did. Kind of. I mean, he left the wi-com for me. It has lettering on it, see?” She holds the wi-com out for me. “It’s from a book. The book led me to the painting, the painting led me to… this.”

“Why did he leave messages for you? What’s he playing at?”

Amy hesitates, then hands me the mem card that was originally attached to the vid screen. When she presses her thumb against the ID box, the video plays. Orion’s voice calls Amy his contingency plan, seeks her aid for a mission should he have failed, and — I can’t help but notice — if it looks like I am failing too.