Beth Revis - A Million Suns

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.”

“ Through the Looking-Glass is a book,” Amy says. “Not a painting.”

Instead of arguing, I jump up and head to a stack of paintings. Harley did so many and the gallery is so small that not every single one is hanging from the walls. I flip through the canvases quickly — I know exactly which one I’m looking for.

“Harley did a painting right after his girlfriend, Kayleigh, committed suicide. I remember when he finished it — Orion said it was his ‘greatest achievement.’” Amy looks at me doubtfully. “What’s wrong?”

“Do you really think he’d use another painting for the next clue?” she asks.

“Maybe?” I shrug, still sifting through canvases. “He left those clues specifically for you, but let’s be honest — he didn’t know you that long. I guess he saw how close you were to Harley in that short amount of time and figured the best way to leave the clues was with his paintings.” Amy doesn’t notice the bitterness in my voice; even Orion could see that she was closer to Harley than she was to me.

“So where is this painting?” Amy asks.

“Don’t know. It used to be on the wall.”

“Where?” Amy calls. She’s moved to the center of the room, examining the only wall that isn’t decorated with art.

“Over there, actually,” I say. I get to the end of the first row of Harley’s canvases and start in on the second. “Anyway, Orion told Harley that good paintings all have titles. Harley said he didn’t think paintings needed names, but Orion made a big deal out of it and called the painting—”

“ Through the Looking Glass ,” Amy says.

“Yeah.” I glance back at her. She’s bending in front of the blank wall, reading a tiny placard.

“ Through the Looking Glass, Oil Painting by Harley, Feeder,” she reads. She turns back to me. “But where is it? There’s a hook here for the painting, but no painting.”

“It’s not here, either,” I say, pushing aside the stack of paintings.

“This must have been an important painting — it’s the only one that has a placard.”

Amy’s right. The rest of the room is a bit of a mess, but this blank wall is neat, clearly sectioned off. It’s obviously meant to be the center of attention, even if there’s nothing left to direct one’s attention to.

“Orion names the painting, he hangs it in the center of the room, he bothers to get a placard made that shows the title of the painting — this has to be the next clue he wanted us to find.” Her green eyes search mine, as if she could see Harley’s art in them.

I move to stand beside Amy, staring at the empty wall. “But where’s the painting?”

“WHO WOULD TAKE IT?” I ASK. “SOMEONE CLOSE TO HARLEY?”

“He didn’t have many friends. Me — Bartie, Victria.”

“One of them?”

Elder shakes his head. I believe him — Bartie’s too serious to think of stealing a painting, and while Victria would have no qualms about it, she’d pick a painting of Orion, not Kayleigh, judging by the sketch she stole from Harley’s room. “And I know Doc wouldn’t.”

I snort. No, Doc wouldn’t.

“Unless…”

“Yeah?” I ask.

“Harley’s parents might have… ”

For some reason, this surprises me. I didn’t really think of Harley having parents. He just… was. And while I know that the people living in the Ward were separated from the rest of the Feeders on purpose, it just didn’t occur to me that there was anything of Harley outside of the Hospital and the stars.

“Come on,” Elder says. “Let’s try it.”

In all my time on Godspeed , I don’t think I’ve ever actually walked the entire length of the ship. I’ve run it dozens of times — or at least, I did before the Phydus wore off — but I’ve never walked it.

We start down the same path we took to get to the rabbit fields. When we reach the fork in the road, we go left instead of up and over to the fields. I glance back — the fence has been repaired, and the entire area looks undisturbed. I can see a couple of rabbits, lazily hopping about, sniffing the ground where their owner lay dead just a few hours before.

“Tell me about the painting,” I say, desperately trying to replace the image in my mind of the rabbit girl’s death with anything else.

“It’s really frexing good,” Elder says. “But, I don’t know… weird, I guess. Usually Harley paints real-life things, but this one is… different. It’s a picture of Kayleigh right before she died.”

Somehow, it doesn’t surprise me that the painting Harley did in memory of Kayleigh’s death is weird — after all, the only other surreal painting he did was of his own.

“Her death — it surprised us all. Of all of us, I always thought that it would be Harley… ”

“You thought Harley would kill himself?” I ask.

“He’d tried a couple of times. Once before Kayleigh. Twice after. Three times after,” he adds.

He’d forgotten the third attempt, the one that actually worked.

“Right after Kayleigh died,” Elder says, “Harley started that painting. I mean, right after she died — he began stretching the canvas the same day we found her body, painted through the night. Eventually, Doc drugged him with a med patch. Once he was asleep, I lifted the wet brush from his hand. His fingertips were dented from his grip.” Elder’s voice is far away.

Freshly hatched puffy yellow baby chicks cheep up at us as we pass them. The solar lamp is bright and straight above us, making our shadows disappear on the dusty path. The City is far enough in front of us that while I can see people bustling about, I can’t make out their faces, and the Recorder Hall and Hospital are far enough behind us that I don’t feel their beady stares. I lower the hood of my jacket and unwind the strip of cloth around my hair, relishing the cool air against my scalp.