A Million Suns

Here, each of the wall floppies is labeled with a different subject — History, Agriculture, and Science are the most popular ones. A crowd of nearly a dozen people peer up at a diagram of a nuclear reactor on the Science wall floppy, arguing in soft tones about some detail in the schematics.

The least popular wall floppy is Literature. Only a handful of young women are scrolling through a copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. They’re struggling with the language more than my classmates did in ninth grade, but I wonder if, when they do get past the thees and thous and I bite my thumb at you, sirs, will they walk away thinking that is love? I consider pausing here and telling them about the debate we had in class where I argued that Romeo and Juliet weren’t really in love. In ninth grade, I was so sure of myself I won the debate (and a prize of a free homework pass), and I remember shooting down the opposing side so passionately that the entire class was in an uproar. But now… now I can’t remember a single argument from the debate on either side, and I can think of nothing to say to these people. How can I argue that Romeo and Juliet doesn’t really show love to a group of people who have no concept of what love really is? When I don’t know what love really is — just what it isn’t.

Suddenly, all the wall floppies go black.

“Hey!” one of the girls reading Shakespeare shouts.

“What’s going on?” a burly man at the Agriculture wall floppy growls.

Giant words in bright white letters scroll across the darkened screens, filling the hall with one phrase, repeated over and over.

LEAD YOURSELF

My eyes widen, and I pull my hood even farther down over my face, so hard that the seams strain against the back of my head. While everyone else is distracted, reading the words and puzzling about how they flashed on their floppies, I rush to the back of the hall, toward the book rooms. Something like this was bound to happen. Elder’s been spending all his free time with me in the Recorder Hall, reading up on civics and police forces, but I don’t think he really understood that some people are going to want to rebel just because, for the very first time, they can.

“Who did this?” A male voice cuts through the mutterings of the crowd. He sounds wary, scared even, but also aggressive, as if he’d like to find and punish whoever hacked the floppy network.

“What does it mean?” a woman near me says. Her friend shakes her head violently, her hair whipping her cheeks, her eyes wide with fear.

A woman at the Science floppy starts tapping the screen, trying to make the message go away. The crowd around her starts whispering uneasily as nothing she does changes the message. Whoever hacked the floppies did a good job, apparently.

“Eldest needs to fix this,” the first man says. It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about Elder. Many of the people around him nod, their eyes on the screen, their mouths gaping.

“Those floppies didn’t change until the freak walked by,” one of the women who had been reading Romeo and Juliet says in a clear, loud voice. She starts searching the crowd in the entryway for me. I duck my head and run into the back hall.

I don’t breathe until I’m in the fiction room and the door zips shut behind me. There’s no lock — hardly any of the rooms on the entire ship have locks — but if I can lie low here, the people in the entryway might eventually forget their anger and forget me.

The fiction room is smaller than the others on this floor; clearly, the ship’s makers decided that history and science were more important than novels. I wish it looked more like my library back home, with huge plush beanbags scattered across the floor, dark carpet, posters of famous authors on the walls, and tiny square dusty windows filtering in the sunlight. Instead, the fiction room looks like all the rest — cold and sterile and entirely too clean. It’s like a hospital room with books instead of beds: white tiled floor, stark paneled walls, silvery-metal table.

Even though the room is sparkling clean, there is an ever-present scent of dust and old paper rising from the tomes. Everything here is in alphabetical order regardless of subject matter. Chaucer is beside Agatha Christie; J. K. Rowling beside Dr. Seuss beside Shakespeare. When I get to the end of one row and look down the next, I see unreadable titles, some written in languages I can guess at — French, German, Spanish — and some I can’t even begin to decipher — Chinese? Korean? Japanese?

I could get lost here, but I need to see if Orion really did leave a clue for me to follow in the phrase printed on my wi-com. I quit wandering among the fairy tales and poetry (Grimm and Goethe) and head to the first row of books, running my fingers along their bumpy spines. I head to the first bookcase, scanning the titles— The Pilgrim’s Progress, Ender’s Game, Mousetrap—until I get to the one I’m looking for.

Inferno, Volume I of the Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, shelved beside a slender volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Ironic — a book of love poems beside a book about hell. I pull out the poetry collection and toss it on the metal table near the door so it can be reshelved with the Ss; then I hook my finger on the spine of Dante’s Inferno.

Just the title makes me remember those weeks in Ms. Parker’s English class. I can feel the hard seat of my class desk; I can remember laughing with Ryan and Mike as we worked on our final project.

Funny how a book about hell reminds me of home.

As I slide Inferno off the shelf, something slips out, wafting to the floor. I bend over to pick it up — a paper-thin sheet of rectangular black plastic, about the length and width of my open hand. The feel of it reminds me of a floppy, but it’s smaller, and there is a fingernail-size bit of raised hard plastic in one corner. I slip it in my pocket; Elder will probably know what it is. I stand back up and reach for Dante again.

The door bursts open. I get a glimpse of a panicked woman’s face — eyes wide with fear, dark hair swinging. She races past me to the far side of the room and throws herself behind the last bookshelf.

I run over and drop to my knees beside her trembling body. “What’s wrong?” I ask, reaching for her. Now that I have a chance to really look at her, I realize who she is: Victria. Harley and Elder’s friend. The girl who writes, stories or novels, I think. The last time I spoke with her, I told her about the sky on Earth and how it never ended, and she spit in my face, denouncing me in front of everyone.

She snatches her hand away. Sweat beads on her face and arms, and she’s panting hard. “Luthe — Luthor. He’s…”

Him.

My stomach drops.

He’s the one. The one who held me down three months ago, who used the Season as an excuse to try to rape me. He was like Harley and Elder — aware of the world around him without Phydus dulling his mind. He knew what he was doing when he slammed me to the ground and pressed his weight against me. When he watched hope leave my eyes. When I gave up struggling.

He told me his name was Luthe, but Victria called him Luthor. Like Lex Luthor, Superman’s arch-nemesis… but the exploits of a bald super-villain seem comical compared to the evil that lies behind this Luthor’s skin. I realize then — Luthe is his nickname. The name his friends call him. The idea of calling him that fills me with revulsion. I don’t like to think of him in the same terms his friends do.

The door zips open again. Victria whimpers softly, hiding her face. I jump up.

He stands in the doorway, scanning the room.

His eyes lock on me.

And he smiles. Slowly.

Seductively.

7 ELDER

THE DOOR IS LOCKED. JUST THE WAY I LEFT IT.