A Million Suns

“Can you wait here a moment?” Elder asks. “I see something I should take care of.”

I nod, and he walks into the butcher’s on the corner. I creep closer to listen. Two men, both of the older generation, are working, even though there are five workstations in the building.

One of the men looks up when Elder enters. He nudges his partner.

“Oh, um, hello, Eldest,” he tells Elder, wiping his bloody hands on the stained smock in front of him.

Elder doesn’t bother telling the man that he prefers to be called Elder. “Where are your other workers?”

The men glance nervously at each other. The first turns back to the cow he’s butchering, sawing away at a leg bone with a hacksaw. The other man stands at his counter, unsure of what to do. “They — well — they didn’t come in today.”

“Why not?”

The man shrugs. “We told them yesterday we would need help, that Bronsen was bringing in at least three head, but…”

“But they didn’t come in.”

The man nods.

“Why didn’t you do something about it?”

He keeps wiping his hands on his smock, but they’re as clean as they’re going to get against that dirty thing. “It’s… it’s, uh… it’s not our place.”

“Not your place to do what?”

“To tell others to come to work.”

Elder’s jaw clenches. He leaves, letting the bell at the door say his farewell.

He storms down the street, and his scowl wards off any further greetings from those who pass us. “Eldest never had these problems,” he growls at me in an undertone. “People just not working. Lazy. He never had to deal with that. People obeyed him, and they didn’t dare miss work. Eldest made sure that everything on this ship ran smoothly.”

“Eldest didn’t do that,” I say. My words startle Elder enough that he stops in his tracks. “He didn’t,” I insist. “Phydus did.”

Elder smirks, and some of the anger in him fades. We pass a group of spinners sitting on the sidewalks, chatting merrily with each other as the threads slide through their fingers. In the next block, though, the buildings that house the looms are dark and quiet, no weavers in sight. Elder glowers at it as he leads me to an iron staircase set against the side of a series of brightly painted trailers stacked on top of the working area.

“The yellow one,” Elder says, pointing to a trailer three flights up. “That’s where Harley used to live.”

I follow Elder up the steps. The higher we go, the more paint splatters there are on the railings and steps. Even here, Harley has left his mark. Elder hesitates before knocking, his fist poised over an aqua blue smear of dried paint.

No answer.

He knocks again.

“Maybe they’re not here?” I ask. “It is the middle of the day.”

When no one answers on his third knock, Elder pushes the door open.

23 ELDER

IT’S DARK INSIDE, AND IT STINKS OF SOMETHING SOURED. There are traces of Harley here still — the inside is painted white with yellow swirls along the top. A table sits in the center of the room, but all but one of the chairs have been stacked in the corner, and the top of the table is littered with scraps of cloth, scissors, and tiny bottles of colored dye — accouterments of being a weaver.

“Hello?” Amy calls. “I think someone’s back there,” she adds, nodding at the cloth covering the doorway that leads deeper into the trailer.

I step in front of her and peel back the curtain. This room is darker still and smells of musk and sweat. It’s the main bedroom — beyond this room is another curtained door leading, I know, to a bathroom and a smaller bedroom.

Curled in a tight ball in the center of the bed is Harley’s mother, Lil. Her hair is messy, but she’s fully dressed, although her clothes are stained.

“What are you doing here?” Lil asks, her voice quiet and defeated.

“Where’s—” I struggle for the name of Harley’s father. “Where’s Stevy?”

Lil shrugs without getting up.

Amy moves forward, hesitates, then sits on the edge of the bed. “Is everything all right?” She reaches for Lil, but Lil, startled by Amy’s fair coloring, cowers back. Amy’s hand drops into her lap. After a moment, she gets back up and moves behind me.

“Where’s Stevy?” I ask again.

“Gone.”

“For how long?”

Lil shrugs again.

From under the covers, I hear her stomach growl.

“Let’s get you something to eat,” I say. I step forward, reaching down for her hand. Although Lil doesn’t flinch from me, she doesn’t respond to my offer, either.

“No point,” she says. “No food.”

“No food?” I ask. I instinctively look to the curtained door; the wall food distributer is in the main room of the trailer. “Is it broken? I’ll have maintenance come and check on it.”

“No point,” she says softly. I ignore her and com the Shipper level, requesting they send someone as soon as they can.

Once I break the com link, I turn my full attention back to Lil. “What’s wrong?” I ask. “Why aren’t you working? Should I com Doc?”

She stares at the ceiling. “I can’t work. The dyes remind me of him. The colors. Colors everywhere.”

“Lil,” I say, making a mental note to com Doc later, “did you take any of Harley’s paintings from the Recorder Hall?”

Now she sits up. “No!”

But her eyes dart to the curtain.

She notices my glance in that direction. “They’re mine. He’s my son. He was my son. It’s all I have left of him.”

“We just want to look,” Amy says in a small voice from behind me.

Lil flops back into her pillow. “What’s the point? He’s not coming back. Neither of them is coming back.”

She doesn’t look up again, so Amy and I creep around the bed to the curtain on the far wall. I lift it up, and Amy follows me into the room.

A bathroom. The toilet’s unflushed and the sink is stained. We move quickly to the side, where another curtain blocks a doorway.

This is Harley’s room — or, at least, it was until he moved out to live in the Ward. There are traces of what the room used to be — a narrow mattress against one wall, a small nightstand that still holds a clock — but clearly in the years since he left, the room has become something of a storage space for his family. I maneuver past the boxes until I see what we came for: Harley’s painting, Through the Looking Glass.

“It’s beautiful,” Amy breathes. I suppose she’s right, but when I see it, I only remember the way it really happened, not the way Harley painted it.

The painting is vividly bright, even though in my memory everything was dark: the water, the mud, her eyes. Five figures stand at the top of the painting, looking down into the pond — me, Harley, Victria, Bartie, and, behind us, Orion. Harley had used some sort of reflective paint on the surface of the pond — but just beneath the mirror- like surface of the water, a girl swims, floating on her back, her laughing eyes peering up toward the surface. Koi