A Million Suns

And before I can figure out what he wasn’t my first of, he kisses me.

It’s sloppy and wet and awkward and our teeth clack together and his tongue feels like a dying fish in my mouth, flopping around.

I pull back — but it’s not Jason kissing me, it’s Luthor.

“You’ll never escape,” he says.

I want to run away, but my muscles are frozen as Luthor steps closer. His mouth opens in a wide grin, and his teeth are all black and rotten. I open my mouth to scream, but before I can, his lips crash against mine.

I wake up, struggling against my tangled quilt. My face is damp — with sweat or tears, I can’t tell. As soon as I escape my bed, I run to the bathroom and splash cold water on my cheeks, still gasping from the scream I never sounded in my nightmare.

I grip the sides of the sink with both hands, unable to stop shaking. I don’t recognize the girl in the mirror. Eyes red, lips cracked, fear spilling out. I don’t like admitting how much Luthor scares me. I wrap my arms around myself, squeezing them tight against my body. Why should I be so afraid of him when he hasn’t even really done anything? Is almost a good enough reason for fear?

Yes.

The room caves in around me. What I want to do is run, but I’m too afraid of what lurks in the dark, in the places where there’s nothing but cows and sheep and no one to hear me shout for help.

And that pisses me off.

It’s not just Luthor, though he’s the biggest part of it. It’s the eyes that glared at me in the City. It’s the way some of them, like Harley’s mother, Lil, still flinch when they see me. It’s the fact that it will be this way for the rest of my life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it, no more than I could jumpstart the ship’s engine. I can’t change what I am or where I came from, and because of this, they’re never going to accept me.

I dress quickly — so quickly that I mess up my hair wrap and have to do it over again. I doubt anyone’s awake yet, it’s so early, but I don’t want to risk it. I make sure the paper I found last night is tucked securely in my pocket and then I am out the door, through the silent Hospital, and racing down the path. When I reach the grav tube dais, the solar lamp clicks on, momentarily blinding me. I press the wi-com on my wrist and activate the grav tube.

The winds start up, and for a minute I think about jumping out, just comming Elder and asking him to come get me. A few strands of my hair float up. Then the winds accelerate and even more hair escapes from my scarf, reaching up like thousands of tiny arms. For one instant my toes are on the ground but my heels are lifted, and then whoosh! I’m sucked up into the tube. I shut my eyes. I don’t want to see the Feeder Level shrink away as I soar higher and higher. I don’t open them again until the winds die down and I step out onto the Keeper Level.

I try to smooth the scarf over my hair, then give up and rip it off, stuffing it into my jacket pocket. I don’t have to hide my hair from Elder anyway.

I open my mouth to call for him, then snap it shut, realizing something.

For the first time in three months, I didn’t start my day by talking to my parents on the cryo level.

When I woke up sad and lonely and empty inside… I came straight here.

Straight to Elder.

Just like Victria went straight to Orion.

Orion was wrong about me. It’s Elder who’s my safe place. Elder’s my home.

The Keeper Level is silent. I’m going to feel like an idiot if I’ve come all the way up here and Elder’s not around. But as I cross the Great Room, I can hear soft snoring. Elder’s bedroom door is open. I lean through the doorway.

He looks younger asleep, the exact opposite of the fierce aging that yesterday’s chaos spread across his face. The room is messy in a way only a boy’s room can be messy: clothes everywhere, despite the fact that he’s got a “hamper” that automatically cleans clothes right there. There’s a musky scent in the room, something that doesn’t exactly smell like Elder, but that reminds me of him even more. You could drop me anywhere in the universe, blindfolded, and I’d know this was his room just from the smell.

I step over piles of clothes and sit on the edge of his bed, near his feet. Elder’s bed dips, and his eyes flutter open.

“Amy,” he says in a sleep-heavy voice, warm and smiley, drawing the syllables out so that my name ends with “meeee.”

“Amy!” he shouts, sitting straight up in bed. “What the frex — how’d you — why are you here?”

I grin. “I found this,” I say, tossing the folded paper I found in my cryo chamber at Elder’s lap. He reaches for it, stretching in a way that reminds me of a cat.

“What is it?” he asks as he reads the page.

“It’s a list of everyone in the military who’s frozen on the cryo level. I double-checked it against the official records.” Elder looks confused, but then I add, “It’s the next clue Orion left for me… for us.”

Elder stares at the paper, brow furrowed in thought. “The last clue was about adding things up.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I counted — there are twenty-seven people on that list. But I tried twenty-seven — the number, spelling it out — it didn’t work. None of the doors opened.”

I don’t know what I expected from Elder — for him to suddenly remember another locked door somewhere on the ship or for him to magically add up the list to something other than twenty-seven, but all he does is say “Hmmm,” and toss the paper back to me. He slides out of bed, and once he’s past the covers, I see that he’s not wearing pants. In fact, all he has on are a pair of boxer shorts — made of thin white linen and considerably shorter and tighter than the boxers boys wore on Earth. I stare openly. When I’d raced up here and plopped onto his bed, I hadn’t thought about what he’d be wearing — but now—

Elder laughs, and I notice his smirk.

“Oh, shut up and put some pants on!” I say, throwing a pillow at him.

I’m still blushing as Elder — now fully clothed — leads me back to the grav tube in the Learning Center. He pushes his wi-com to start the tube, then turns and holds his hand out to me.

Wait, what?

“I’ll go after you,” I say, stepping back.

Elder raises an eyebrow, a hint of a smile playing on his lips. “Come on, just ride with me.”

We’d done it once before, of course. But that was when I was half-drugged with Phydus, and before… before I’d started thinking about how life stuck on a ship wouldn’t be so bad if Elder walked around pantsless more.

Before I can protest again, Elder pulls me closer, the warmth of his body wrapping around me. He holds me loosely, knowing that I still don’t know what to do with his touch, but his grip is firm enough to make me certain that he’d never let me fall. Elder moves closer to the grav tube opening in a sort of sidestep-twirl. He uses his free hand to touch his wi-com.

“Ready?” he whispers. The words float around my face like a summer breeze.

I nod, because I can’t find any of my own words.

The grav tube comes alive, the cool winds rushing and swirling in and around, making my hair flutter and our clothes cling to our bodies. Elder tightens his grip around me, takes one step forward, and plunges us into thin air.

We fall for a moment, in darkness between the levels, and my heart beats in my throat — not only from the exhilarating pull of the grav tube, but also from the way Elder’s arms encircle me, holding me closer than he’s ever done before. We’re not free-falling — we’re being sucked down, fast, faster than a person should fall. I cower against Elder’s grasp, clutching my hands around his neck and burrowing my face into his shoulder, but his hold on me doesn’t falter. He’s the only stable thing in the swirling chaos.

A burst of light — we’ve gone through the entire Shipper Level and are already being sucked down into the Feeder Level. The tube bends — the Feeder Level has a curved roof, and the angle makes me feel as if I’m not just falling down, but falling on top of Elder. I think about wiggling away, but my body doesn’t want to abandon the safety of Elder’s arms.

I glimpse past his shoulder, once, and see the Feeder Level stretched out before me. I don’t feel anything seeing it, not hate or love, and so I don’t watch the fields and buildings zoom closer as we near the ground.

And then the winds calm, my hair floats down — an impossible tangled mess now — and we bob next to each