A Million Suns

he wasn’t our choice.”

“Bartie lists all kinds of books in the Recorder Hall,” the man says, waving the floppy at me again. I still don’t take it. “All those governments on Sol-Earth. They had systems. Voting and elections, things like that. Things where people could choose and have a voice.”

“Taking the ship from Elder isn’t the right thing to do,” I insist. They seem so — I don’t know, logical—that I think if I could just sit them down, show them how hard Elder’s working, how much he really cares, maybe they wouldn’t be so willing to trash him.

“I’m sorry,” the man says. “But we can’t trust you either.”

“And why not? I live here too!”

He shakes his head. “But you’re not one of us.” His eyes drift down to my red hair spilling from the jacket. I try to stuff it back under the hood. The man smiles smugly. He looks perfectly at ease, as if he’s in complete control. In contrast, I can already feel my face is hot. “All I know,” he says, “is that we didn’t need police before you. Everything was fine before you.”

I back down the first two steps. “Maybe Elder would be the leader we need him to be if he didn’t have any distractions,” the deep-voiced woman says in a conversational tone, as if she’s not talking about eliminating me as a distraction.

I back down the next two steps. “It did all start with her,” the other woman says.

I’m gripping the Phydus patch in my pocket, deeply aware that one won’t subdue everyone in the group. Why did I bother trying to say anything? I should have known better.

Orion’s list brushes against the back of my hand.

No. I won’t let them scare me away from the chance to find the next clue.

I storm up the stairs and shoulder past the woman with the deep voice. The man steps out of my way, but he does so with an eerie twist on his lips, watching me as I push open the doors to the Recorder Hall and enter. I don’t like that look. It reminds me too much of the way Luthor looks at me, as if I’m a thing, not a person.

Inside, the Recorder Hall is mostly deserted. A single man, tall and skinny, reads an essay by Henry David Thoreau on the Literature wall floppy, and four people are bunched together, reading about the Boxer Rebellion. But no one’s looking at the Science floppy at all. That’s strange. This is the first time since Elder took the ship off Phydus that no one’s analyzing the engine diagram, trying to improve efficiency, not knowing that the engine hasn’t moved us forward in years.

I make my way quickly to the book rooms. I don’t think the group on the porch is going to bother following me in here, but I’d rather get done as quickly as possible.

I bypass all the nonfiction rooms. Orion left this clue for me, and even if someone else has hidden it, I still think my best chance of finding it is either in fiction or art.

I have to have a chance of finding it. I have to.

Someone probably changed the last clue — deleted parts, probably added that text — but Orion left me a much more elaborate path. He’s put so much care and planning into hiding each clue. There has to be something else, some way to figure out the next step.

I trail my fingers along the shelf, looking for something that might hint at Orion’s next clue. I flip through Dante’s Inferno again, and then Paradiso and Purgatorio. I look through everything by Lewis Carroll, including that stupid poem Ms. Parker made us diagram, “Jabberwocky.”

This is useless. Orion may have left the next clue in a book, but he didn’t leave it in a book he’s already used.

I collapse into the chair in front by the metal table in the center of the room. A copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets lies in the middle, just where I threw it after finding it misshelved by Dante a few days ago. I guess the new Recorder, Bartie, is too busy writing manifestos and trying to start an unneeded revolution to bother with doing his actual job.

Sighing, I snatch up the book and head for the S shelves. There’s just enough room to squeeze the sonnets between King Lear and Macbeth.

I head for the door — might as well see if there’s anything attached to any of the rest of Harley’s paintings.

I pause. Orion had a contingency plan for everything — why not make sure the clues are close together, just in case someone tampered with one? I’m the only one who ever really bothers with the book rooms — and before me, there was only him. What are the chances of someone else putting a book on the wrong shelf— right next to the book that held the first clue?

I rush back to the S shelf, my hands shaking as I reach for the poetry book. The pages are glossy and thick, dotted with illustrations from the Elizabethan era. On the first page is a color portrait of Shakespeare. The Bard wrote about star-crossed love, but I doubt he ever realized his works would one day be soaring through the stars.

I frown. We’re not exactly soaring now, are we?

I flip through the pages quickly, creasing them in a way that I know Elder would frown upon. But… there’s nothing here. I force myself to slow down, reading each poem even though they make little sense to me.

I take a deep, shaking breath. Part of me wants to throw the book against the wall. I’d gotten my hopes so far up.

Maybe Elder’s right. Maybe this whole thing is pointless.

Still, I take the book with me as I head back to my room in the Ward.

The Hospital’s still busy even though it’s nearly time for the solar lamp to turn off, but the third floor is almost empty. Only Victria sits in the common room, staring out the window. I start to say something to her, but I remember the angry look she gave me when she found me in Harley’s room and in the cryo level, so I move straight to the glass doors leading to the hallway. She glances up at me as I pass, but not with an angry glare.

She’s been crying.

I think of saying something to her, but I doubt she’d care to speak to me. I hear her sniffle as I reach for the door. She hates me. There’s a muffled sound behind me, like she’s holding in a sob. But I hear anyway.

I let the glass doors close and head over to the couch.

“Go away,” she says, but there’s no heart in her voice.

“What’s wrong?”

She turns back to the window.

I lean into the seat cushion and cross my legs. “I’m just going to stay here until you tell me.”

She waits a long moment, as if testing me. When I don’t move, she finally speaks, her words fogging the glass of the window, “I just miss him. The worse things get, the more I think about what he might have done.”

“Is this… is this about Orion?” I ask.

She chokes out a laugh, a wet sound marred by her angry tears. She swipes her arm across her face. “It’s stupid really,” she says, still talking to the window more than to me. “He… he was older than me. I was just some stupid little kid to him. But… I’ve always loved stories. Books. And I’d go to the Recorder Hall, and he’d be there.”

My lips twitch up in a small smile, and I think back to what I knew of Orion before I discovered he was a murderer. He wiped my face and hands clean when I’d been crying once, and I sort of wish I could do the same for Victria now.

“The thing that makes me so upset,” Victria continues, “is that I never had a chance to tell him. I mean, I think he knew, but I never actually said the words. I’d go to the Recorder Hall almost every day, and we’d talk and joke, but… I never said what I wanted to. And now it’s too late.”

It’s sad how much Victria and I have in common — she wants to reveal her deepest secrets to people who are nothing but ice, too.

“I think,” I say slowly, “that if you really loved him, he probably knew, whether you said it or not.”

She finally turns to look at me, and there’s a hint of a smile on her lips. Her eyes are mostly dry now. “I just wish I had a choice,” she says.

“A choice?”