A Million Suns (Across the Universe 2)

We wait. A woman opens her mouth to speak, but I quell her with a look. We’re all listening to the silence. Wondering if anyone still lives on the other side of the door.

If Elder survived.

Something smacks against the door. A woman behind me screams, and a man near the hallway shouts, “Frex!” The door moves again—not with the force of a tornado, like before, but instead with a rattle and shake.

Fingers pop out at the door edges.

“They’re alive!” shouts the same woman. And as one, we all rush to the door, prying our fingers into the open crack. Together we strain against the mechanics to slide the damaged door open. The door moves an inch. We all push harder. With a screeching metal-on-metal sound, the door finally, finally gives way.

I see the blood on him first—dripping from a gash in his shoulder, staining his dark skin red. Sweat makes his hair cling to his forehead. His arms strain to cast aside the remains of the door, and he staggers through.

“Elder,” I whisper. My voice cracks in the middle. I feel tears stinging my eyes, but they don’t fall. I almost lost him. Again. It wasn’t until I saw his body on

the hatch floor yesterday that I realized how much I cared about him, but even then I couldn’t define my feelings.

A part of me has been holding back from him since I first started to see how devoted he was to me. That part of me wove words into my soul, words like doubt and can’t trust and lust and not worth it. All those words break, all at once, like strings ripped from torn cloth.

Now, though, staring at his grief-stricken face, I don’t think with words at all.

Beyond him, the Shippers are helping each other up. They cry in joy for those who lived and begin to mourn for those who died beyond the sealed Bridge door.

But I’m just looking at Elder, and he’s just looking at me, and everything else disappears.

My hands are shaking. My legs are too—in fact, I’m shaking all over. I want to rush to him, but I can’t. Instead, he’s the one who makes a move. He barrels through the mangled doorway (although he’s limping; why is he limping?) and wraps his arms around me. I collapse into him, but he supports me, lending me his strength when I don’t seem to have any more of my own.

“Oh, God, Elder,” I mutter into his chest, and it’s not much, but it’s the best prayer I’ve got.

He strokes my hair soothingly. The world continues around us—people rushing into or out of the Engine Room, more cries, more reunions—but we are a silent stalwart amid the chaos.

“How did you know?” Elder asks, his nose buried in my hair. The question is so the opposite of everything I am right now—logical words formed into a logical question—that it confuses me at first. I lean back and look up at him. Elder leads me past the remains of the door and through the crowd to a quiet corner in a room nearby. Beyond his shoulder I can still see the chaos of the explosion—Kit has arrived with a posse of nurses and taken charge, corralling the wounded to one area and commanding everyone else to leave. A group of engineers examines the seal-locked door of the Bridge, ensuring that there’s no more danger of exposure.

“The explosion,” Elder says, drawing me back to him. “You knew before, didn’t you? You came here to warn me. ”

“I found another one of Orion’s videos. In the armory. ”

“Orion—Orion did this?” Elder’s eyes are befuddled; he’s still reeling from the explosion.

“No, not Orion. But . . . someone else has his videos. Someone else knows the codes to the locked doors. I think Orion’s been trying to tell us the way off the ship all along, but someone else found out his secret before we did and they’ve been trying to stop us. ”

I hand Elder the floppy with Orion’s video. In the first video I found, Orion seemed certain that there was a choice to be made and that I would make it. But by this last video, he sounds the same way he did in the video of him just after he ran away from Eldest—scared and unsure. Whoever found these videos of Orion clearly agrees that the planet isn’t worthwhile—and will murder anyone who tries to land the ship. The explosion on the Bridge is proof enough of that—it has ensured that even with Centauri-Earth so close, we’ll never land.

I can’t read Elder’s face as he watches the short video—grief, anger, doubt, something else, something empty and painful. But when he looks up at me, all that’s left in his eyes is a hollow sort of nothing.

“None of this matters,” Elder says. “With the Bridge gone, we’re going nowhere. ”

Once he says it, it becomes real for him. I see the sixteen years of his life trapped on the ship, and the decades of his future fall on him like a weight—he literally sags with the realization that Godspeed can’t land. He’s got everything on him now—the ship, the people, the deaths, the disappointment. And I realize: he has always had them. Always.

Elder looks behind him, to the Engine room, and beyond to the sealed doors. “Shelby was in there. In the Bridge. ”

And just like that, the terror’s back. I push it down, try to drown it under the waters of my soul, keeping it under with both hands and watching it die.

“Why?” Elder’s eyes search mine. He’s not asking why someone would blow up the Bridge. He’s asking why someone would let Shelby die for it.

59

ELDER

“NO, NO, NO, NO, NO,” SHELBY SAID.