“So?”
“So we missed something,” Amy says. “Orion knew something else, something about the ship or the mission that we should have discovered then . . . but we didn’t. We missed a clue. ”
She’s right. When we discovered that little book, I was distracted by the space suits, then by the planet. And Amy was distracted by the way I nearly died. Everything happened so quickly . . . and we missed something. Some last clue, something that will explain what we’re up against on Centauri-Earth.
I head straight to the space suit room, the first door after the bridge. It’s still packed to the brim with supplies we brought from Godspeed. I stare at the crates of food, the boxes of cloth and medical supplies and everything else we thought we’d need.
And that’s when it hits me: “There’s no way the book is still here. ” Stupid of me to come here and look, really. I knew it was gone. We cleared out this room. Crammed it full of farm equipment and livestock. At any point in time anyone could have picked up the slender volume of The Little Prince and tossed it away. It could be on Godspeed. It could be thrown away. Destroyed.
Maybe there was one more clue in The Little Prince. But whatever it was, it’s long gone now.
Amy laughs. “Oh ye of little faith,” she says. “I was in here while they packed this room. I was going to take the book back up to the Recorder Hall, but . . . ” She stares hard at the crates in the way. “Give me a leg up, will you?”
“What?” I ask, incredulous.
“Give me a leg up. ” She puts both hands on the nearest crate, testing her weight against it. When I cup my hands under her foot, she pushes off, scrabbling to clamber on top of the crates.
“What are you doing?” I call.
She climbs over the crates, occasionally slipping and once falling through a box of cloth and cursing. “I know we agreed that we shouldn’t waste space on anything we didn’t need to survive, but . . . ” Her voice trails off as she reaches the wall, her eyes even with the broken monitor that was supposed to show how the space suits worked. “But I just couldn’t let this book go. ”
Amy pries her fingers under the glass monitor embedded in the wall, and it slides off its hook. She pulls out a thin volume with a hand-drawn image of a little boy standing on a cratered moon. Amy crawls back over the boxes, then leaps down, tossing me the book. The Little Prince is emblazoned on the cover, followed by an unpronounceable name.
I flip through the pages until I find the clue Orion had left, the underlined text Amy saw but neither of us thought to explore.
“I,” replied the little prince, “do not like to condemn anyone to death. ”
“It’s a warning,” I
mumble, reading it.
Amy reads over my shoulder. “There has to be something more. Orion wouldn’t have left a clue that didn’t go anywhere, and he wouldn’t have brought it up, not as he was dying, not as you were telling him we were at the planet and it was dangerous. He might have been psycho, but he was careful with his clues. There has to be something here that links to why Centauri-Earth is dangerous, what it is we’re really facing. ”
I’m not sure how much of this is logic and how much of it is just wishful thinking, but it’s the only chance we have.
I flip the book closed, examining the cover. Orion called me a little prince, but I have to admit, I do not think I have anything in common with this one. This little prince stands on top of his dry, dusty rock of a kingdom, and he does not know what it is like to have a thousand people relying on him. He could step off his planet and bounce throughout the universe from place to place—and, as I start to scan the pages of the book, I see that’s just what he does. He must not feel the weight of gravity on such a small planet, but there is much more than gravity that drags me down.
I start to try to read the story, but Amy’s impatient, and I can’t concentrate on the words. It seems silly—there’s a hat and a rose and a fox, and little of it makes sense. When we get to the end, I hand the book back to Amy. “There’s nothing here,” I say again.
She shakes her head, opening the book again. “There has to be. ”
She doesn’t start at the beginning of the book this time; she starts near the middle, where Orion underlined the text. Her fingers trace the circles and underlines, grooves cut deep by a heavy pen. She turns a couple of pages, running her fingers over the illustration there, a fat man in a star-strewn cape, towering above a planet even smaller than the Little Prince’s.
Amy gasps.
“What is it?” I ask, leaning forward.
“Look. ” She holds the book out to me. I stare at the page. “Look. ”
And then I see it.
The clue isn’t in the text—it’s in the illustration. The man in the picture sits on a throne. “He’s the king,” Amy says. “He thinks he’s the king of the stars. ” His cloak wraps around him and trails along the sides of the planet, cloth billowing out across the surface. A dozen or more yellow stars decorate the robe, giving him the appearance of being wrapped in the universe. He wears a golden crown and a scowl, and for reasons I cannot explain, his wrinkled face reminds me of Eldest.
And—right over where the king’s heart should be—there’s a star. It’s part of the original design and is one of many decorating the robe, but inside the star, in very faint black ink, is a hand-drawn heart that definitely was not a part of the book’s illustration.
“And look here,” Amy says, pointing to the bottom of the small planet the king uses as a throne. In tiny print is one sentence, curving along the edge of the planet:
Who are the real monsters?