RAZORBILL

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

Beth Revis wrote her first books while still at university, where she secretly jotted down stories instead of taking notes. In addition to writing teen fiction, Beth spends her time doing things like trying to point out the dramatic irony in Oedipus Rex to gaggles of sixteen-year-olds. This is because she is also a teacher, in case you were wondering.

Beth lives in rural North Carolina with her husband and her dog, where she splits her time between writing lesson plans, writing stories, and writing up plans to travel somewhere new. Across the Universe is her debut novel.

www.acrosstheuniversebook.com

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

RAZORBILL

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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Published simultaneously in the United States and Great Britain in Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd, 2011

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-141-33362-5

AMY

Mom wanted me to go first. I think it was because she was afraid that after they were contained and frozen, I’d walk away, return to life rather than consign myself to that cold, clear box. But Daddy insisted.

“Amy needs to see what it’s like. You go first, let her watch. Then she can go and I’ll be with her. I’ll go last.”

But the long and the short of it is that you have to be naked, and neither of them wanted me to see either of them naked (not like I wanted to see them in all their nude glory, gross), but given the choice, it’d be best for Mom to go first, since we had the same parts and all.

She looked so skinny after she undressed. Her collarbone stood out more; her skin had that rice-paper-thin, over-moisturized consistency old people’s skin has. Her stomach—a part of her she always kept hidden under clothes—sagged in a wrinkly sort of way that made her look even more vulnerable and weak.

The men who worked in the lab seemed uninterested in my mother’s nudity, just as they were impartial to my and my father’s presence. They helped her lie down in the clear cryo box. It would have looked like a coffin, but coffins have pillows and look a lot more comfortable. This looked more like a shoebox.

“It’s cold,” Mom said. Her pale white skin pressed flat against the bottom of the box.

I looked away as the other worker, Hassan, pierced Mom’s skin with the IV needles. One in her left arm, hooked up at the crease of her inner elbow; one in her right hand, protruding from that big vein below her knuckles.

The stuff in the IV bag did not flow like water. It rolled like honey. Hassan squeezed the bag, forcing it down the IV faster. It was sky blue, like the blue of the cornflowers Jason had given me at prom.

My mom hissed in pain. Ed removed a yellow plastic clamp on the empty IV in her elbow. A backflow of bright red blood shot through the IV, pouring into the bag. Mom’s eyes filled with water. The blue goo from the other IV glowed, a soft sparkle of sky shining through my mother’s veins as the goo traveled up her arm.

“Gotta wait for it to hit the heart,” Ed said, glancing at us. Daddy clenched his fists, his eyes boring into my mom. Her eyes were clamped shut, two hot tears dangling on her lashes.

Hassan squeezed the bag of blue goo again. A line of blood trickled from under Mom’s teeth where she was biting her lip.

“This stuff, it’s what makes the freezing work.” Ed spoke in a conversational tone, like a baker talking about how yeast makes bread rise. “Without it, little ice crystals form in the cells and split open the cell walls. This stuff makes the cell walls stronger, see? Ice don’t break ’em.” He glanced down at Mom. “Hurts like a bitch going in, though.”

Her face was pale, and she was lying in that box, and she wasn’t moving at all, as if moving would break her. She already looked dead.

“I wanted you to see this,” Daddy whispered. He didn’t look at me—he was still staring at Mom. He didn’t even blink.

Hassan kept kneading the bag of blue goo. Mom’s eyes rolled up into the back of her head for a minute, and I thought she’d pass out, but she didn’t.

“Almost there,” Ed said, looking at the bag of Mom’s blood. The flow had slowed down.

The only sound was Hassan’s heavy breathing as he rubbed the plastic sides of the bag of goo. And whimpering, soft, like a dying kitten, coming from Mom.

Daddy pulled me forward. Looking down at Mom reminded me of looking down at Grandma last year at the church, when we all said goodbye and Mom said she was in a better place, but all she meant was that she was dead.

“Can I touch her?” I asked Ed. He shrugged, so I reached out, gripped the fingers of her left hand. They were already ice cold. She didn’t squeeze back.

Daddy and I stepped back, but not so far that Mom would think we’d left her in that icy coffin alone. Ed pulled Mom’s eyes open. His fingers were big, calloused, and they looked like rough-hewn logs spreading apart my mom’s paper-thin eyelids. A drop of yellow liquid fell on each green eye. Ed did it quickly—drop, drop—then he sort of pushed her eyes shut. She didn’t open them again.

I guess I looked shocked, because, this time, when Ed glanced up at me, he actually stopped working long enough to give me a comforting smile. “Keeps her from going blind,” he said.

“It’s okay,” Mom said from her shoebox coffin. Even though her eyes were sealed shut, I could hear the tears in her voice.

“Tubes,” Ed said, and Hassan handed him a trio of clear plastic tubes. “Okay, look.” Ed leaned down close to Mom’s face. “I’m gonna put these down your throat. It’s not gonna feel good. Try to act like you’re swallowin’ ’em.”

Mom nodded and opened her mouth. Ed crammed the tubes down her throat. Mom gagged, a violent motion that started at her belly and worked all the way up to her dry, cracked lips.

It was a long time before she became still and silent. She kept trying to swallow, the muscles in her neck rearranging themselves to accommodate the tubes. Ed threaded the tubes up through a hole at the top of the shoebox coffin, near Mom’s head. Hassan opened a drawer and pulled out a mess of electrical wires. He stuffed a bundle of brightly colored wires down the first tube, then one long black cable with a small box at the end down the second one, and finally a small rectangular black piece of plastic that looked like a solar panel attached to a fiber-optic string down the last. Hassan plugged all the wires into a little white box that Ed fixed over the hole at the top of what I realized was nothing more than an elaborate packing crate.

“Say goodbye.” I looked up, surprised at the kind voice. Ed had his back to us, typing something into a computer; it was Hassan who spoke. He nodded at me encouragingly.

Daddy had to pull my arm to make me approach Mom. This … this was not the last image of her I wanted. Yellow crusting her eyes, tubes holding wires crammed down her throat, a soft sky-blue sheen pumping through her veins. Daddy kissed her, and Mom smiled a bit around the tubes. I patted her on the shoulder. It was cold too. She gurgled something at me, and I leaned in closer. Three sounds, three spluttering grunts, really. I squeezed Mom’s arm. I knew the words she was trying to get past the tubes were, “I love you.”

“Momma,” I whispered, stroking her paper-soft skin. I’d not called her anything but Mom since I was seven.

“’Kay, that’s it,” Ed said. Daddy’s hand snaked into the crook of my elbow, and he tugged at me gently. I jerked away. He changed tactics and gripped my shoulder, spinning me against his hard, muscled chest in a tight hug, and I didn’t resist this time. Ed and Hassan lifted up what looked like a hospital’s version of a fire hose, and water flecked with sky-blue sparkles filled the shoebox coffin. Mom spluttered when it reached her nose.

“Just breathe it in,” Ed shouted over the sound of rushing liquid. “Just relax.”

A stream of bubbles shot through the blue water, obscuring her face. She shook her head, denying the water the chance to drown her, but a moment later, she gave up. The liquid covered her. Ed turned off the hose and the ripples faded. The water was still. She was still.

Ed and Hassan lowered the shoebox coffin lid over Mom. They pushed the box into the rear wall, and only when they closed it behind a little door on the wall did I notice all the little doors in the wall, like a morgue. They pulled the handle down. A hiss of steam escaped through the door—the flash freezing process was over. One second Mom was there, and the next, everything about her that made her Mom was frozen and stagnant. She was as good as dead for the next three centuries until someone opened that door and woke her up.

Without waiting for Daddy’s response, Ed and Hassan were already preparing another shoebox coffin. They didn’t care whether it was me or him; they were just doing their job.

“I’m going next. Your mother wouldn’t agree to that—she thought you’d still back down, decide not to come with us. Well, I’m giving you that option. I’m going next. Then, if you’d like to walk away, not be frozen, that’s okay. I’ve told your aunt and uncle. They’re waiting outside; they’ll be there until five. After they freeze me, you can just walk away. Mom and I won’t know, not for centuries, not till we wake up, and if you do decide to live instead of being frozen, we’ll be okay.”

“No. It’s not fair for us to guilt you into this. It’ll be easier for you to make an honest decision if you do it without facing us.”

“But I promised you. I promised Mom.” My voice cracked. My eyes burned painfully, and I squeezed them shut. Two hot trails of tears leaked down my face.

“Doesn’t matter. That’s too big of a promise for us to make you keep. You have to make this choice yourself—if you want to stay here, I understand. I’m giving you a way out.”

“But they don’t need you! You could stay here with me! You’re not even important to the mission—you’re with the military, for Pete’s sake! How is a battlefield analyst supposed to help on a new planet? You could stay here, you could be—”

“—with me,” I whispered, but there was no point in asking him to stay. His mind was made up. And it wasn’t true, anyway. Daddy was sixth in command, and while that didn’t exactly make him commander in chief, it was still pretty high up. Mom was important too; no one was better at genetic splicing, and they needed her to help develop crops that could grow on the new planet.

Daddy went behind the curtain and undressed, and when he came out, Ed and Hassan let him use a hand towel to cover himself as he walked to the cryo chamber. They took it away when he lay down, and I forced my eyes to stare at his face, to not make this worse for either of us. But his face radiated pain, a look I had never seen Daddy wear before. It made my insides twist with even more fear, more doubt. I watched them plug the two IVs in. I watched them seal his eyes. I tried to retreat within myself, silence the scream of horror reverberating in my mind, and stand straight with a spine made of iron and a face made of stone. Then Daddy squeezed my hand, once, hard, as they crammed the tubes down his throat, and I crumbled, inside and out.

Before they filled his box with the blue-speckled liquid, Daddy held up his hand, his pinky finger sticking out. I wrapped my own pinky around his. I knew that with it, he was promising everything would be okay. And I almost believed him.

I cried so hard when they filled his cryo chamber up I couldn’t see his face as it drowned in the liquid. Then they lowered the lid, slammed him in his mortuary, and a puff of white steam escaped through the cracks.

Ed and Hassan looked at each other. Hassan shrugged. Ed jerked the lever of the little door open again and pulled out the clear shoebox coffin.

And there was Daddy. The translucent liquid was frozen solid and, I knew, so was Daddy. I put my hand on the glass, wishing there was a way to feel his warmth through the ice, but snatched it away quickly. The glass was so cold it burned. Green lights blinked on the little electric box Hassan had fixed to the top of Daddy’s cryotube.

“So,” Ed said, “are you going under, or are you leaving the party early?” He pushed Daddy’s shoebox coffin back into its little slot in the wall.

When I looked up at Ed, my eyes were so watery that his face sort of melted, and he looked a bit like a Cyclops. “I …”

My eyes slid to the exit, past all the cryo equipment on the other side of the room. Beyond that door were my aunt and uncle, who I loved, who I could be happy living with. And beyond them was Jason. And Rebecca and Heather and Robyn and all my friends. And the mountains, the flowers, the sky. Earth. Beyond that door was Earth. And life.

But my eyes drifted to the little doors on the wall. Beyond those doors were my momma and daddy.

I cried as I undressed. The first boy who ever saw me naked was Jason, just that one time, the night I found out I would leave behind everything on Earth, and everything included him. I did not like the idea that the last boys to see me naked on this planet would be Ed and Hassan. I tried to cover myself with my arms and hands, but Ed and Hassan made me remove them so they could put the IVs in.

And, oh god, it was worse than Mom made it look. Oh, God. Oh, God. It was cold and it was burning all at the same time. I could feel my muscles straining as that blue goo entered my system. My heart wanted to pound, beat upon my rib cage like a lover beating on the door, but the blue goo made it do the opposite and sloooow down so that instead of beatbeatbeatbeat, it went beat … beat …

Ed jerked my eyelids open. Plop! Cold, yellow liquid filled my eyes, sealing them like gum. Plop!

One of them, maybe Hassan, tapped on my chin, and I opened my mouth obediently. Apparently, not wide enough—the tubes hit my teeth. I opened wider.

And then the tubes were forced down my throat, hard. They did not feel as flexible as they had looked; they felt like a greased broomstick being crammed down my mouth. I gagged, and gagged again. I could taste bile and copper around the plastic of the tubes.

A few moments after it was done, my stomach tingled. I could feel the wires inside me being pulled and tugged as Hassan plugged the little black box to the outside of my very own shoebox coffin.

A metallic sound—the hose being opened up. Cold, cold liquid splashed on my thighs. I wanted to move my hands to cover myself there, but my body was sluggish.

“I dunno,” Ed said. “Things ain’t exactly peachy here now. Nothing’s been right since the first recession, let alone the second. The Financial Resource Exchange was s’posed to bring more jobs, wasn’t it? Ain’t got nothing now other than this P.O.S. job, and it’ll be over soon as they’re all frozen.”

Another silence. The cryo liquid washed over my knees now, seeping cold into the places on my body that had been warm—the crease of my knees, under my arms, under my breasts.

Ed snorted. “What they’re offering? They’re offering a lifetime’s salary, all in one check.”

“Ain’t worth nothing on a ship that won’t land for three hundred and one years.”

My heart stopped. Three hundred … and one? No—that’s wrong. It’s three hundred years even. Not three hundred and one.

“Difference between surviving or not. It’s not like when we were kids. Don’t care what the prez says, that Financial Act ain’t gonna be able to fix this kinda debt.”

What are they yammering about? Who cares about national debt and jobs? Go back to that extra year!

“A man has time to think about it anyway,” Ed continued. “Consider his options. Why’d they delay the launch again?”

Cryo liquid splashed against my ears as my shoebox coffin filled; I lifted my head.

Delay? What delay? I tried to speak around the tubes, but they filled my mouth, crowded my tongue, silenced my words.

“I have no idea. Something about the fuel and feedback from the probes. But why are they making us keep all the freezing on schedule?”

The cyro liquid was rising fast. I turned my head, so my right ear could catch their conversation.

“Who cares?” Ed asked. “Not them—they’ll just sleep through it all. They say the ship’ll take three hundred years just to get to that other planet—what’s the difference in one more year?”

I tried to sit up. My muscles were hard, slow, but I struggled. I tried to talk again, make a sound, any sound, but the cryo liquid was spilling over my face.

I shook my head. God, didn’t they know? A year made the world of difference! This was one more year I could be with Jason, one more year I could live! I signed up for three hundred years … not three hundred and one!

Gentle hands—Hassan’s?—pushed me under the cryo liquid. I held my breath. I tried to rise up. I wanted my year! My last year—one more year!

“Breathe in the liquid!” Ed’s voice sounded muffled, almost indecipherable under the cryo liquid. I tried to shake my head, but as my neck muscles tensed, my lungs rebelled, and the cold, cold cryo liquid rushed down my nose, past the tubes, and into my body.

As one of them pushed at my feet, sliding me into my morgue, I imagined that my Prince Charming was just beyond my little door, that he really could come and kiss me awake and that we could have a whole year more together.

There was a click, click, grrr of gears, and I knew the flash freezing would start in mere moments, and then my life would be nothing but a puff of white steam leaking through the cracks of my morgue door.

And I thought: At least I’ll sleep. I will forget, for three hundred and one years, everything else.

And then whoosh! The flash-freeze filled the tiny chamber. I was in ice. I was ice.

But if I’m ice, how am I conscious? I was supposed to be asleep; I was supposed to forget about Jason and life and Earth for three hundred and one years. People have been cryo frozen before me, and none of them were conscious. If the mind is frozen, it cannot be awake or aware.

I’ve read before of coma victims who were supposed to be knocked out with anesthesia during an operation, but really they were awake and felt everything.

I hope—I pray—that’s not me. I can’t be awake for three hundred and one years. I’ll never survive that.

Maybe I’m dreaming now. I’ve dreamt a lifetime in a thirty-minute nap. Maybe I’m still in that space between frozen and not, and this is all a dream. Maybe we haven’t left Earth yet. Maybe I’m still in that limbo year before the ship launches, and I’m stuck, trapped in a dream I can’t wake from.

ELDER

See, there are hardly any locked doors on Godspeed. No need. Godspeed isn’t small—it was the largest ship ever built when it was launched two and a half centuries ago—but it’s not so huge that we don’t all feel the weight of the metal walls crushing us. Privacy is our most valued possession and no one—no one—would dare betray privacy.

Which is why the locked door before me is so strange. Why lock a door no one would ever breach?

My mouth tightens. The worst part? I know that door is locked because of me. It has to be. This is the Keeper Level, and Eldest and I, as the current and future leaders of the ship, are the only ones allowed here.

Because I know—I know—on the other side of that door is my chance. When Eldest was called to the Shipper Level to inspect the engine, he rushed to his chamber for a box, went all the way to the hatch, then turned around and took the box back to his room. And locked the door before he left. Clearly, whatever is in that box is important and has something to do with the ship, something that I, as leader-in-training, should know about.

It’s just one more thing Eldest is keeping from me. Because stars forbid he’d actually train me instead of giving me more mindless lessons and reports.

If I had that box, I’d prove to him I could … what? I don’t actually know what’s in there. But I do know that whatever it is has been making him spend a lot more time on the Shipper Level. There’s a serious problem going on, something that’s kept Eldest more preoccupied than I’ve ever seen him before.

I kick the door, then turn and fall against it. Three years ago, when it was time for me to start training, I didn’t care for shite about whether or not Eldest trained me as he should. I was just glad to be off the Feeder Level. Even though my name is Elder, I’m the youngest person on the ship, and I’ve always known that I, as the one born in the off years, would be the Eldest of the generation born after me. I was never comfortable living with the Feeders and their obsession with farming. Moving in with Eldest felt like a relief.

But I’m sixteen now, and I’m tired of doing nothing but lessons. It’s time for me to be a real leader, whether Eldest likes it or not.

I bang my head against the wall and bump it against a piece of raised square metal. The biometric scanner. I’d always assumed it operated the lights to the Great Room. Most of the biometric scanners are there to interface with the ship—to turn on lights, start electronics, or open doors.

I turn around and roll my thumb over the biometric scanner bar. “Eldest/Elder access granted,” the computer chirps in a cheerful female voice. As Elder, I always have the same security access as Eldest.

Huh. That’s odd. Usually, a door opens automatically once access is granted. What other command does a door need?

Eldest’s chamber door doesn’t zip open like I expect it to. Instead, the ceiling moves. I spin around, my heart banging around inside my chest. Above me, the metal ceiling splits into two pieces and drops down slowly, exposing—

There are hatches in the ship, I know there are, but Eldest has never let me see them, just like he hasn’t let me see the massive engine that fuels the ship, or some of the records of the ship before the Plague. I didn’t even know the metal ceiling over the Great Room covered a window to the uni.

The entire uni stretches out before me. So big, so frexing big. My eyes fill with starshine. There are so, so many of them. The stars are abbreviated white dashes in the sky with streaks of faint colors—mostly reds and yellows, but sometimes blues or greens. And, seeing them all, I feel closer to planet-landing than I ever have before. I can see it: the ship disembarking for the first time, at night, with no moon or clouds, and before we set out to build our new world, we all stop and stare at the stars above.

“Access override,” the computer says in its still-pleasant voice. “Screen lowering.”

And then the window to the universe breaks. A thin line cracks right at the center of the window, splitting open, wider and wider.

A rumbling sound fills the Great Room. My head whips left and right, and left and right again, looking for something to hold on to, but there’s nothing here—the Great Room is just a wide-open floor. Why did I never notice how useless it is to have a room with nothing to hold on to? It’s huge, sure, but there’s nothing here except the vast floor and the walls and the doors—nothing that can save me from a broken window that exposes me to space. And what then? The ship will rip apart? And me? I’ll explode or implode or something. I can’t remember which, but it doesn’t matter. The end result will still be the same. My tunic weighs heavily on my shoulders, sticking to my sweat, but all I can think about is how thin the material is against the ravages of space.

And then another thought hits me: the rest of the ship. If the Keeper Level is exposed, space won’t just suck me out—it will rip through the Keeper Level, into the Shipper Level and the Feeder Level below it. They’ll all die. Everyone. Every single person aboard the ship.

My feet slip on the tiled floor as I tear across the room. (For one tiny moment, my feet try to turn to the hatch door, the door that leads to life and freedom, but I ignore my feet. They’re just trying to keep me alive; they don’t care about the rest of the ship.) I throw myself at the big red lockdown button over the hatch. The floor shakes as the Keeper Level closes itself off from the rest of the ship. There’s no going back now.

AMY

But all it really was, was America giving up. Bailing out in order to join the Financial Resource Exchange. A multinational alliance focused on one thing: profit. Fund global medical care to monopolize vaccines. Back unified currency to collect planet-wide interest.

And provide the resources needed for a select group of scientists and military personnel to embark on the first trip across the universe in a quest to find more natural resources—more profit.

And I know something about nightmares, seeing as how I’ve been sleeping longer than I’ve been alive.

I hope. What if this is just a part of a long dream dreamt in the short time between when Ed locked the cryo door and Hassan pushed the button to freeze me? What if?

It’s a strange sort of sleep, this. Never really waking up, but becoming aware of consciousness inside a too-still body.

The only thing keeping the nightmares from engulfing me is the hope that there couldn’t possibly be a hundred more years before I wake up.

Not a hundred years. Not three hundred. Not three hundred and one. Please, God, no.

Sometimes it feels like a thousand years have passed; sometimes it feels as if I’ve only been sleeping a few moments. I feel most like I’m in that weird state of half-asleep, half-awake I get when I’ve tried to sleep past noon, when I know I should get up, but my mind starts wandering and I’m sure I can never get back to sleep. Even if I do slip back into a dream for a few moments, I’m mostly just awake with my eyes shut.

Sometimes I think there’s something wrong. I shouldn’t be so aware. But then I realize I’m only aware for a moment, and then, as I’m realizing it, I slip into another dream.

A field of flowers; smells of dirt and rain. A breeze … But not really a breeze, a memory of a breeze, a memory made into a dream that tries to drown out my frozen mind.

Earth. I hold on to my thoughts of Earth. I don’t like the dreamtime. The dreamtime is too much like dying. They are dreams, but I’m too out of control, I lose myself in them, and I’ve already lost too much to let them take over.

Pressure on my pinky where Daddy wrapped his finger around mine, and a whisper of his words promising me I could stay with my aunt and uncle. The heaviness in my chest, where I thought about it, where I really thought about it. I push the dream-memory down. That happened centuries ago, and it’s too late for regrets now. Because all my parents ever wanted was to be a part of the first manned interstellar exploratory mission, and all I ever wanted was to be with them.

And I guess it doesn’t matter that I had a life on Earth, and that I loved Earth, and that by now, my friends have all lived and gotten old and died, and I’ve just been lying here in frozen sleep. That Jason lived and got old and maybe he married and had kids and everything, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s dead now. God, his great-grandchildren might be my age.

A splatter of rain on my skin, but it’s bright and sunny under the blue sky. And Jason’s there, and we almost kiss, but then everything changes and we’re at that party where we met because dreams are like that: they go in and out of memories and scenes, but they’re never real. They’re never real, and I hate them because they aren’t.

ELDER

A CRANKING NOISE MAKES ME LIFT MY FACE UP TO THE broken window, where the glass has split evenly in two. Why am I not dead yet?

The two halves of the window slide down, down, and the stars go with them. But that’s … impossible. The stars are supposed to stay in place, not move with the window.

Wait … it’s … it’s not a window. It’s, well, I’m not sure what it is. The Great Room’s ceiling is domed, and the metal covering has folded up along the edge of the room at about chest height. The window—the thing I thought was a window—is really two halves of a giant glass and metal screen sprinkled with sparkling lights, held up by hydraulic arms that hiss and moan at me. The two folded halves rest on either side of the domed room at about shoulder height, and behind them is the real ceiling of the Keeper Level, more metal. More blank, empty, starless metal.

The stars, the beautiful shining stars, aren’t stars at all. It’s just glass and lightbulbs made to twinkle like stars. Fake stars on a screen sandwiched between two metal ceilings.

I reach up to touch the half of the universe that’s closest to me. The tiny bulbs aren’t quite hot to the touch, but warm enough to make me snatch my fingers away. The straggling remains of a spiderweb stretch from the base of a star-bulb to a tiny metal plaque on the bottom of the pane.

A navigational chart? Here? My eyes scan the section of screen in front of me, and, sure enough, I see a light blinking near the bottom of it, under the plaque, next to two close-together star-bulbs. A red light, triangular and pointing to the stars. I notice that the blinking red light isn’t fixed like the star-bulbs; it’s on a little track, and it’s nearly at the end of its path.

“Elder? Elder! What’s happening?” Eldest shouts from the hatch connecting the Keeper Level to the Shipper Level. I can visualize him beyond the hatch door: angry face, blazing eyes, and long white hair brushing against his shoulders as he beats on the heavy metal door.

I turn back to the pieces of fake window. The stars are lies. I had them for a moment, but they weren’t real.

Beep, beep-beep fills my left ear. My wireless communication device beeps, letting me know that someone is trying to link with me. Each of us has a wi-com implanted behind our left ear at birth—it’s how we communicate with each other as well as the ship.

“Com link: Eldest,” the computer says directly into my left ear through my wi-com.

Beep, beep-beep. “Eldest override,” my wi-com says cheerfully. “Com link: Eldest.”

“Elder!” Eldest’s voice fills my ear, a low growl. “What happened? Why did you throw the Keeper Level into lockdown?”

“I’m going to release the lockdown.” Eldest disconnects the link. A moment later, the floor rumbles and the hatch door opens. Eldest climbs up into the Keeper Level, slamming the hatch door behind him.

I glance up at the biometric scanner by his door. “I scanned my access, and this—” I stop, indicating the two halves of the “window” still lowered.

“Why were you messing around with that?” Eldest roars. He strides across the room, and in his anger, he’s forgotten to be gentle with his leg. It was wounded before I was born and never truly healed, but his limp has grown worse with age. His feet make an uneven beat against the metal floor: stomp, step, stomp, step, stomp. He’ll be sore later, and he’ll blame me for that, too.

When Eldest reaches the biometric scanner, he rolls his thumb over the bar. The glass rises first, pulling the stars up along the ceiling, the hydraulic arms sighing in relief. Then the grinding metal screen tucks them away, hiding their false light.

“You’re loons! You put the Keeper Level into lockdown over this?” Eldest’s rage almost makes me cower. Almost.

“I didn’t frexing know that! I thought those stars were real! What are they even there for?”

“Then who are they there for?” I shout back. “It’s just you and me on this level!”

Eldest sets his jaw. A lump rises in my throat, but I swallow it down. I won’t let Eldest think I’m nothing more than a little boy who throws a tantrum when he discovers the stars aren’t real.

“You can’t do this, Elder. You could cause the whole ship to panic!” Eldest looks both enraged and weary at the same time. “Don’t you understand? You are Elder. When you take my role as Eldest, you must dedicate your whole life to this one idea: you are the caretaker of every single person on the ship. They are your responsibility. You can never show weakness in front of them: you are their strength. You can never let them see you in despair: you are their hope. You must always be everything to everyone on board.” He takes a deep breath. “And that includes not panicking and throwing an entire level of the ship into lockdown!”

“While you were still here.” His voice is different now. Calmer. I meet his eyes, and I see something in them I’ve never seen before.

“No.” Eldest drawls out the word. “Well, yes, it was stupid. But it was also noble. That took courage, boy. That took leadership. To be willing to sacrifice yourself for the rest of the ship? Shows you think. You thought about how the Keeper Level’s on top, didn’t you? That if the Keeper Level was exposed to space, the explosive decompression would affect the level below it, and the one below that. You thought before you acted. You thought of all the people below.”

I look away. Maybe it had been noble, but all I can see is how the stars aren’t real.

“I’m sorry,” Eldest says. When he sees my confused look, he adds, “I’ve ignored you. It’s my fault. You reminded me of the other Elder, and we … did not get along. When I trained him, I told him too much, too soon. And he acted foolishly, selfishly. But you’re different. I forget that you’re different, but you are.”

Eldest has my full attention now. I know perfectly well there had been another Elder, one between me and Eldest. He died before I was born, but Eldest never talked much about him before.

“I’d already trained that Elder. He was supposed to train you, leaving me to care for the ship. When he died and I had to train you, too … I was never supposed to be saddled with another Elder, and I’ve lapsed in my responsibilities with you.”

I search his eyes. When we’re on the Feeder Level, Eldest is a kind grandpa. When we’re on the Shipper Level, he’s like an old king, commanding but attentive. But when it’s just him and me, he lets his real self show—or at least what I take to be his real self—and his real self may be old, but it isn’t kind and it isn’t weak.

Something in the silence makes me realize Eldest has allowed me, and only me, to see this. And that, more than anything, makes me forgive his neglect.

Eldest nods once, then motions for me to follow him into the Learning Center. His uneven gait is more pronounced than usual, his leg already making him regret his stomping rage.

There are only four rooms on the Keeper Level: my and Eldest’s chambers, the Learning Center, and the Great Room. The Learning Center is the smallest of the rooms, with only a table and the portal to the grav tube. The Great Room is the largest. It’s big enough for everyone on board the ship to stand there at once, if they don’t mind standing close together, but only Eldest and I are allowed on this level. It’s leftover from before the Plague, before we used an Eldest system to rule. My and Eldest’s chambers, as well as the Learning Center, were offices back then, for the crew, and, judging from the glowing star chart behind the metal screen, the Great Room was used for navigation.

After the Plague so many decades ago, the ship changed. It had to. The Plague Eldest renamed the levels, reserving this one for himself and the Eldests who would follow.

Eldest sits on one side of the table in the Learning Center. I sit on the other. The table is a rare antique from when the ship departed centuries ago, made of real wood, wood from Sol-Earth. I wonder at the life hidden in the wood: a tree that breathed Sol-Earth air, lived in Sol-Earth dirt, then was chopped down, crafted into a table, and thrown out into space aboard Godspeed.

“There are things you should know,” he says. He picks up a floppy—a digital membrane screen nicknamed for its, er, floppiness—from the table and runs his finger over it, turning it on. When the screen lights up, he scans his thumb over the ID box.

“Eldest/Elder access granted,” the floppy chirps. Eldest taps something onto the screen, then slides the floppy over to me. I can almost see the wood grain through the thin membrane, but then I grow distracted by what Eldest is showing me.

It’s a floor plan of the Shipper Level—I recognize the main central hallway branching into the large rooms used for science and industry, manufacturing and research. Brightly glowing dots are scattered across the map, blinking and moving around.

“The wi-com locator map.” The wireless communication devices implanted behind our left ears not only allow us to com with each other and the ship, but also serve as locators.

I lean over the table to better see the wi-com map. Eldest’s long white hair brushes my face before he sweeps it behind his ear, and I can smell a whiff of soap and something stronger that bites at my nose.

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

Table of Contents

1

AMY

2

ELDER

3

AMY

4

ELDER