A Million Suns Read Free

of my father’s face. The cold seeps into my skin, and I flash to the moment—just a fraction of a second—when I felt cold before I felt nothing.
    I can’t remember what my father looks like when he smiles. I know his face
can
move, his eyes wrinkle with laughter, his lips twitch up. But I can’t remember it—and I can’t envision it as I stare through the ice.
    This man doesn’t look like my father. My father was full of life and this . . . isn’t. I suppose my father is in there, somewhere, but . . .
    I can’t see him.
    The cryo chambers thud back into place, and I slam the doors shut with a crash.
    I stand slowly, not sure of where to go. Past the cryo chambers, toward the front of the level is a hallway full of locked doors. Only one of those doors—the one with the red paint smudge near the keypad—opens, but through it is a window to the stars outside.
    I used to go there a lot because the stars made me feel normal. Now they make me feel like the freak that nearly everyone on board says I am. Because really? I’m the only one who truly misses them. Of all the two-thousand-whatever people on this ship, I’m the
only
one who knows what it is to lie in the grass in your backyard and reach up to capture fireflies floating lazily through the stars. I’m the only one who knows that day should fade into night, not just click on and off with a switch. I’m the only one who’s ever opened her eyes as wide as she can and
still
see only the heavens.
    I don’t want to see the stars anymore.
    Before I leave the cryo level, I check the doors of my parents’ chambers to make sure they locked properly. A ghost of an
X
remains on my father’s door. I trace the two slashes of paint with my fingers. Orion did this, marking which people he planned to kill next.
    I turn, looking toward the genetics lab across from the elevator. Orion’s body is frozen inside.
    I could wake him up. It wouldn’t be as easy as pushing a reanimation button, like waking my parents would be, but I could do it. Elder showed me how the cryo chambers were different; he showed me the timer that could be set for Orion’s reanimation, the order of the buttons that needed to be pushed. I could wake him up, and as he sputtered back to life, I could ask the question that hollows me out every time I look at his bulging eyes through the ice.
    Why?
    Why did he kill the other frozens? Why did he mark my father as the next one to kill?
    But more importantly, why did he start killing now?
    Orion may believe that the frozen military personnel will force the people born on the ship to be soldiers or slaves . . . but why did he start unplugging them when planet-landing is impossibly far away?
    He’d hidden from Eldest for years before Elder woke me. He could have stayed hidden if he hadn’t started killing.
    So I guess my real question isn’t just why, but . . .
    Why
now?

3
    ELDER
    I STARE AT MARAE, MY MOUTH HANGING OPEN. “WH-WHAT the frex do you mean?” I finally stammer.
    Marae rolls her shoulders back, straightening her spine and making herself appear even taller. My eyes flicker to the other Shippers, but I notice that hers do not. She doesn’t need them to affirm who she is or what she believes. “You have to understand, Eld . . . Eld
er
,” Marae says. “Our primary duty as Shippers is not to fix the engine.”
    My voice rises with anger and indignation. “Of course your frexing duty is to fix the engine! The engine is the most important part of the whole ship!”
    Marae shakes her head. “But the engine is only a
part
of the ship. We have to focus on
Godspeed
as a whole.”
    I wait for her to continue as the engine churns noisily behind us, the heartbeat of the ship.
    â€œThere are many things wrong with
Godspeed
; surely you’ve noticed.” She frowns. “The ship