Amy gasps. “That’s why you’re killing the ones with military experience. You think they’ll make the people born on the ship fight when they land.”
“I know they will!” Orion roars. I can see the Eldest in him now, when he shouts. “And if there are no hostiles to fight, then they’ll use that military experience to force us into slave labor. It’s the perfect plan: growing expendable people while they sleep!”
“But why me?” Amy says, her voice a desperate whisper. “When you unplugged me, surely you could tell I wasn’t my daddy? Why didn’t you put me back in before I melted? Why did you let me wake up?”
A slow, evil smile spreads across Orion’s face. His gaze pierces mine. I clench my fists. Orion cocks an eyebrow at me.
“I keep my secrets,” Orion says, glancing at Amy.
“Daddy isn’t a slave driver,” Amy says. “And if there were ‘hostile’ aliens, he wouldn’t force you to fight.”
Orion shrugs. “How do you know that for sure? And,” he adds before Amy can say anything else, “either way, better safe than sorry.”
“Your kind of safe means killing my dad!”
Orion glances behind her at Eldest’s body. Clearly, he has no hang-ups about killing.
“If you don’t like it…” he says, walking over to the cryogenic freezing tube on the other side of the room. He opens the door and sweeps his arm to display the interior. “By all means, refreeze yourself. Sleep until we reach planetside, and see what kind of man your father really is. That is,” he adds, thinking, “if Elder and I decide to let your father live until planet-landing.”
“You’re as evil as him!” Amy hisses, pointing at Eldest’s lifeless body.
“But you know what’s really gonna twist you?” Orion asks. “The fact that Elder sort of agrees with everything I’m saying.”
“No, I don’t—” I start when Amy looks back at me with her beautiful accusing eyes.
“And the fact that Elder here’s the one who gave me the idea for unplugging them in the first place.”
Amy covers her mouth with her hand. Her eyes fill with disgust, and it’s directed at me.
“Don’t believe him,” I plead.
“No, really, it’s true. You have realized that, haven’t you, Elder?” Orion sneers, laughing, and I wonder how much he knows. I search his face, and see mine in it. We share the same DNA, but we aren’t the same person. But maybe the same emotions and self-doubts and fears are woven into our identical genetic code.
“Why don’t you tell her?” Orion continues. “Or would you like me to?”
“Tell me what?” Amy asks.
I stride across the room to where Orion is standing beside the cryogenic freezer. My hands are clenched into fists.
“She’s a pretty thing,” Orion whispers to me, low so Amy and Doc can’t hear. “Very pretty. Is that why you did it?”
“Shut up,” I growl.
“Don’t let her get in our way.”
I know that there are all sorts of logical reasons why I should do it. Orion is as crazy as Eldest, his method of control just as twisted, if not more so. I’ll never be able to talk him out of killing the frozens, and he needs to be punished for the deaths he has already caused.
But those aren’t the reasons why I shove Orion into the cryofreezer and lock him inside.
“Let me out!” Orion screams.
I spin the dial. Cryo liquid held in the tank over the freezer bursts open, pouring blue-specked water over Orion’s head.
“Frex!” he splutters. He claws at the door, his face twisted with pure terror. Amy comes up beside me, watching Orion through the little window in the door. When he sees her, his eyes fill with an evil glint. He opens his mouth to shout something at her.
I spin the dial again.
The cryo liquid pours faster, filling his mouth, drowning him. His face is under the liquid now, his cheeks puffed out, his eyes bloodshot and popping. One hand presses against the window, and I notice the jagged scar on his thumb, the only thing that separates his thumbprint from mine.
“Freeze him now, or he’ll die,” Doc says. “He might die anyway.” He shrugs. “You didn’t prep him for freezing.”
I look into Orion’s eyes and see myself in them.
I slam my fist into the big red square button.
A flash of white steam escapes the box.
Orion’s face is pressed to the glass, his eyes bulging.
But he can no longer see us.
75 AMY
ELDER STARES THROUGH THE SMALL WINDOW INTO ORION’S frozen face. I wrap my arms around him from behind. I try to pull him back, but he won’t move, so I just hold him.
“It’s over,” the doctor says. “Unless you wake him back up, you’re Eldest now.”
I can feel Elder stiffen under me.
Elder shakes his head. “Let the people he tried to kill judge him when they land.”
I think of my father, and what kind of judge he will be to this man, and I am not the least bit sorry for him.
“How am I going to lead a ship full of people?” Elder asks, his voice catching. “When the Phydus wears off, they’re going to realize the lies. They’re going to be angry. They’re going to hate Eldest, and me.”
“They won’t hate you,” I whisper into the back of his neck. “They will relish their anger, because that is the first emotion they will have ever truly felt, and then they will realize there are other emotions, and they’ll be glad of them.”
“Will you stay with me?” Elder whispers. His breath fogs the glass covering Orion’s face.
“Always.”
Elder pushes his ear button, and he makes an announcement to the entire ship, just as Eldest did before when he told the ship to fear me. His first announcement is simple. In childlike terms, he explains that they’ve all been under the influence of a drug, and that they will slowly start to regain their own emotions. Elder encourages them to remain calm as they begin to feel for the first time, especially the pregnant mothers.
Doc begs me for the wires to fix the pump.
“We should at least keep putting the hormones in the water,” he insists, “so that they don’t start mating with relatives.”
“Most people don’t want to commit incest,” I say dryly. “When they wake up from the drug, we’ll just explain to them what incest is, and what it does, and that they should get a blood test before they have sex. You’ve got those scanner things that test DNA. We could start mapping out family trees again.”
I hand the wires to Elder.
Doc turns to him. Elder just looks at him coldly. “No more drugs,” he says.
And that’s that.
Later, when men with thick gloves have taken Eldest’s poisoned body and thrown it out of the hatch after Harley, when Doc has put Orion in an empty cryo chamber, when we’re safely back in my room with Harley’s painting watching over us, Elder gives his second announcement. It is a repeat of Eldest’s last one: Everyone is to go to the Keeper Level.
Before we go up there, we discuss the truth.
“That’s what killed Harley,” I say. “The truth. When he heard about how he’d never leave the ship—” I choke on my words.
“He couldn’t live with that truth,” Elder finishes for me.
“We should have known that it wasn’t Eldest killing the frozens. He would have known it would make you seek the truth, and he wanted to keep it from you, from everyone.”
Elder looks down at his hands, then up at Harley’s painting. “A part of me thinks that we cannot share the truth, not all of it.”
I start to speak, but Elder cuts me off.
“A part of me thinks that the truth will kill them all, just like it killed Harley. This is a big truth, a great truth. We cannot just say it. We must let people discover it.”