Elder looks at me doubtfully, like a child frustrated with an overprotective mom. I don’t care. I lean in closer to him. “You’re too important to risk.”

“The vid,” Elder says, his voice low. “It’s the only way to figure out what Orion meant.”

“You were the one who said Orion was loons.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Besides, that last clue was probably tampered with. Most likely someone didn’t want us finding this room or the suits, and—”

“But Amy,” Elder says. “Space suits!” Elder can’t keep down his excitement about going out into the stars—but I can’t keep down my fear.

“The suits don’t change anything!” But I’m wrong. They change everything. “Let me go,” I whisper. “Let anyone else. We can’t risk you.”

Elder smiles—a huge, carefree grin, and I really do feel like a mother watching her baby totter off into a fire. “I’m touched. You actually do care about me.”

My mouth drops open. “You idiot. Of course I care about you.”

He leans forward quickly and pecks me on the forehead. “Then help me get the suit on.”

I growl—but I can’t stop him. At least I can make sure he’s as safe as possible. I pick up two halves of the breastplate. I feel like a lady dressing her knight in his armor, just like a movie I saw a long time ago on Sol—on Earth. The lady tucked a token—a small scarf—into the knight’s armor to remind him of her love for him. I don’t have a scarf, and I’m not even sure if I love Elder, but I strap him so hard into the breastplate that he grunts in protest.

I keep checking the manual. It doesn’t seem right that all it takes to go into space is a set of bronze long johns and a plastic shell. I knew space suits had come a long way from the puffy white marshmallow-like suits of the twentieth century, but this thin suit doesn’t seem adequate. Still, when I watched videos of men and women working in the space of Godspeed before it launched, their suits looked exactly like this.

Elder steps into the boots one at a time. They go halfway up his calves, and when I push a button on them, they shrink against his legs. Elder hobbles to the center of the room, then turns around, letting me inspect him.

“Looks solid,” I admit.

“All that’s left is the helmet and the backpack,” Elder says, reaching for the helmet.

“This first.” I help pull Elder’s arms through the straps of the pack, and it snaps into the hard shell pieces of the suit.

I plug the wires from the pack into their connectors on the shoulder of the suit. “This is a PLSS, a primary life support subsystem,” I say as I connect a tube to the base of the helmet. “Basically, it has all the stuff you need to live—brings in oxygen, takes out carbon dioxide, regulates pressure, all that.”

I snap on a metal-enforced cable to a hook at the front of Elder’s suit. “And this,” I say, “is your lifeline back to me—to the ship. I’m attaching the other end to the hatch. The book says there’s a special hook there just for this.”

Elder nods. He looks pale, and there’s a sheen of sweat on his face.

I think about kissing him then. Just in case.

Instead, I cram his helmet onto his suit and lock it into place. The PLSS has only two modes—on and off—so I open the latch door, flip the switch to on, and secure the door back in place.

“That’s pure oxygen,” I say loudly. “Get used to it now, before you’re in space.”

Elder nods, but he’s got so much on that his whole top half bends back and forward. I bite my lip, worried.

Elder follows me, clomp-hobbling, to the hatch. Inside, I latch the end of his lifeline to a hook on the floor.

“Come back to me,” I whisper to Elder’s helmet, but I don’t know if he can hear me.

I step back into the hallway. The hatch closes behind me. I look through the bubble window. Elder raises one hand.

I punch the code into the keypad slowly, hesitating before the last digit. Should I do this? Is it worth it to find Orion’s big secret if it risks Elder?

The door in front of me seals shut, a grinding metal-on-metal noise as it locks. Through the window, I have one last look at Elder in his bronze suit. I am overcome with an insane urge to rip the controls out of the wall beside me and keep the hatch from opening.

But it’s too late. It opens.

And Elder’s gone.

37

ELDER

MY ARMS AND LEGS FEEL SLOGGED DOWN AS IF WALKING through muddy water. Everything’s muffled in the suit. Amy shuts the door that leads into the ship; I can see her pensive face through the window, the worry exaggerated by the rounded glass. The lock creates a dull, almost-imperceptible click that nevertheless reverberates.

Then I’m alone with just the sound of the life-support system strapped to my back, a soft whoo-sh-whoo swirling in my ears.

The back hatch opens, and the universe explodes around me. I’m launched through the doorway backward, my arms and legs jerking painfully as my body flies out into space. The movement winds me, and I can’t breathe. Just as I start to panic, I feel cool oxygen flowing through my helmet.

The cord tethering me to the ship pulls taut, and my body bobs against it, my arms and legs no longer stiff in the suit. I look up. And I am surrounded by the universe.

A Million Suns: An Across the Universe Novel
A Million Suns: An Across the Universe Novel

A million suns stretch out beyond me, their light piercing the darkness. The ship seems to glow. I scan it, looking for whatever massive secret Orion told me I would find.

The ship itself is mostly egg-shaped, with a horned beak protruding from the bridge. A honeycomb of glittering glass covers the arching protrusion. Beneath that, then, must be the Feeder Level. I stare at the smooth exterior of the ship, marveling how only a few moments ago I was on the other side, running my fingers over dusty rivets. There’s a line of thick, dark metal rimming the bottom of the ship, about where the cryo level starts, and a pointed ridge sticks out from the front, like a smaller version of the bridge’s beak. There’s glass there, too—an observatory must be hidden behind the last locked door on the cryo level.

There’s nothing here that stands out as unusual, except maybe the as yet unseen observatory. I recline in space, my eyes roving over the hull—there are no strange cracks or marks; the thrusters in the back of the ship aren’t working, but I already knew that. Was that the great secret Orion wanted me to find out? That the ship isn’t moving?

It would be disappointing to learn that after all this, that was Orion’s great mystery. But how can I be disappointed in space?

I stretch out my arms and legs, knowing that there are no walls here that can contain them. I look past Godspeed and forget about whatever pointless mission Orion’s video sent me on. I gaze out, to the stars. I remember the first time I saw real stars, through the hatch window. They were beautiful then, but now, seeing them here, all around me, beautiful feels like an inadequate word. I see the stars as a part of the universe, and having spent my life behind walls, suddenly having none fills me with both awe and terror. Emotion courses through my veins, choking me. I feel so insignificant, a tiny speck surrounded by a million stars.

A million suns.

Centuries away is Sol. Circling around it is Sol-Earth, the planet Amy came from. And one of these other stars is the Centauri binary system, where the new planet spins, waiting for us.

And here we are, in the middle, surrounded by a sea of stars.

A million suns.

Any of them could hold a planet. Any of them could hold a home.

But all of them are out of reach.

The thought makes me queasy-dizzy, a sick feeling that starts in my stomach and blurs my vision.

The stars don’t look like suns anymore. They look like eyes.

Laughing eyes. Winking eyes that mock me, forever dancing away from my reach.

I swat at them, my arms feeling funny.

My body feeling funny.

And then I hear it. Soft, barely audible.

Boop . . . boop . . . boop.

An alarm. A warning, piped directly into my helmet.

I breathe deeply—or I try to—but I can’t. The air is thinner now, and even though my nostrils flare and my mouth is open, black spots dance before my eyes. I can’t get enough air. Something’s wrong with the PLSS strapped to my back—something’s wrong with the oxygen.

My first instinct is to call for help—I raise a gloved hand to my neck and bump up against the solid helmet before I realize that, of course, I can’t reach my wi-com.

My tether to the ship isn’t more than twenty yards long, but Godspeed feels as far away as the millions of stars around me. I start pulling myself closer to the ship, hand over hand, swimming through nothing to reach the safety of the open hatch.

I can hear my heart beating in time with the alarm.

The more I think about not breathing, the more I want to breathe.

I tug on the tether, and my hands slip from it. The movement spins me off, away from the cord, jerking me around.

I have spent the whole time facing the ship, looking back at the path we have taken. But now I see behind me, toward where the ship is facing. And I realize why Godspeed seemed to glow. This . . . I never expected this. How did Orion keep this secret? How could anyone keep this secret? It’s—it’s everything—it’s—

There, hanging in the sky, right in front of me—

Is a planet.

38

AMY

I STARE OUT THE OPEN HATCH, MY EYES NOT ON THE STARS, but on the tether that ties Elder back to me.

I count down the seconds. The tether twitches. And I know:

Something’s wrong.

39

ELDER

I CAN’T BREATHE, BUT IT’S NOT BECAUSE OF THE LACK OF oxygen. It’s because everything about me—my lungs, my heart, my brain—stopped when I saw that blue and green and white orb floating in the sky.

In the distance, far larger than the millions of stars around me, I can see Centauri A and Centauri B, the two stars that make up the center of this solar system. They’re so bright and so big compared to the other stars that they melt in my eyes like blurry, glowing orbs of ice.

But I don’t stare at them.

I stare at the planet.

That—this—is Orion’s secret. It’s not that the ship isn’t working, that we’re never going to make it.

It’s that the ship has already arrived.

We’re already here! There—there—is the planet that will be our home!

It floats, so bright that it hurts my eyes. Giant green landmasses spread out across blue water, with swirls and wisps of clouds twirling over top. At the edge of the planet, where it turns away from the suns and starts to darken, I can see bright flashes of light—bursts of whiteness in the darkness—and I think: Is that lightning? In the center, where the light of the suns makes the planet seem to glow from within, I can see, very distinctly, a continent. A continent. On one edge, it’s cracked and broken like an egg, dark lines snaking deep into the landmass. Rivers. Lots of them. Maybe something too big to be rivers if I can see it from here. Fingers of land stretch out into the sea, and dots of islands are just out of their grasp. That area will be cool all the time, I think. Boats can go along the rivers, up and down. We can swim in the water.