The solar lamp is turned off and darkness blankets the ship, keeping me hidden. Everyone should be asleep. Especially the old Recorder.
The Recorder is of the oldest generation, a weak man who acquiesces to any of Eldest’s demands, not because he is drugged but because he wants nothing more than to do Eldest’s bidding.
Not because he is drugged. He has the pills I need. I just have to take them.
The giant front doors squeak when I push them open. I slip inside and shut them as quietly as I can.
Inside, the entryway of the Hall reminds me of when I was younger, when Eldest favored me. He would bring me here and let me run my hands over the digital membrane screens that decorate the walls, lighting them up with images and vids and music. My fingers ache with a foolish desire to turn on the closest screen. I’ve filled my time in hiding with my own thoughts—how I can survive, how I can one day take down Eldest, how I can change the ship for the better. I’m sick of my own voice.
“Who’s there?”
I freeze. My fingers are hard and numb around the knife in my pocket.
That was not the voice of an old man. That was a woman’s voice, clear and strong.
“I know someone’s there. Don’t make me com Eldest.”
Frex.
“Wait!” I say, stepping into the center of the entryway. I let go of the knife, hold up my empty hands.
The lights flick on. I blink, momentarily blinded by the brightness.
“Who are you?” the voice demands again.
“Who are you?” I shoot back, rubbing my eyes. “What happened to the Recorder?” I try to think of the old man who used to be the Recorder—he was old, but not so old that he would need a replacement already.
The woman’s hand shakes as it hovers over her wireless communicator. She’s only a few years older than me, but a childlike fear fills her eyes.
“Don’t com Eldest,” I plead. “Just—wait.”
She steps around the desk. “The old Recorder was my grandfather,” she says. “He . . . decided to retire. He let me take his place. We didn’t tell Eldest.”
The corner of my mouth twitches up. This girl is clever—and so was her grandfather. Much more clever than I would have thought. The grandfather is probably drugged up now, whiling away his later years on one of the farms that produce the food for the ship. By swapping places with this girl, he ensured that she would get his ration of blue-and-white pills, that his granddaughter would be able to think for herself.
And they didn’t tell Eldest, who would have put a stop to such independent thinking.
Maybe . . . maybe she’ll be on my side. Maybe I don’t have to stand up against Eldest by myself.
“What do you want?” she asks, suspicion tainting her voice.
“I—I . . .” I stutter, unsure of what to say.
“I know you,” she says.
I duck my head down, hoping my bedraggled hair will hide my features, but it’s too late.
“You . . . you’re dead. Eldest told everyone you died.”
I glance up, meeting her eyes. “Eldest lied.”
She approaches me warily, but I’m not sure if she hesitates because she’s afraid of me, or afraid I’ll run. I stand very, very still. When she’s only inches away from me, she reaches up and touches the side of my face, tucking my hair behind my ear.
She gasps.
I raise a hand to cover the scar on the side of my neck. It’s still fresh, puckered and pink, and it hurts to the touch.
She touches the side of her own neck where, just behind her left ear, a wi-com button is embedded. Implanted under our skin at birth, wi-coms provide easy communication with everyone onboard Godspeed. But they also provide Eldest with a locator. When I went into hiding, I had to get rid of my wi-com. I rub my fingers together, remembering the way they were slick with my own blood as I gouged the device from my neck.
“Why are you here?” the girl asks, and I know she’s talking about more than just why I’m in the Recorder Hall.
“Eldest . . .” I swallow. I’ve held on to the secrets Eldest tried to kill me for; I’m not ready to give them up to a girl with big, innocent eyes. “I’ve been in hiding. From Eldest. But I need . . . I’m running out of supplies.”
The young woman’s face lights up. Even though she’s my elder, I feel like an old man next to her vivacity. “Sanctuary!” she says enthusiastically.
“Sanctuary?”
She darts to the other end of the room, to a desk by the wall, and grabs up a heavy book from Sol-Earth. “Just like in this story,” she says, running back to me and pushing the book into my hands. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo. “You,” she says, “are seeking sanctuary. Back on Sol-Earth, in this place called Pah-rees, if you were in trouble, you’d go to Note-ree Dame, and you could hide there in safety.”
I hand the thick book back to her. “You’re going to let the Recorder Hall be my sanctuary?”
She nods eagerly. “I’ll protect you from Eldest!”
I can’t help but smile, even though I’m worried that this young woman has no idea what she’s doing, offering sanctuary to me. Against Eldest. Eldest may look like a kind old grandfather, but he rules Godspeed more fiercely than any dictator. The few who don’t obey him because of the drugged water obey him because of their fear.
Except, maybe, this girl, alone in the Recorder Hall and ignored by all but the books.
“You can’t tell anybod—” I start.
“Of course not!” She cuts me off, looking wounded that I would even suggest that she would reveal my location.
I don’t want to trust her. I don’t want to trust anybody. But the thing is . . . I can’t live in hiding in a forgotten part of the ship for the rest of my life.
“My name is Mag,” the woman says. She searches my eyes, and I can tell that she wants me to stay.
“I’m—”
“I know who you are.”
Everyone does. I’m the heir to Eldest’s tyranny. I’m the one who was supposed to take over the ship after him.
I was the one he tried to have killed when I disagreed with him.
“I’m not that person anymore,” I say. “I can’t be.”
“You need a new name,” Mag says.
I open my mouth but don’t speak, my mind racing to come up with a name for her.
“No!” she says, her voice bouncing off the high walls of the Recorder Hall. “We’ll find a name for you!”
She turns to the giant digital membrane screens hanging from the walls and starts tapping on one. “Let’s name you after a story,” she says. “What about Quasimodo? He was in that story I was telling you about earlier. No,” she says before I have a chance to speak. “His name’s too long and weird. Maybe something from Shakespeare? Like Oberon or Puck? Or Romeo?” She giggles. Names flash on the screen she’s working on: lists of characters in the books preserved in the Recorder Hall, names of authors, charts of the most popular names used on Sol-Earth when the ship launched, a genealogy of the first generations born on Godspeed.
“I know,” Mag says, stopping her search and whirling around to face me. “I know. We’ll name you after a constellation. It makes perfect sense.”
There is something poetic in the idea: name me after the stars we’re soaring through.
“Here.” A star chart appears on the wall screen, with lines connecting the dots of stars and little name labels beside them.
She steps back, and it’s not until she’s studiously staring at the star chart that I realize how quiet the Recorder Hall is without her voice.
“What about that one?” she asks, pointing.
“Hercules?” I say.
She nods. “He was a hero in a lot of the really old stories.”
“No.” I shake my head. I’m no hero.
Mag frowns—not at me, at the chart. This is a puzzle for her to figure out, nothing more.
“That one.” I point to a trio of stars lined up. “Orion.”
> “Orion? I don’t know that story. . . .”
I do. “He’s a hunter.” Much more fitting than a hero.
“Orion,” she says to the chart. She speaks slowly, as if tasting the word. Then she turns to me. “Orion,” she says, and with that, I am named.
It only takes three months for me to consider life at the Recorder Hall normal. Mag and I share the little room in the back of the third floor of the Hall—I sleep on the floor, she sleeps on the bed. We’ve slowly started increasing the food rations we take. There has never been a limit to the amount of food given out—with Phydus, people tend to only eat what they need—but we don’t want to risk some observant record keeper who isn’t on Phydus discovering a sudden spike in food consumption from the Recorder Hall.
Mag’s meds are delivered to her daily, one pill at a time, through the automatic dispenser built into her wall. She went to the Hospital with a faked stomach pain, though, and swiped a hundred-count bottle of pills for me. I keep it with me at all times. I have long since learned that if I have the choice between food and meds on this ship, the meds are more precious.
Now I upend the bottle Mag stole for me. Two pills fall into my hand. I put one in my mouth and swallow, then carefully put the remaining pill back in the bottle.
Mag pokes her finger into the dispenser in her wall and withdraws her own pill.
“I need to get more meds,” I say.
Mag stares at the blue-and-white pill in her hand. “I’m going to visit my grandfather today,” she finally says.
“Why?” I ask.
Her fingers curl over the pill. “I miss him.”
I watch her, but she doesn’t lift the pill to her mouth.
“He won’t be the same,” I say eventually.
Her fingers go lax. “I know.” She puts the pill on her tongue and swallows.
I don’t want her to go. Although it’s been months—nearly a year—since Mag and her grandfather switched places, I find it hard to believe that Eldest, who knows everything on this ship, hasn’t noticed. Going to her grandfather may draw attention to the fact they swapped roles, and that may bring Eldest here—to her, and to me.
But I can’t keep her locked up in the Recorder Hall. I can’t ask that of her. Just because I’m trapped doesn’t mean I can imprison Mag. Maybe she has escaped Eldest’s watchful eye, and she should take advantage of that while she can.
While she goes off to the farms to find her grandfather, I go down to the book rooms. I’ve been reading up on all the civic and social sciences materials from Sol-Earth. While the civics room is among the smallest of the collections in the Recorder Hall—more than twice the amount of space is reserved for mathematics, and twice that again is reserved for science—there are plenty of books on government to keep me busy.
I find that the volumes I tend to gravitate toward are not the thick, heavy tomes full of history and analysis. Instead, it’s the thin books that I spend the most time with. Plato’s Republic. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses—even though that one’s about religion, which I will admit to understanding nothing about, it’s also about who has the ability to dictate for others what is right and what is wrong. Sometimes it feels as if the shorter the book is, the harder it is to understand. The Magna Carta is tiny, but there are three books here in the Hall, each more than two inches thick, that try to explain just how important it is.
I push aside the analytical commentaries and look just at the source texts. In one stack I have The Republic, Common Sense, Ninety-Five Theses, and now the Magna Carta. I slide over Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” then add Thomas More’s Utopia.
On the other side of the table, I have a collection of essays written by samurai on Bushido, Machiavelli’s The Prince, an Indian book called Arthashastra, and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.
This is the difference. On one side are the books that advocate voting and sharing the government with the people. The other has books that Eldest would agree with: a strong leader using fear or violence to control. This is it, as black-and-white as the pages inside the books.
I draw the stack on the right side closer to me. This is where I should find the key to overthrowing Eldest, making the ship into a world where people can live freely, with the truth and without the hazy acquiescence Phydus provides.
I remember Eldest, when I first learned of the drugs he put in the water.
“Give me that bucket, boy,” he said. I was thirteen years old, and felt special that he included me in today’s work rather than keeping me cooped up with lessons.
The bucket wasn’t big, but the syrupy liquid inside was heavy, and I had to use both arms to carry it. Eldest took it from me one-handed and lifted it to a small spout built into the side of the water pump.
“I thought the vits were already distributed,” I say, watching the liquid slide down into the pump.
“These aren’t vitamins.”
I chew on the inside of my cheek. I don’t ask questions: I want to prove to Eldest how smart I am by figuring this puzzle out for myself.
Eldest seems to know I can’t, though. He sets the empty bucket down and turns to stare at me.
“What’s the biggest danger on this ship, boy?” he growls.
I think for a moment, but Eldest is emanating impatience. “Disease,” I say quickly, thinking of the Plague that decimated our population a few gens ago.
Eldest shakes his head. “We can recover from disease. The thing we couldn’t recover from?” He waits a moment, but I have no answer. “Mutiny. We’re alone out here, boy. Alone. Ain’t nothing on the other side of the ship’s walls but the vacuum of space. Nowhere to go. If this ship rises up in mutiny, we’ll kill ourselves. The mission will be lost. A revolution would be suicide for everyone.”
I think about what he says, my eyes drifting to the heavy steel walls that line the room.
“This stuff?” Eldest kicks the bucket. “This stuff prevents mutiny. This saves us all.”
I stare at the two stacks of books I’ve arranged on the metal table.
With a broad sweep of my arm, I topple them into each other, mixing the titles.
It’s not as simple as black-and-white, right or wrong.
When I first started questioning Eldest, I was doing just that: asking questions. But I realized soon enough that asking questions was the worst possible thing I could ever do.
I did it anyway.
But even now, I’m still asking questions. Only now, instead of questioning Eldest, I’m starting to question myself. Would a revolution be good? Should I risk everything—even the lives of everyone on board this ship—for what I think is right?
“What are you doing?” Mag’s voice cuts through my concentration and makes me jump in surprise.
“I didn’t know you’d be back so soon!” I say, masking my worry with a smile.
She doesn’t return my grin; her eyes are rimmed with red, her jaw clenched. “I’ve been gone for two hours.”
I bite back a word of surprise. I’d not realized I’d been in the book room so long.
She crosses the small room and sits opposite me. “Are you reading all these?”
“Already read them.”
Mag is silent for a long moment. Her eyes stare at the books, but I don’t think she’s really seeing them.
“What am I doing, Mag?” I say to the mixed-up books on the table. “I thought . . . I thought it would all be worth it.” My fingers go unconsciously to the spiderweb scar behind my left ear, where I removed my wi-com in order to hide from Eldest. “But now I’m just spending my life in hiding, not even fighting.” I pause. “Not even sure if I should fight. Maybe Eldest isn’t entirely wrong.”
“The drugs are wrong.” Mag spits out the words, vehemence making her voice rise. “And Eldest is wrong for using them.”
I look up at her. I’d noticed her red eyes when she came in, but now I see the sorrow mixed with rage behind them. “Did you see your grandfather?”
I ask gently.
Mag growls.
“What happened?” I say.
She looks down at the mess of books on the table, over to the shelves behind me, up at the tiny window high in the wall. She looks everywhere but at me. “He was on Phydus.”
She finally meets my eyes. “It’s like he was dead inside.”
That’s what Phydus does. It turns you into a mindless drone, a worker for Eldest to use, and nothing more.
“Weren’t you on Phydus before your grandfather gave you his spot here?” I ask.
Mag nods. “Of course. I didn’t even know about Phydus. He brought me here and started giving me half doses using his own meds. He’d pop the capsules open and sprinkle the Inhibitor med onto my breakfast. There was a short time—maybe a week?—when I was starting to come out of the influence of Phydus, and he was starting to fall under it.”
“What did it feel like?” I ask. As Eldest’s chosen heir, I was always on the meds that prevent Phydus from controlling me.
Mag’s eyes lose focus as she remembers. “It was like . . . nothing. It was like living in a state of nothing. Nothing ever really hurt. Nothing bothered me. Everything was so . . . peaceful.”
Her answer surprises me. “It sounds nice.”
“I think it was nice,” she says. “At least, it was nice to be the one on Phydus. But now that I take Inhibitor pills, I see others on Phydus. I see Granddad. And . . . it’s not nice to see him like that.”
I try to imagine Mag on Phydus. She’s so vibrant, it’s hard to picture her with empty eyes. But then I remember the way Eldest’s face hardened when he told me about mutiny. Rage burns within Mag like a smoldering ember.
I don’t know if I fear that rage . . . or love it.
I can trace back to that day in the library as the day everything changed. I don’t know if it was my words that affected Mag or if it was seeing her grandfather on Phydus, but that smoldering ember grew into a flame. First she read the books I had spread out on the table—all of them. That took her nearly a month, but although she was silent and reserved, I could tell that her passion was only growing.