across-the-universe

I__e heard that when you__e in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you__e hyper-aware of what__ happening around you.As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me.Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren__ bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder__ cursing, my pounding heartbeat.I feel nothing__ot the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb.Scent and taste disappear.The only thing about my body that works is my eyes,and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land__ continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home. My eyes drink up the image of the planet__nd my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I__e never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent__t dips and curves in ways I don__ recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect.And it__ not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home,but it will never be the home I left behind.

More than the sound of my own beating heart, I miss the sound of a ticking clock. Time passes, it must pass, but I have no more assurance of moving through time than I have that I am moving through space. In a way, I__ glad: this means perhaps 300 years and 364 days have passed, and tomorrow I will wake up. Sometimes after a cross-country meet or a long day at school, I__ fall into bed with all my clothes on and be out before I knew it. When I__ finally open my eyes, it would feel like I__ just shut them for a minute, but really, the whole rest of the day and half the night was gone. But. There were other times when I__ collapse onto my mattress, shut my eyes and dream, and it felt like I__ lived a whole lifetime in that dream, but when I woke up, it had only been a few minutes. What if only a year has gone by? What if we haven__ even left yet? That is my greatest fear.

Don__ 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.

The President called it the __pitome of the American dream._ Daddy called it the __nholy alliance of business and government._ 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__ore profit. The answer to my parents_ dreams. And my worst nightmare. And I know something about nightmares, seeing as how I__e been sleeping longer than I__e 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__ a strange sort of sleep, this. Never really waking up, but becoming aware of consciousness inside a too-still body. The dreams weave in and out of memories. The only thing keeping the nightmares from engulfing me is the hope that there couldn__ 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__e only been sleeping a few moments. I feel most like I__ in that weird state of half-asleep, half-awake I get when I__e tried to sleep past noon, when I know I should get up, but my mind starts wandering and I__ sure I can never get back to sleep. Even if I do slip back into a dream for a few moments, I__ mostly just awake with my eyes shut. Yeah. Cryo sleep is like that. Sometimes I think there__ something wrong. I shouldn__ be so aware. But then I realize I__ only aware for a moment, and then, as I__ realizing it, I slip into another dream. Mostly, I dream of Earth. I think that__ because I didn__ want to leave it. 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__ like the dreamtime. The dreamtime is too much like dying. They are dreams, but I__ too out of control, I lose myself in them, and I__e already lost too much to let them take over. I push the dream-memory down. That happened centuries ago, and it__ 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__ 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__e just been lying here in frozen sleep.

And I know what I told my father was true: let us taste the world, and we__l do whatever it takes to shape it into our home.

My heart will never forget what it__ like to fade in and out of time, to never know if one year or a thousand have passed by, to torture yourself with the idea of your soul trapped behind ice for all eternity.I know what torture there is behind ice.

Everyone, this is the new girl. Elder knows her. New girl, this is everyone._ A few people look up politely; some actually smile. Most, however, look wary at best, disgusted at worse. The nurse closest to me jabs her finger behind her ear and starts whispering to nobody.__hat__ wrong with her?_ I ask Harley as he leads me to the table he was sitting at.__h, don__ worry, we__e all mad here.__ giggle, mostly from nerves. __t__ a good thing I read Alice in Wonder-land . I definitely think I__e fallen into the rabbit hole.___ead what?_ Harley asks.__ever mind._ All around me, eyes follow my every move.__ook,_ I say loudly. __ know I look different. But I__ just a person, like you._ I hold my head up high, looking them all in the eyes, trying to hold their stares for as long as possible.__ou tell __m,_ says Harley with another Cheshire grin.

Kayleigh was right. Without the pills, you really do feel nothing.And nothing can be nice.

What you really want to know,_ I say, __s how to make sure we all don__ just rip each other apart, right?_ The fight earlier is way too fresh in our minds. We are a powder keg; just a spark will blow us apart.

And I look at Harley, and the billions of stars are in his eyes, and he's drinking them up, pouring them into his soul.

I would use the same word to describe both my joy and the rain: torrential. This__his__his is all I ever wanted from the world: wide-open spaces and cooling rain and the chance to run.

The dark sky.A hundred million stars.More stars than I__e ever seen before. My eyes let me see farther, but they don__ show me the one thing I want to see. I would trade all the stars in the universe if I could just have him back again.Wind whistles through the trees nearby. Birdsong weaves in and out of the sound.The hybrids emerge from the communication building, heads tilted to the sky.And then we see the end.Godspeed__ engine was nuclear; who knows what fueled the biological weapons. But they explode together. In space, they don__ make the familiar mushroom cloud. They don__ make the boom! of an exploding bomb.There is, against the dark sky, a brief flash of light. It is filled with colors, like a nebula or the aurora borealis, bursting like a popped bubble.Nothing else__o sound of an explosion, no tremors in the earth, no smell of smoke. Not here, on the surface of the planet.Nothing else to signify Elder__ death.Just light.And then it__ gone.And then he__ gone.

That__his__s Orion__ secret. It__ not that the ship isn__ working, that we__e never going to make it.It__ that the ship has already arrived.We__e already here! There__here__s 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__ursts of whiteness in the darkness__nd 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__ 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.Because already, I can see myself living there. Being there.On a planet that looks up at a million suns every night, and at two every day.I want to scream, shout with joy. But the air is so thin now.Too thin.I__e spent too long looking at Orion__ secret.The boop . . . boop . . . boop . . . fades away. There__ nothing to warn about now.Because there__ no air left.My sight is rimmed with black. My head pulses with my heartbeat, which sounds as loud to me as the alarm once did. I turn from the planet__y planet__nd start pulling, hand over hand, against the tether, toward the hatch. The ship bobs in and out of my vision as my whole body jerks. I__ panicked now and fighting to stay awake. I try to suck in air, but there__ nothing there to suck. I__ drowning in nothing.

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.Any of them could hold a planet. Any of them could hold a home.But all of them are out of reach.