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“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.
