I reached inside her and pulled out the deepest memories in her body, the memories that words can’t describe, the memories that are as much a piece of her as her arms and legs. Those are the ones she’s filled with now.
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Amy pulls away and looks into my face. Her pale skin is blotchy red, her eyes are veined and shadowed, and a shiny line of snot trickles from her nose to the top of he
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The freedom of our people is more important!” Julie says fiercely. “We will never stop fighting, never stop working for what is right!”Jack just smiles at her. “That’s a nice lie to believe,” he says.
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I try not to look obvious as I wait for Mom’s answer. I feel as if I am on the edge of a knife, my feet being sliced by the blade, teetering toward one side or the other.“Oh, of course!” Mom exclaims, her voice trilling with laughter. “How could I have forgotten?”And now I know. Really know. This woman is not my mother. I don’t know who she is, but I know absolutely who she is not.
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The dark sky.A hundred million stars.More stars than I’ve ever seen before. My eyes let me see farther, but they don’t 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’s engine was nuclear; who knows what fueled the biological weapons. But they explode together. In space, they don’t make the familiar mushroom cloud. They don’t 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—no 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’s death.Just light.And then it’s gone.And then he’s gone.
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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.
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I would use the same word to describe both my joy and the rain: torrential. This—this—this is all I ever wanted from the world: wide-open spaces and cooling rain and the chance to run.
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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.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’ve spent too long looking at Orion’s secret.The boop . . . boop . . . boop . . . fades away. There’s nothing to warn about now.Because there’s 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—my planet—and 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’m panicked now and fighting to stay awake. I try to suck in air, but there’s nothing there to suck. I’m drowning in nothing.
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I have emotions,” I whisper. I am nothing but a black hole of emotions.
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Well, sometimes home is a person.
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We keep sending colonies up into space,” Akilah says, “and we don’t even know what’s at the bottom of the sea.”“Yeah, we do,” I counter. “Fish and stuff.”Akilah laughs. “We’ve barely explored the sea. There are places where the water is so deep that it has never seen light.” She sighs. “I would like to go to those places. I would like to sink down and down and down and see what’s hidden at the bottom.”The sea is a dangerous place because it makes you believe in forever. I stare back at the shoreline, where heavy boulders clutter the shore, a remembrance of the attacks during the Secessionary War. For all the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the war, more are dead and gone beneath the waves of the sea. I tread water, turning slowly, so the island’s behind me and all I can see is the blue-green waters. The sea goes on forever and ever. We are tiny, almost invisible specks. It could swallow us up. We are less than the bright stars of the night sky, compared to the vastness of the sea.And it is this place, as one tiny, barely visible speck bobbing in the water, where Akilah feels safe.Maybe being alone in the sea, with its unexplored depths, its clawing-finger waves, really is safer compared to the land, where there are people and malice and death.
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Maybe one day the smears of paint Harley left throughout Godspeed will fade, and maybe the stars never will, but id rather have Harleys colors.
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And I look at Harley, and the billions of stars are in his eyes, and hes drinking them up, pouring them into his soul.
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I stare at the stars... And even though there are so many and they look so close together, I know they are light years apart. The glitter in the sky looks as if I could scoop it all up in my hands and let the stars swirl and touch one another, but they are so distant, so very far apart, that they cannot feel the warmth of each other, even though they are made of bu
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I cannot imagine a more perfect hell than being trapped inside my own mind.
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I feel alone.I dont mean i feel lonely; I mean i feel alone, the same way i feel the blanket resting on my body, or the feathers of my pillow under my head, or the tight string of my sleep pants twisted up around my waist. I feel alone as if it were an actual thing, seeping throughout this whole level like mist blanketing a field, reaching into all the hidden corners of my room and finding nothing living but me. Its a cold sort of feeling, this.
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I realize the simple truth is that power isn’t control at all- power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn’t someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others so that they may have the strength to stand on their own.
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What you really want to know,” I say, “is how to make sure we all don’t 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.
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If I can only see him in madness, is it worth trying to hold onto sanity?
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How ironic it would be, to die at his hands while trying to save him, when he first came to me because he was trying to save me.
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