Free A Million Suns by Beth Revis

the hidden corners of my room and finding nothing living but me. It’s a cold sort of feeling, this.
    When I finally get out of bed, the only thing I want to do is to go straight to Amy and demand her forgiveness. Maybe we can at least go back to what we had before our fight, even if all we had was an awkward friendship punctuated by significant silences. I have to figure out what to do about the ship’s engines—if anything even
can
be done—but I can’t fix the ship without first fixing whatever I broke in Amy.
    I’m so intent on this idea that it’s not until I’m halfway down the grav tube to the Feeder Level that I remember the look in her eyes as she left me yesterday—a combination of anger and hurt and sad—and I realize that she probably doesn’t even want to see me. The solar lamp clicks on as my feet land on the dais under the grav tube. I trudge down to the path. The morning mist evaporates before my eyes.
    Instead of going to Amy’s room in the Hospital Ward, I veer left to the Recorder Hall. Maybe if I give Marae some of the books I’ve read on police forces and civics, she’ll have a better idea of how to organize the Shippers in this new duty. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. But the reality is I dread seeing Amy, knowing that she’ll still be mad at me. And that she has every right to be.
    I’m surprised that when I enter the Recorder Hall, there are already people here, gathered around the wall floppies in the entryway. Most of them crowd around the
Science
section. Second Shipper Shelby points to the generator in a diagram of the ship’s engine as she lectures to the crowd gathered at her feet. She meets my eyes and nods at me. I knew Shelby had, with First Shipper Marae’s and my permission, begun a class for interested Feeders on the technical aspects of the ship, but it hadn’t occurred to me that these lessons would begin just fifteen minutes after lamp-on.
    I hesitate before I go down the hallway into the book rooms. Isn’t Shelby’s lecture futile? The engine is dead, even if the Feeders don’t know it yet. Frex, we’re not even sure how far we are from Centauri-Earth. Even if these Feeders
do
garner enough information to get the ship moving again, chances are that they won’t see the planet in their lifetimes.
    One of the Feeders listening to Shelby rubs her stomach in a slow circle. She’s three months pregnant now, but her tunic hides her rounding belly. Her movement, as unconscious as it is, reminds me—that’s what this is about. Shelby’s lectures aren’t meant to solve the engine problem—not really—but to give these people hope.
    That’s the one thing Eldest did right. He may have lied—but in the end, he gave them a reason to keep going.
    That’s what everyone’s missing now.
    I duck silently into the hallway and head to the book rooms. I throw open the door of the room dedicated to works on civics and social studies.
    â€œWhat the?” someone shouts from inside.
    I jump back, startled, my heart racing. “You scared the shite out of me!” I exclaim, collapsing in the chair at the table across from Bartie.
    Bartie’s laughing too hard at his own response to reply. For a moment, this feels like old times. Bartie and I were friends when I lived in the Hospital for the year before moving to the Keeper Level with Eldest. There was a whole gang of us, then: Harley, Bartie, Victria, Kayleigh, and me, counting my lucky stars that, for the first time ever, I had friends.
    We would spend our days in the Hospital or the garden. Harley would paint while Bartie played guitar and Victria wrote. Kayleigh was always flitting around, trying to tinker with everything. She made a metal canvas stretcher for Harley that nearly bit his fingers off, and she once tried to figure out the old Sol-Earth schematics for an electric guitar that very nearly