Page 120 of Across the Universe (Across the Universe 1)

I pause just long enough to snatch the floppy off her desk. As we race down the hall, I scan my thumb and tap in my access code. The computer chirps, “Eldest/Elder access granted” as the elevator opens. While we rise, I bring up the wi-com locator map.

“What are you doing?” Amy asks, her eyes on the numbers above the door.

I slide the timer back, looking for the dots marking where and when everyone was.

On the map for last night is Harley’s dot, beeping softly, mostly where the hatch door is, but sometimes pacing up and down the hall and once, all around the cryo floor. No one else is on the entire level—until I show up. There I am, running; there’s where I stop. My glowing dot merges with Harley’s, and I remember our fight, our last fight.

Amy hovers over my shoulder, watching. My dot leaves Harley’s, and now it blinks near the elevator in front of the cryo floor. Harley’s doesn’t move from the hatch door. I wonder what he was doing in those last moments. Painting? Planning?

I fast forward. Around morning, Doc and Eldest’s dots show up, but they don’t linger—they go straight to the lab on the other side of the cryo level. I look up at Amy sheepishly.

“I fell asleep,” I say. I wonder if Doc and Eldest noticed me.

Amy shakes her head. “It wasn’t them, though, was it? They didn’t go near the cryo chambers. ”

We turn back to the wi-com locator map. My dot moves quickly up and down the aisles of cryo chambers—discovering the painted Xs.

And then my dot goes to the hatch.

There I am; there he is.

Then his dot is gone.

A hard lump forms in my throat. My eyes blur at the moment when it happens, when his dot suddenly jerks off the map and doesn’t come back.

Amy sucks in a gasp, but doesn’t let the air back out for a long time, and then it’s just a hushed, “Oh. ”

“No one else came down there,” I say as the door opens to the fourth floor. “It must have been Harley. ”

“But Harley never left the door, not after you showed up. ”

I meet Amy’s eyes. Harley couldn’t have painted the Xs.

“That thing,” Amy says, pointing at the floppy, “it can only track people through their ear buttons, right?”

I nod.

“It couldn’t see me, could it?”

I shake my head.

“What about Orion? He’s the one who brought me the painting. He had to have been down there, but that means he doesn’t have an ear button, doesn’t it? He’s got long hair to cover it, but I’ve seen that scar on his neck—that creeps up past his hair. I bet he doesn’t have an ear button. He’d be invisible. ”

And—oh—she’s right.

Orion.

71

AMY

THE DOOR AT THE END OF THE HALLWAY IS LOCKED.

“How are we—?” I stammer. “What are we going to do?”

Elder kicks the door in.

He rolls his thumb on the scanner, punches the button, and then we’re going down, down, so achingly slow.