Page 26 of Across the Universe (Across the Universe 1)

“What?” I kneel beside her, close to her cracked lips.

“My name is Amy. ”

Eldest looks down at her. Amy opens her eyes—a flash of new-grass green—but shuts them again, flinching at the fluorescent light.

“Your name is immaterial, girl. ” Eldest turns to Doc. “We need to figure out who reanimated her. ”

“Where are my parents?” Her voice is a whisper, choked with pain. The others don’t even notice her.

“Can we put her back in?” Eldest asks Doc. Doc shakes his head no. His eyes are sorrowful.

“Don’t freeze me again!” Amy says, panic edging her voice. Her voice cracks from disuse, and she coughs.

“We couldn’t if we wanted to,” Doc tells Eldest.

“Why not? We have more freezing chambers. ” He looks past Doc’s shoulder to a door on the other side of the room. I hadn’t noticed it before, but I log it away in my memory, to explore later.

“Regenerative abilities deteriorate greatly across multiple freezings, especially when reanimation hasn’t been done properly. If we put her in another cryo chamber, she might not ever wake up. ”

“I want Daddy,” she

whimpers, and even though I know that she is more woman than girl, she seems very much like a child now.

“Time to go to sleep,” Doc says. He pulls a med patch from his pockets and rips it open.

Amy’s eyes fly open. “NO!” she shouts, her voice cracking on the word.

Doc approaches her, and she flings her arm up gracelessly like a club, crashing into his elbow. The med patch falls to the ground. Doc picks it up and tosses it into the bin, then opens a drawer and pulls out another med patch. “It will make you feel better,” he explains to the girl as he tears this one open.

“Don’t want it. ” Her eyes are pinpricks of black in pale green circles.

“Hold her down,” Doc tells me. I just stand there, looking at her. Eldest shoves me aside and pushes his weight against her shoulders.

“Don’t want it!” the girl screams, but Doc has already slapped her arm with the patch, and the tiny needles prick her skin like sharp sandpaper, sending meds into her system.

“Don’twannagosleepagain. ” Her words slur together and are hard to understand. “Don’ wan. . . na,” she says, her voice dropping. A few small tears mixed with eyedrops linger on her lashes. “Not. . . sleep,” she says, even quieter and slower. “No. . . no more. . . sleep. ” And her eyes roll back into her head, and her head sinks down amidst her sunset hair, and she loses all consciousness.

I stare at her, and even though her chest is moving up and down in steady breaths, she looks more dead now than she did in the ice.

I wonder if she dreams.

15

AMY

I AM AWAKE. BUT I DO NOT STRETCH, YAWN, OR OPEN MY EYES. I am not used to doing any of that. At least, not anymore. So I lie here, becoming aware of my senses. I smell mustiness. I can hear someone breathing softly, as if asleep. I feel warmth, and it is not until I realize this that I remember I am no longer frozen.

My first thought: how much of the dreams and nightmares was real?

Even now, the dreams I had while frozen are fading, becoming fuzzy memories, like dreams do. Did I really dream for three centuries, or did I dream for the few minutes between fully waking and unfreezing? It felt like centuries, dream upon dream piling up in my head—but dreams are like that, time isn’t real. When my tonsils were taken out, I had dozens of really detailed dreams, but I was only under the anesthesia for an hour or so. Besides, I couldn’t have dreamt when I was frozen—that’s impossible, dreams can’t flit through frozen neurons.

But what about those stories of patients who are awake during surgery, even though the anesthesia is supposed to knock them out?

No. Ignore that. It’s not the same. I could only have dreamt in that small time when my body was melting but my soul hadn’t yet. If I start thinking about time, and how much passed, and how aware I was of it passing, I’ll drive myself crazy.

I force my eyes open. I can’t be haunted by dreams—whether they’re centuries old or not—if I am awake.

The crinkle of my eyelids feels new to me, and I revel in opening my eyes.