Page 45 of Shades of Earth (Across the Universe 3)

What little light remains in his faded eyes slowly disappears.

22: ELDER

“He’s gone. ”

Amy says the words, but they still don’t register.

He can’t be gone. His blind eyes still stare, still try to absorb the world he can never see.

I don’t have the heart to close them.

“He was me, you know. ” A me who faced the truth by himself. A me who did what he did to protect my people. Everything good in my life came from him, and I gave him nothing in return. “Technically, I mean. ”

“I know,” Amy replies.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper to Orion, because even though he was a murderer, he didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve to have the planet given to him and then stolen away.

I don’t meet her eyes as I sink to the floor and roll my head against the hard metal of the shuttle. It’s hopeless. We should have never come. We should have stayed on Godspeed.

“We’ll figure it out,” Amy says. “We won’t let everyone die. ” She sits down next to me and rests her head against my shoulder. For a few minutes, we just sit there in silence—me coming to grips with the realization that I can’t save my people if I don’t know what it is I need to protect them from, Amy leaning against me, serving as a reminder of everything Orion didn’t have.

“Elder,” Amy says after a while, “what was that he called you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“He gave us a clue,” she says, wonder filling her voice. “Before he died . . . ” Her voice trails off as she jumps up, excited.

“What do you mean?” I ask, my heart thumping. My knees are weak with hope as I stand up.

“A clue! I don’t know if he meant to or not, but he gave us a clue. ”

“A clue? What clue?”

“Think about it,” Amy says, her eyes flashing. “Think about the trail of clues we went on. ”

My mind skips over that time. Harley’s painting. Amy’s wi-com. Shakespeare and Dante. And another book . . .

“You’ve forgotten—of course you have, you were distracted by the space suits at the time. ” Her eyes are wide and gleaming.

“Space suits?”

Amy grabs my hand and drags me back toward the shuttle door. “Remember when we discovered the room with the suits? There was a book there, just like the other books Orion left for us, but there wasn’t a clue inside the book. Do you remember what book that was?” Her voice is manic, urgent.

I shake my head. My only thought had been to go outside Godspeed and see the universe that had been blocked out by steel walls all my life.

“I remember it,” Amy says, smirking. “That book. It was The Little Prince. ” She whirls around to face me, the ends of her hair whipping her neck. “And what did he call you just now?”

“A little prince,” I answer automatically. For one brief moment, the hope Amy’s exuding infects me. But no— “That can’t be a clue,” I say. My eyes dart to Orion’s body, still staring vacantly up into the blue sky. “He was just making fun of me, saying that I was, you know, the leader, but not any good at it. Besides, we already found that book and the clue in it. ”

Amy frowns, thinking. “What was that clue?” she asks.

I shrug. “Just some underlined text. ”

“No, I mean, what did that clue show us? Every single clue Orion left for us had a reason. Each one led to something else, each piece was important. How was that clue important?”

“It was where the space suits were. ”

Amy shakes her head. “But it’s not how we found the suits—that clue came from the sonnet. ”