Happily Ever Endings... Across the Universe by Beth Revis

Happily Ever Endings... was born out of sheer frustration. You know how when you read a series and you love it but the last book takes a little while to come out and then you sort of forget parts of the novel? That's what these posts are going to serve to remedy. Happily Ever Ending... is a short post about what happened at the ending of each book that is going to be in a series for people who need a quick reminder of what happened in the previous installment. It's really annoying when you can't remember what happens and don't have time for a reread, so this hopefully will be a huge help!

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Synopsis from Goodreads: A love out of time. A spaceship built of secrets and murder.

Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into the brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules.

Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone-one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship-tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn't do something soon, her parents will be next.

Now Amy must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there's only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.

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Happily Ever Ending: After Elder gets Amy some medicine to cure her from the haze she was left in by the medicated water, Elder takes her to the Recording Hall. There they discover that the ship has potentially been travelling for a lot longer than the 250 years it was meant to have been, and that something bad happened during the Plague - something so bad that all records of it were destroyed. When Elder asks Eldest about it, he reveals that there was never a Plague. He takes Elder to the engine room and explains how the fuel is not reprocessing like it should be, and instead of being 25 years behind schedule, they’re 250 years behind. He then goes on to reveal that the Plague was actually when a leader told his people the truth - and they began wars and committed suicide, etc. The Elder/Eldest system was then established and the season came into play. He tells Elder about Phydus - a chemical in the water that removes emotions, ensuring people wouldn’t be consumed by extreme emotions and cause another ‘Plague’. The Hospital meds for ‘crazy’ people kill Phydus, leaving them free to think for themselves and hopefully be able to save the ship from potentially dying if something goes wrong.

Meanwhile, Doc is also sharing this information with Amy, warning her that if she gets on Eldest’s bad side, she’ll be delivered a lethal dose of Phydus and be killed.

Elder goes down to the cryo level to see Harley and take a shift watching the frozen people to make sure no one else gets murdered. When Elder wakes up, someone has painted red crosses on 38 of the frozen people, and Harley has locked himself in the hatch. Elder watches him get sucked out into the stars.
Up in her room, Amy is examining the lists she had painted on her bedroom wall - all the details about the people who had been rudely unfrozen. She ignores her own list and realises everyone unfrozen has something to do with the military. She doesn’t - but her dad did - could there have been a mistake and she was unfrozen instead of her dad?

They rush down to the cryo level to check, and they check the wi-com locator to see who could have drawn the red crosses. They realise that Orion doesn’t have a wi-com, because he must have been down there to take a painting from Harley to give to Amy. When they get to the cryo level, they find all the x-marked frozen people open, so the shove them all back in. Then they sneak into the lab on that level, and overhear Eldest and Orion arguing about the dead Elder and putting more Phydus in the water pump. Elder decides he doesn’t want to rule a Phydus controlled community so with Amy's help he destroys the water pump.

Eldest then reveals that all Elders are clones, and that’s why they have the same scanner name. While this is happening, Orion, who is the ‘dead Elder’ sneaks in and pours a bucket of Phydus over Eldest’s head, killing him by ‘calming him to death’.

Orion then reveals he’s been killing the military frozen people to stop them from using the people on the ship as soldiers when they get to the Centauri earth. They realise he’s just as evil as Eldest and Elder pushes him into a cryo chamber and freezes him.

As Eldest now, Elder decides to get rid of all drugs and make the truth available to anyone who seeks it. It is then revealed that Elder was the one who unplugged Amy, not Orion, but he decides he can never tell Amy that - she'll never understand, she’ll just blame him for taking her away from her family. But he tells her anyway and she’s furious, but she realises he was genuinely sorry and he really didn’t realise what he was doing when he flipped the switch. She asks him to stay with her, and he replies with, ‘Always.’

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I hope this helped! Now you're all set up to read the next one! If I've missed anything important or you think there's something wrong, let me know in the comments! I'm not all that good at these... ;)