Shades of Earth

Horror washes over me.



The transport boxes jump on their tracks as the people inside shake and pound at the plastic, trying to get out.



My face whips around to Mom. Her mouth is hanging open oddly, as if she no longer has control of her facial muscles. Her eyes are staring straight ahead. Empty.



“Something’s wrong!” I scream, running forward. “There’s something wrong with the air!”



Dad’s cursing, trying to make the controls work, but that little red light just keeps flashing, and the gas—the gas that I fear is not oxygen at all—is whooshing inside the sealed transport boxes.



I hurtle myself against Mom’s transport box with all my might. The plastic bends but doesn’t break, doesn’t unseal. “Open the boxes!” I scream. “Open them all! It’s poison!”



“I can’t! I can’t!” Dad shouts, pounding against the control and cursing.



I use all my strength to pull against the box door. My fingernails break off, but I don’t care. I can’t get it open, my mom’s inside, and she might already be—



A loud hiss erupts from the boxes, and all five hundred open at the same time.



“Mom!” I scream as a wave of the gas that had been inside the transport box washes over me. I collapse, dimly aware of my senses deadening. Dad rushes to me, picks my head up from the ground. Elder’s on my other side.



“Amy? Amy?” Dad asks, shouting in my face, but the gas has made me frozen.



I can’t move.



Everything seems so



slow.



I’ve felt this before.



Like living underwater.



The sky is so blue.



Daddy. Daddy yells at me.



I wonder why.



There’s Mommy.



She’s quiet.



Still.



50: ELDER



Screams and shouts erupt around us as people rush to the transport boxes, trying to save the people strapped down.



But it’s too late.



They’re all already dead.



I don’t need a sample of the gas to know that it was a high concentration of Phydus that killed them—and since the lab in the original shuttle is gone, we couldn’t test a sample anyway. But Amy’s reaction tells me all I need to know. I kneel beside her. In my head, I know there’s nothing to do but wait for the effects to wear off. But my whole body is shaking with fear. She could have been inside one of the transport boxes. She could have been . . . I taste bile and swallow it down. I can’t break down because of what might have been.



Colonel Martin checks Amy’s mother’s vital signs before collapsing at her feet, but it’s as I feared. She’s gone. Her mouth and eyes are open, as if she were screaming, but it’s too late. She’s dead, the same way Eldest died and Lorin—an overdose of Phydus.



Any doubt that the aliens on this planet have access to Phydus and know what it does evaporates.



They killed four hundred and ninety-nine people in one fell swoop.



The medical doctors who weren’t packed into the transport boxes—only three left now—are racing from person to person, trying to see if anyone is alive. Some of my people, panicked by the massive death toll, race to the ruins, screaming. Some of the military dispatches, trying to keep everyone together and at a safe distance from the transport shuttle. The gas is gone now and only oxygen blows through the vents, leaving just the trace of a sticky sweet scent in the air before evaporating.



Chris moves beside me; I hadn’t seen him approach. He looks stunned, and he struggles for words as he stares down at Amy’s body, hardly even noticing those who actually died.



I watch her too, even as I take in the chaos that surrounds us. She stares vacantly ahead. Right at her mother.



I know exactly the moment when the drug wears off. I can see the look in her eyes change from empty idleness to dawning horror at the sight of her mother’s dead body. She curls up, a gasping, choking sob escaping her lips as she clutches her father and cries. A part of me rejoices—the drug didn’t kill her, didn’t deaden her mind—but part of me wishes she could be spared the pain of her mother’s death.



“We’re too much in the open,” Chris says, looking up. The blue sky feels ominous, as if the pteros could just swoop down out of the sky or the aliens could attack us at any moment. We have to get out of here.



“The ruins?” I ask Chris. My eyes flick to Colonel Martin—he should be giving the orders now—but he’s crouched in front of Amy’s mother, sobbing. I am surprised by the cold, emotionless part of me that’s detached itself from sympathy.



Chris frowns, thinking.



I answer my own question. “It won’t be safe there,” I say. “The—aliens, whatever is attacking us—they blew up the shuttle. They’re trying to kill us all, and they must know where the ruins are. They could be waiting for us.”



“It’s that or nothing,” Chris says grimly. And he’s right. Where else can we go? To the forest—where the flowers make us sleep and the pteros fly overhead? Here, in a wide, open space where already five hundred have died? The ruins aren’t much, but they’re the only place of security we have, and the stone walls might provide us with some cover.



It’d mean returning to walls, but what other option do we have?



I rush to the communication room and grab the voice amplifier. People have scattered already, some panicking in the woods, some just running, and I hope my words can reach them all.



“Everyone! Go back to the ruins! Do not stay in the open! Get to the buildings!”



Through the big glass window, I can see a shift in the group as they swerve back the way we came, toward the ruins. The military acts as one, rounding people up and herding them to the relative safety of the stone structures.



Chris is trying to talk to Colonel Martin, but none of his words are breaking through his grief.



“Amy,” I say, “we have to go.” I grab her by the elbow, but her arm slides out of my grip like water streaming through a sieve.



I seize hold of her again, sure of my grasp, and yank her up. She stumbles, but I don’t let her go. “There’s nothing we can do!” I shout, hoping she can hear my words through her sorrow. “We have to go.”



Colonel Martin stands too. We’ve made it halfway across the compound when Amy gasps and turns back. “We can’t leave Mom!” she says wildly, turning her head to her father. “We can’t just leave her there!”



Chris wraps his arms around her to keep her from running back to the auto-shuttle. “We have to,” he says, gasping as he struggles to hold her back.



“We can’t leave her!” She reaches blindly for her mother.



“Amy.” Colonel Martin’s voice is heavy and broken. “We have to go.”



She sags, the fight leaving her so suddenly that Chris staggers under her weight.



“Follow me!” I call. My heart breaks at the way Amy’s entire body is limp with grief. We start out across the meadow after the group heading back to the ruins. Soon we’re running, Amy’s steps only occasionally tripping when her eyes, blurry with tears, don’t see a root or stone.



When we reach the first building, the one that had become Amy’s home with her parents, Amy collapses in one of the little camp chairs the Earthborns had packed with them, crying softly. Colonel Martin turns to Chris and me. His cheeks are sunken, dark circles under his red-rimmed eyes. He’s shaped his grief into battle-ready armor; he looks more deadly and dangerous in this moment than I’ve ever seen him before.



“I’m sending out a group of military to scout the nearby area, to look for anyone who got lost in the panic, with orders to capture any sentient alien life-forms they can find.” He glares at Chris, a wild fierceness in his eyes. “Is there anything you can tell me about what attacked us, anything that can help us track them down and kill them all?”



Chris shakes his head mutely.



I narrow my eyes, unsure why Colonel Martin thinks Chris is the expert on this.



“Is there anything you’re keeping hidden?” I ask. We don’t have time for secrets and subterfuge. If there’s any other information that can be helpful . . .



“You know what I know,” Colonel Martin replies. “Earth is sending aid. We only have to survive a few more days, a week, max.”



I snort. “Oh? Well, they killed off a third of us in one morning. A week shouldn’t be too hard.”



51: AMY



I try to look interested.



I try to care.



I should care.



I was prepared to say goodbye to my parents. I did say goodbye to Mom. And when I did, I never expected to see her again. She’d go to the space station and from there back to Earth. It was a forever sort of goodbye.



But there’s a difference, isn’t there? Between saying goodbye and death.



Dad and Chris and Elder argue about something. The weapon on the space station, the Hail Mary that’s supposed to be able to wipe out the aliens and save us all. Elder and Chris don’t want to use it. They say we don’t know what it is, how much damage it will cause. If it kills the aliens, couldn’t it kill us too?



But I don’t think Dad cares about that sort of thing anymore. About casualties. Not now that Mom’s become one.



At one point, Elder brings up our idea that there’s something still on Godspeed, some sort of clue that will tell us what the aliens are and how to defeat them.



“I don’t need any damn clues,” Dad growls at him. “I don’t care what the aliens are. All I need is a big enough gun to kill them all. And that’s what I’ve got on the space station.”



“You would commit genocide?” Chris asks softly.



“They would do the same to us.”



Elder tries to bring me into the conversation. Maybe I could soften Dad, make him listen.



But I just stare at the floor.



“I’m so sorry,” Chris tells me as Dad dismisses him and Elder.



I look right through him.



Sorry? It’s just a word.



Elder doesn’t use words. He just wraps his hand around mine and pulls me until I stand. He keeps pulling, and I stagger behind him. At the doorway, he stops.



“I thought I was going to lose you,” he says softly, not letting go of my hand.



Like I lost my mother.



“Amy,” he says, and then he waits until I meet his eyes. “I can’t lose you. I can’t ever . . . ”



But death doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t care if someone loves you, doesn’t want you to go. It just takes. It takes and it takes until eventually you have nothing left.



Elder seems to realize that nothing he says can penetrate the darkness that has wrapped around me. He just tugs me closer to him, and he wraps his arms around me, and he holds me up while I sag against him, biting my lip as hard as I can to keep from crying because I’m afraid if I do, I’ll never ever stop.



After a long time, Elder says, “Do you want me to stay?” He glances past me, at Dad. “I will, no matter what he says.”



I shake my head and step back from him. Elder squeezes my hand one last time, then disappears into the night.



Then it’s just me and Dad in this cold, stone building, made by people long dead.