Shades of Earth

A woman near the wall moans. Her eyes are on the three dead bodies lined against the shuttle wall at her feet, the people who didn’t survive the landing. I think for a moment her exclamation of pain was for that, but then I see the river of blood snaking down her arm.



I squat beside her, but she barely registers my presence. I peel back her shirt—a ragged cut mars her back shoulder, the red a stark contrast to her dark brown skin.



“I’m going to stitch you up, okay?” I ask, hoping that I sound confident.



She glances up at me, a look of fear in her eyes. I wonder if she doesn’t want me to work on her because of who I am and how I look, but she turns away again, angling her shoulder more toward me, offering it up like a sacrifice.



“Do you know how to do this?” she asks, her voice hollow.



“Yeah,” I lie, because honestly, what else am I supposed to tell her?



The first time I pull too tight, ripping the thread through her. She hisses in pain, and I try to apologize, but she’s shaking her head, eyes closed, wishing, I know, for it to just be over.



“What’s your name?” I ask, trying the same diversion tactics I used with Heller.



“Lorin,” she says shortly. I start to make small talk with her, but then I notice the way her lips are pressed tightly together, her eyes squinched shut.



She doesn’t want to talk.



I plunge the needle back in, and out, and in, and out, and then I can breathe again because it’s finally done.



“Thanks,” she mutters.



I spray the cut down with disinfectant and start on the next person.



I lose track of time and how long I have left until my parents awaken, my body slipping into a machine-like state as I try to separate my mind from my actions. I try not to think about how the needle pierces flesh, not cloth; I try not to notice the wet sound of the thread sliding through bloody skin. I am so focused on what I’m doing that when a harsh, shrieking scream echoes throughout the chamber I jump back, dropping the needle.



Like everyone else, I look up—but all I see is the metal ceiling.



“That was outside,” Elder says, his voice deep and low as he crouches beside me.



My eyes round. “What was it?”



“Something—outside,” he repeats.



The man whose leg I’d been stitching looks up at us, fear in his eyes. “Is that one of them monsters Orion warned us about?” he asks, and I’m ashamed to admit that was the same thing I—probably everyone—was thinking.



I look around me. All 1,456 sets of eyes are watching us. Are watching him. Elder. They are waiting for their leader to react. If he shows fear now, their new world will begin with fear.



Elder lowers his voice. “I’ve got to go,” he tells me in nearly a whisper. “I’m going outside,” he says, this time loud enough for everyone to hear.



I grab his wrist, leaving a bloody handprint there. “Why?”



Another screeching cry echoes above us. Whatever it is—it’s close.



Elder pulls me up, dragging me away from the man I was working on. One of Kit’s nurses kneels beside him and takes over, disinfecting the needle I dropped.



“Remember the way the shuttle was knocked off course?” Elder asks me softly. I nod. “What if that was no accident?”



“We were, what—attacked?” My voice sounds doubtful. “And you were mad at me for trying to wake up the frozens? If we were attacked, we need them even more!”



“Shh!” Elder says, his eyes darting over my shoulder. No one heard me, though. Still, even Elder seems to agree that the idea that we were attacked seems a little ludicrous. The shuttle did seem to be pushed out of trajectory—but the shuttle is also old. One of the rockets could have blown. Something could have malfunctioned.



“We have to know what we’re up against,” Elder says.



I bite my lip.



“I’m going,” he repeats.



“Then I’m going too.” I say this immediately, without thought, but as soon as the words are out, my eyes flick to the cryo chambers. It will be soon now.



Elder notices. He touches my arm. “You should stay,” he says. I think he’s only saying this so I don’t feel guilty. “I have to go.”



When I look into his eyes, I know that his sense of responsibility outweighs every fear I have.



“Well,” I say, “at least go armed.”



6: ELDER



“I don’t know how to shoot,” I remind Amy as she roots around in the armory.



“It’s easy,” she says. She thrusts a heavy metal gun into my hands. “I’ve already loaded it. Point this end at whatever’s out there and pull the trigger. Bang. That’s all there is to it.”



She drops two small, green, egg-shaped objects in my hand. “Impact grenades,” she says at my curious look. “If the gun doesn’t work, just throw these. They’ll explode once they hit something.”



My eyes widen. The grenades don’t seem fragile, but the idea of them exploding doesn’t fill me with ease.



“And take this—” Amy adds, reaching for a large weapon with a tube the size of my arm.



“Enough!” I say. “I can barely carry these. I’m only going outside to look.”



Another piercing cry cuts through the air.



“Wait,” Amy says, her eyes pleading with me. Her fingers curl around my arm, gripping my wrist, holding me back with more strength than I knew she had. “Please. Just wait for my dad to wake up. The military can take care of whatever that is out there. That’s their job.”



“And what’s my job?” I ask, gently breaking free of her grasp. “To protect my people. I have to do this.” My people need to see me facing the world and whatever dangers it might hold. If I do, then they can too. But if I stay here, cowering, waiting for the frozens to save us, that will become their first instinct.



“Be safe.” Amy says the words like a prayer. Her eyes don’t meet mine, then she leans in, quick, and pecks me on the lips. Her cheeks flame up in a blush. All I want to do is grab her and crush her against me, to give her a kiss that’s worthy of that blush.



“I’ll be fine.” It’s not until I say this that I realize it’s probably not true. My first reaction when I heard the screeching sound outside was to look, to calm the fear on my people’s faces. But now my mouth is dry and my stomach twists as if the fear inside it was poisonous acid. I think it’s the armory. Being surrounded by this many weapons reminds me that there’s a reason why we have them.



My hand goes to the wi-com embedded behind my left ear, and I press the button down. Instead of the usual beep, beep-beep, there’s nothing but a click as the button’s depressed and released. I frown and push the button again, so forcefully that I wince in pain.



Shite. The wi-com network was on the ship. My fingers run over the edge of the button, a perfectly circular bump that has been a part of my body for as long as I can remember. Now useless. The frexing thing is useless. It’s implanted into my flesh, its wires creep beside my veins, and it will never work again.



Amy grabs my hand, pulls it away from the button under my skin. “You don’t need to tell them anything,” she says. “They all know what you’re about to do for them.”



I’ve never felt so disconnected from . . . everything. It’s one thing to know that the ship’s unreachable, but now the connection I’ve had with my people who are here is gone too.



I wait until Amy’s back in the cryo room before I turn toward the bridge. I don’t think I could have kept my fear hidden from her as I opened the door, and I didn’t want her to see me hesitate. I don’t have a military authorization code, but Shelby showed me how to override the system for emergencies. I can’t do much, but I could put the shuttle in lockdown, set an alarm sequence, or start the sprinklers in the event of a fire. And I can open the doors.



I stand, leaning against the control panel, staring through the thick glass of the honeycombed window. It’s foggy now with condensation, but I can still make out the world that is ours. I touch the thick glass, surprised at the warmth it offers.



I know from pictures of Sol-Earth that the super-tall bushes are called trees and that the wood from them is the same kind of wood that made the table I used when working on assignments from Eldest. I know the dirt, although blackened from our descent, will not be the smooth, clay-like, evenly processed soil that filled the Feeder Level.



But I’m not looking at any of that.



I’m looking out, past the burnt ground and the broken trees, their limbs twisting and turning like tangled yarn, past the horizon and to the sky.



And no matter how much my eyes strain, there isn’t a wall. Not a single frexing wall.



Something dark flashes in the blue sky, something unnatural, and my grip around the gun Amy gave me tightens.



I give my order to the computer: open doors.



It works. A cracking sound echoes throughout the bridge. I grab the control panel to steady myself—but my disorientation isn’t from the shuttle moving. It’s from the window breaking open. Just as I once saw the ceiling of the Keeper Level split in half, the honeycombed glass of the window lifts on one end, rising like a hinged lid.



The individual glass pieces were held together by metal solder, but now I realize that the metal is actually a part of an intricate mechanical feature. The hexagonal segments of glass move and shift, forming a ramp down the right side of the ship. The angle is steep, but the glass is long enough to stretch out past the burnt ground to the yellowish earth beyond.



I step past the control panel, brushing my hand along the exposed edge of the shuttle. The metal between the glass serves as a grip—I can easily walk down the sharp ramp formed by the window pieces and set foot on the new world.



A warm breeze blows past, filling my nose with the scent of ash and dirt, lifting the edge of my hair. The air is thick and humid, but the wind is as soft as Amy’s shy kisses; and although it barely touches my skin, it spurs me just as deeply. I race down the ramp, skidding to a halt only when my feet touch the ground of the new world. The sandy soil shifts underfoot, making me feel as if I could plant myself into the earth as surely as one of the twisty trees.



My vision drifts up. How could I have ever thought the blue-and-white painted steel plates of the roof of the Feeder Level emulated the sky? They don’t. They don’t look anything like the gradient blues and grays above me, the wispy strands of clouds that move before my eyes. I’d never understood how Amy could miss Sol-Earth so much, how Godspeed was never enough for her. What’s the difference between air from a spaceship and air from a planet?



Everything.



The two suns overhead beam down, so bright that staring at them makes me blink black dots. Two suns. Centauri-Earth is in a binary star system, unlike Sol-Earth, which had only one sun. The big sun is slightly higher in the sky than the littler one. The smaller sun has an orange-red color, a color that reminds me of Amy’s hair, actually, and the bigger one is bright white, reminding me of her skin.



A high-pitched ringing pierces my ears, and I whip my head around to the forest. Something dark moves in the shadows, but as I try to squint through the tree branches, I hear another sound.