Shades of Earth (2 page)

3:
AMY

I've heard that
when you're in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you're hyper-aware of what's happening around you.

As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me.

Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren't bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder's cursing, my pounding heartbeat.

I feel nothing—not the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb.

Scent and taste disappear.

The only thing about my body that works is my eyes, and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land—a continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home.

My eyes drink up the image of the planet—and my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I've never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent—it dips and curves in ways I don't recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect.

And it's not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home, but it will never be the home I left behind.

“Frex, frex,
frex!
” Elder shouts, pulling so hard against the steering wheel that the veins on his neck pop out.

I swallow dryly—this is no time to be sentimental. “What should we do?” I shout back over the sound of beepings and alarms from the control panel.

“I don't know; I don't frexing
know!
”

A yellowish-brown cliff looms high, seemingly parallel to the shuttle, and it isn't until we pass over it that I realize we aren't going to crash into it.

“Ground impact in T minus five minutes, shuttle off course from initial landing sequence,” the computer says in a perfectly bland voice, and I wish it was a person so I could punch it.

“
Are
we going to crash?” I gasp, ripping my gaze from the image through the honeycombed glass window to face Elder.

Elder's pale and his face is tight. He shakes his head, and I know he doesn't mean, “No, we're not going to crash.” He means, “I don't know, we might.”

My eyes dart to a circular screen on the control panel—it shows a horizon line that dips and spins chaotically.

A lit button near me flashes, and I read the words engraved onto it:
STABILIZER
. That sounds good? I don't know—but Elder's straining to keep the ship steady, and it can't hurt, and I don't know if I should, but—I push it.

The horizon dips all the way down, then all the way up, jerking me around like some sort of sick combination of a roller coaster and the whirling teacup ride at Disney World. Indicator lights show us tiny rockets that are bursting at the bottom of the ship, making us even out until the entire shuttle steadies and slows.

“What the—” Elder starts, but he's cut off when the rockets sputter, and we drop straight out of the sky.

I scream as we plummet toward the earth.

Elder slams his fist against one set of controls, then another. We're dropping so quickly that the image outside the windows blurs and all I can see is murky colors smeared together.

The horizon dips again as Elder's button-pushing works—and then fails—and we're crashing down, down. Rockets flare, casting red-yellow streams of fire around us—

“Ground sensors feedback: suitable landing site,” the computer says over the sound of the alarms. “Initiate landing rockets, yes or no?”

The green
Y
and the red
N
light up again.

“Push it!” I shout as Elder slams his fist against the
Y
.

I can see streams of white-blue fire shooting out the front, and the shuttle jerks, then slows, the sudden movements leaving me breathless. And just like that, all my other senses kick in. Everything becomes real again. I taste copper in my mouth—I've bitten my lip so hard I've drawn blood—and I can already tell that I'll bruise from the too-tight seat belt on my chest and around my hips. The noise from the other side of the door seems deafening, but I can pick out individual cries of pain and alarm from the 1,456 passengers in the cryo room.

And then we stop.

We haven't landed—we're hovering over the treetops—but we're not moving forward anymore. We're not crashing.

The shuttle isn't completely stable, and I can hear a
hiss-shh
sound from under our feet: the rockets are shooting down straight into the ground, keeping us over the surface.

“Land shuttle? Please select yes or no,” the computer says evenly.

Elder and I exchange a glance. There is no meaning, no words behind the look—just one shared feeling.
Relief.

Instead of reaching for the blinking green
Y
, he grabs my hand. His fingers slide between mine, and they're slick with sweat, but his grip is firm and strong. No matter what happens, what awaits us on the other side—we'll face it together. Elder pulls our joined hands toward the last button, and we push it.

The
hiss-shh
slowly fades as the shuttle sinks down and down toward the ground. I realize that somewhere in our mad descent, gravity's returned, and everything feels heavy again, especially the seat belt strapping me down. I throw it off and race to the honeycombed glass windows. I can see that our landing has decimated the area—the trees nearest us are nothing but smoldering ash, and the ground is black and shiny, almost as if it has melted. Trees—trees! Real trees, real ground, a real
world!
Right here!

With a sudden lurch that nearly knocks me to the floor, the rockets cut out and we drop the last few feet to the surface of the planet.

“Well,” Elder says, staring out the window at the burning earth, “at least we didn't die.”

“We didn't die,” I repeat. I look up at his shining eyes. “We didn't die!” Elder grabs my wrist, pulling me into his lap. I melt against the warmth and security of his arm, and our lips collide in a kiss full of all the fear and passion and hope this new world brings. We kiss as if it were our first kiss and our last, all at once. Our lips meet in desperation; our bodies wrap around each other with a sort of fervent fury that exists only in the joy of surviving the certainty of death.

I pull away, gasping for air. I look into Elder's eyes . . . and for one brief moment, I see nothing but the boy who taught me about first kisses and second chances. But then the image shifts, and I don't see him. I see Orion. I scramble up out of Elder's lap, and even though I tell myself that Elder isn't Orion, I can't forget about the way Elder insisted Orion be on this shuttle with us, as if his crimes should be rewarded with a whole planet instead of only ice.

Elder reaches for me again as he tries to get up from his chair—but can't. “Stupid seat belt,” he mutters, unfastening it.

I turn around.

The world is there, on the other side of the glass window.

The world.

Our
world.

“We made it,” I say.

“Yeah,” Elder replies, unable to keep the surprise from his voice. “We did. . . .” His words are a breath of warmth at the back of my neck.

I turn around to meet his eyes, but my vision slides past him, to the door that leads to the hallway that leads to the cryo room.

“My parents,” I whisper.

I can finally have my parents back.

4:
ELDER

Without saying another word,
Amy turns and runs through the seal-lock doors. Her footsteps clatter across the metal floor, the sound rising over the distant shouts from the 1,456 passengers in the cryo room. I take a deep, shaking breath. I still can't believe we've actually made it. Despite my incompetence, despite whatever it was that caused our near-disastrous crash landing . . .

I pause. What
was
it that made us nearly crash? It felt almost as if something
hit
us. . . .

“This concludes the landing of the shuttle,” the computer says. “Please shift operational command of the mission to the highest-ranking officer in cryogenics once reanimation is complete. Do not leave the shuttle until you are commanded to do so. Thank you for contributing to the mission of the Financial Resource Exchange.”

The computer's voice crackles and dies, leaving me in silence. In its place, the monitor on the control panel lights up, flashing a single phrase:

 

Military Authorization Code: - - - - - - - - - -

 

That word—
military
—makes my stomach jerk with the same intensity of the ship's sudden stop earlier. Orion would have been in my place if he hadn't feared the military of Sol-Earth so much that he tried to kill them, convinced they would turn us into soldiers or slaves.

It's hard for me to think of Orion as Amy does: a psychopath murderer. Because if I hadn't had Amy, I might have been Orion. What choice would I have had? I'd have become like him . . . or like Eldest.

And no matter what's happened, I can't help but believe that Orion and his tactics were preferable to Eldest and his lies.

The military authorization request blinks at me, waiting for a code I don't have. I cast one last, longing look at the world beyond the window, the never-ending sky, and then turn my back to it. I can already hear fear and pain rising up in the voices of my people, and the next step belongs to the frozens in the cryo room, not me.

When I reach the cryo room, Amy stands in front of her parents' cryo chambers, leaning over my people strapped to the row. As they pull aside the tether that anchored them to the cryo chambers for safety, Amy pushes past them, her eyes bouncing over the informational readout with such single-minded focus that she doesn't notice the way my people are fumbling, struggling to stand after being bound to the chambers.

I'm surrounded by chaos. Kit, our doctor, has a group of people dashing about, unlatching the tethers we used to strap people to stable objects. It is immediately apparent that the tethers were not a good idea. My stomach twists as Kit shoves a man's shoulder back in joint, and nearly everyone has the same sort of shocked, horrified expressions that I've only ever seen on disaster relief videos from tragedies on Sol-Earth.

A woman near me starts screaming, the sound ricocheting around the metal walls of the cryo chamber, piercing every ear with its horror.

Kit's group of helpers rush forward, disentangling her and the woman beside her from the tether, but it's obvious that it's too late—a deep red mark wraps around her neck. The tether that was supposed to save her life slipped and choked her instead.

I step toward the woman. Her screams have stopped, replaced with sobs.

Amy gasps, an almost inaudible sound, but I whip around to find out what's wrong.

She shoots me a satisfied smile of triumph, and it is only then that I notice the little doors in front of the cryo chambers have all snapped open.

“Frex, do you have to do this now?” I ask, striding toward her.

“Yes,”
she says fiercely.

“
All
of them?” I ask. I could almost understand her need to awaken her parents, but we don't need to add nearly a hundred frozen people to the cacophony of voices around us.

There are dozens injured and at least one—no, two—no, more than that—dead. We don't have time to worry about the frexing frozens, not now, not after we just crash-landed.

I start to tell Amy this, but then she says, “They can
help
.” I think she believes this, but I don't think she thought of it until I questioned her.

Kit rushes over to me. There's a cut on her head leaking blood down the side of her face, but it doesn't look too bad. “Is everything okay?” she asks, worry making her brow crease.

I look around me. Everyone seems to have a glazed look in their eyes—shock, I realize. It's clear that while the tethers did keep people from bouncing around during the crash-landing, they also cut into people's skin or slipped around their necks or jerked them around so violently that they got whiplash.

“Yeah,” I growl. “Everything's brilly.”

“No, I mean the landing—is it—the planet—” Kit doesn't know how to say what she's really asking.

One half of my lips curve up, and for a moment, I don't see the metal walls wrapped around the despair of my people as they try to recover from the crash. I see only the sky. “Yeah,” I tell her. “That part really is brilly.”

She breathes a sigh of relief, and I know what she was really worried about was: is all of
this
worth all of that? And I wonder—has it been? My mind flashes to Shelby, the Shipper who taught me how to land. Without her, we really would have crashed. Whatever the cause of us being knocked off course, the only reason we weren't killed is because of the training she gave me.

And because of the choices I made, she's dead anyway.

The rows of cryo chambers hiss to life. With a clattering crash, the chambers shoot out, dropping support legs onto the floor. Thin robotic arms slide over the top of the cryo box, lifting away the glass lids and sucking them back into the chambers.

A mechanical hum fills the room, drowning out the sounds of pain and fear coming from the passengers. The metal arms shoot back over the cryo chambers, this time with sharp needles sticking out from one side. The arms slam straight down, driving the needles into the ice. I can see tiny streams of bubbles—jets of hot air?—bubbling through the frozen cryoliquid. Already, water drips down, pooling on the ground below. A slope so slight I've never noticed it before draws the water under the chambers.

Amy's eyes are glued to cryo chambers 41 and 40—her parents.

We don't need this. The frozens will cause nothing but trouble now. We need to help the injured.

And . . . and I need
her
. I need Amy. With me, not staring at some frozen boxes. Even now, I can feel the way every person
except
Amy is looking to me, waiting for me to be everything they need me to be. And I'm not sure if I can stand without her by my side.

“What can I do?” I ask anyway, turning away from Amy toward Kit.

Kit leads me to the far wall, where she has formed a sort of triage, setting up the nurses who can aid with the minor cuts and bruises, but there are still dozens of people with much more urgent needs. The tethers were too narrow; they cut into people's flesh, and even I, with my inexperienced eyes, can see that they'll need stitches. More than one person has a dislocated shoulder, like the man Kit helped earlier, and there are so many people sitting against the wall that I'm not sure if it's because they've hurt themselves and can't stand or if it's something else, something less serious, or more.

I meet Kit's eyes. She's desperate. Until a few days ago, she was only an apprentice—Doc is the one who should be here, the one who could efficiently solve everyone's problems. But Doc was a problem by himself.

In Kit's hands, I can see square, pale green patches. Phydus.

“No,” I say, the word a command. Phydus was a part of
Godspeed
; it drugged us into submission for centuries. It has no place here; it has no place in any world without walls or lies.

Kit opens her mouth to protest, but she must see something of Eldest in the way I stand now, because she silently puts the Phydus patches back in her pocket.

“Amy,” I bark over my shoulder.

“In a minute,” she calls back, breathless, her eyes still on her frozen parents.

“Amy,”
I order.

She looks up at me, hurt in her eyes.

“We need help.”

“In a
minute
,” she says again.

“Now.”

I can tell from the venomous look she shoots me that she can see something of Eldest in me now too.

But she leaves the cryo chambers and approaches us. Her sullen attitude changes as she notices the injured around us, seemingly for the first time. “What can I do to help?” she asks, her voice sincere.

Behind her, the cryo chambers drip as the ice melts.