Shades of Earth Read online

Page 3

  “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 p
lace 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.

  5: AMY

  Kit makes me watch as she gives a man stitches over a gash in his leg. “What’s your name?” I ask, trying to distract both the man and myself from the amount of blood pumping past his knee.

  “Heller,” he grunts. He’s in the middle-aged generation of people from Godspeed, but while most of the others who are forty are starting to show the frailty of age, Heller looks as if his bones are made of steel and his skin is leather. He looks down at his wound in disdain, as if mad that his body should betray him with any weakness.

  “What happened, Heller?” I don’t want to watch the way Kit pulls the surgical thread tight through his flesh, oddly pale with spots of red blood. My eyes dart to the melting cryo boxes, and I force myself to pay attention to the injured man before me. I’ve let myself be distracted too much already.

  “Frex if I know,” he growls. “I was sitting there, all trussed up, and a sheet of metal slid over my leg, sliced it right open. ”

  “The door to one of the rabbit hatches broke,” Kit says, tugging the surgical thread tight. “It got several of the others too. ”

  “What happened to the rabbits?”

  Kit jerks her head to the wall near the gen lab. A dozen bright red-and-white splotches dot the gray metal wall. I swallow back the bile rising in my throat.

  “Did you see that?” Kit asks me, tying a knot around the stitch. “See how I did it?”

  “Just like sewing cloth,” I say. Not that I’ve sewed much in my life, but I had to learn how to hem my pants on the ship.

  “Exactly like it. ” She hands me the needle and surgical thread. “Now go do the next person’s. ”

  “You want me to stitch someone?”

  Kit nods.

  “What about that foam stuff?” I ask, thinking of the last time I was here, the time Doc shot me, and how Kit squirted foam into my wound and sealed it up better than stitches or any bandage could.

  “We don’t have much. We should save it for emergencies. ”

  “This is an emergency!”

  Kit shakes her head, already kneeling beside the next person. “Not enough of one. ”

  I stand awkwardly for a moment, unsure of what to do with myself. Elder is nearby but focused on helping others. My heart swells with pride at the way they turn to him, trust evident on their faces despite everything.