Shades of Earth (10 page)

15:
AMY

“Don't break formation!”
one of the military guards shouts.

I pause, looking back. Kit is having trouble keeping track of the shipborns on Phydus; Lorin, in particular, is proving to be erratic. She keeps wandering straight ahead, even if the group veers in another direction. One of the doctors, Dr. Gupta, is helping her, but I shoot Chris a sympathetic smile and drop back.

“What can I do?” I ask Kit.

“Just try to keep an eye on them,” she says. She pushes her hair off her brow. It's hot and humid, like a summer day in Florida.

I pull Lorin closer to me, tugging her to make her keep up the pace. If one of those pterodactyl things did actually decide to attack us, it would strike here, at the end of the group, where the weakest of us are. I glance around, looking for Elder, but he's nowhere to be seen. No—wait, there he is. At the front of the group, with Emma and Dad. With the leaders.

Where he should be,
I tell myself. But I can't help but wish he was in the back with me instead.

“What's wrong with these people?” Chris asks, the joking tone he'd adopted earlier gone as he looks at Lorin intently.

I open my mouth to tell him about Phydus, then close it. How will he react? Right now, Phydus is needed, and it's too hot to start arguing philosophy.

A screeching cry cuts through the humid air.

I stop immediately, but Lorin keeps walking straight ahead. Dr. Gupta chases after her as I reach for my gun. Nearby, the soldiers closest to us pull out their own weapons.

“There!” someone calls from the middle of the group.

A huge, reptilian bird circles us slowly, like a vulture homing in on a meal. It's like it knew I was thinking about it.

I raise the .38 and am about to press my finger against the trigger when my dad begins shouting. “No one fire!” he orders from the front of the group. “Not unless it attacks!”

The
thing
screeches again, swooping down another few feet. I can see its claws—massive and curved.

Someone near the front fires a shot. Dad curses at the trigger-happy soldier.

The dinosaur-sized bird screams angrily, jerking around in another direction so quickly that I have to look away from the gun to keep up with its movements. In moments it's gone entirely. I holster my gun, and it's not until that moment that I realize Chris didn't pull out a weapon of his own, probably because he was worried about pissing my dad off.

“Move out!” Dad calls, motioning for everyone to continue following him. All the excited chatter from before grinds to a stop at this reminder of the potential dangers of this world.

Few people talk now. There's a sort of intense focus to the way we move in the trees. Everyone is jumpy, on guard.

Thunder rumbles, a low sound that rises and then fades.

Screams erupt within the group.

“What was that?” someone shouts.

“Where did it come from!?”

“What's happening?”

The entire caravan comes to a halt as the shipborns crouch, moving closer to each other, casting worried looks into the sky. I try to find Elder in the crowd, but he's too far away.

“What are they going on about?” Chris asks. Around us, the people on Phydus show no reaction to the thunder, but Kit is wide-eyed and terrified.

“It's just thunder,” I tell Kit. “It's nothing to worry about; it just means it's going to rain.”

She nods but still looks scared.

“These people have spent their entire lives on a spaceship,” I explain to Chris, already breaking through the crowd, trying to find Dad and Elder. “They don't know what thunder is.”

The trees rustle, showing the undersides of their leaves, and the wind picks up, chilling my skin, made slick with sweat from the humid air. This storm is moving fast.

“We have to keep moving!” I say as I push through the crowd.

“What if it gets us?” someone near me asks.

“What if
what
gets you?”

“The thing in the sky?” I don't know if he's talking about the reptilian bird or the thunder, but either way, standing here will do no good.

“Come on!” My dad's voice is frustrated and loud. “We need to keep going!”

Elder catches my eyes from across the mob of people. I see the same fear in them that I see in all the other shipborns. They are more scared of the thunder, which is harmless, than the alien life that might kill them.

I push through the crowd to reach Elder. He looks grateful as I approach but scowls when Chris moves behind me.

The fear I saw in him before evaporates. He calls out to his people to keep going and leads the charge himself, striding farther into the woods.

The sky continues to grow darker.

The shadows in the trees seem to have eyes, the stillness of the forest before the storm reminding me of the silence before an attack.

16:
ELDER

There's desperation in the way
we march through the trees now. The shuttle is far enough away that, even if we could somehow make it past the locked doors, we wouldn't be able to return to it before the storm hit, and the trees seem as if they'll never end.

“How much farther?” I ask. I don't like the way it's so humid here—the air seems to steal my breath away.

“We've gone nearly a mile,” Lieutenant Colonel Bledsoe says beside me. Colonel Martin is looking at some sort of instrument, perhaps a compass, and picking out directions. Amy and Chris are behind me, but at least they've stopped flirting. “The probe sensors indicated that water would be near here,” she continues. “If we can find some sort of shelter near that, it would be ideal.” Bledsoe's accent is so strong, I'm grateful that she's still speaking slowly for my benefit.

She looks down at me, waiting for me to contribute my thoughts, and it hits me that if I'd met her before Amy, I would have been scared of her. Honestly, I'm a little scared of her right now. Her eyes seem too big, as if they know too much; and it puts me on edge. Despite the fact that this woman slipping through the forest is both graceful and beautiful, I cannot shake the feeling that she's also dangerous.

No. I shouldn't think that way. I saw how Amy was hurt when others flinched away from her, and I don't want to do that to anyone. I know the way Eldest, who looked just like me, was so quick to hurt others, and I know Amy, who looks nothing like anyone on
Godspeed
, never hurt any of them.

“How sure are we that the probe is accurate?” I ask.

“Pretty sure.”

It's humid here in a way I never felt on
Godspeed
. The air feels thick and damp, like I could swallow it as easily as breathe it. Lieutenant Colonel Bledsoe's skin glistens with sweat. Amy called her “black,” but to me, she looks dark brown, like freshly plowed earth on the Feeder Level or the darkest dyes the weavers used.

“Something wrong?” she says, scowling at me.

I blink, almost miss my step. I didn't realize I'd been staring at her. “I've never seen someone that looked like you.”

“Got a problem with it?” She sounds bemused, but there's a sharp edge to the question.

I shake my head. “No,” I say. “Sorry I was staring. It's just different, that's all.”

Her lips spread in a smile. “'S'alright,” she says. “I've been staring at you lot. Weird, the way you all look the same.”

I pick up my pace again as she starts to outstrip me. “Wait, Lieutenant Colonel Bledsoe,” I call.

She pauses, her lips twitching even farther up. “That's a mouthful, innit? Just call me Emma, then.”

“Emma?”

“It's my first name. Lot better than ‘Lieutenant Colonel Bledsoe,'” she says, trying to imitate my accent. It's so much like what Amy did to me when we first met that I am filled with an immediate sense of relief. Orion was wrong: not all frozens are bad.

The trees start to thin, the branches spreading far enough apart to make speckles of sky visible—which only makes it more obvious how dark the sky is growing. I shiver. None of the Earthborns seem upset by the changing sky, but it's . . . weird, unnatural, the way it changes so quickly.

“Look!” Colonel Martin calls from ahead. Emma picks up her pace, dodging branches as she reaches the front of the crowd.

Colonel Martin's climbed on top of a boulder at the edge of the forest, and he points down, at a wide, clear circle of blue perhaps another half mile away. A lake.

“Fresh water, enough for all of us!” Emma says.

“We have to test the water first,” Colonel Martin says quickly, but he's grinning. This is a triumph for them.

The sky roars, a sound so loud and deafening that my first instinct is to cover my head and look up, trying to find the source of the sound.

“Thunder,” Amy reminds me gently, touching my arm.

And then
fire
explodes across the sky, leaping from one dark cloud to another.

“The frex is that?!” I shout, leaping back.

Amy laughs this time. “Lightning,” she says.

Her laughter grates on me. I'd never seen lightning before, not when it was right in front of me like this. Fortunately, only a few of my people have emerged from the trees by this point, and so only a handful saw the lightning. But their worried cries grow fast.

“We have to find some sort of shelter,” I tell Colonel Martin urgently. “People are going to panic.”

“From a storm?” he asks, doubt in his voice.

“They've never seen a storm, Dad,” Amy tells him.

“What's that?” Chris asks, pointing to the right of the lake Colonel Martin found.

Colonel Martin frowns, but squints in that direction. We all follow his line of sight. A tall hill—or a small mountain—stands in front of a grassy meadow. Its sides are bare rock, yellowish exposed stone. And built into the stone are . . .

“Houses?” Emma asks, shock in her voice.

“Can't be,” Colonel Martin says, staring harder. He snaps his fingers at one of his soldiers, and the man places a pair of binoculars in Colonel Martin's hands. Colonel Martin stares through them, then curses.

“They're ruins. Buildings built straight into the rock, but probably abandoned.”

“We need to go there,” I say.

“Out of the question—we don't know what kind of life-form constructed these buildings.” Colonel Martin passes the binoculars to Emma—but Emma immediately hands them to me.

I stare through the lens. The side of the mountain has been carved into levels, connected by rows of stone steps. Large, even-sided buildings rise up against the hillside, perhaps made using the same stone dug out from the mountain to make the levels. I can see cutouts in the walls of the buildings: windows and doors.

Human-sized windows and doors.

Colonel Martin is right—the entire place looks dusty and old, long abandoned.

“Something could still be there. If there are sentient creatures on this planet, they had to have seen our landing,” Colonel Martin says.

I think about the way the shuttle seemed to be knocked off course. Was that a malfunction of the shuttle, something to do with those giant birds, or was it an attack by whatever being built these structures?

This changes everything.

“I don't trust it,” Colonel Martin continues.

Lightning cracks across the sky. Fat, heavy drops of water start to fall. My people scream. This rain is nothing like the “rain” from
Godspeed
. On
Godspeed
, rain is measured bursts of water from the sprinkler system built into the painted ceiling. But this? No rhythmic falling, no even distribution. The fat, irregular raindrops just plop down on us, clattering through the leaves, splashing against our skin, cool and slick.

“What is this?” a woman shouts. She swipes at her body, trying to get the rain off her, but of course she can't. More falls down.

I hop onto the boulder Colonel Martin still stands on. “Look,” I say, “you're moments away from my people panicking. We need to get to shelter, and we need to get to shelter
now
. Those buildings are the best bet we have!”

Colonel Martin looks at me the same way Eldest did when I thought the light bulbs in the Keeper Level were real stars. “You'd really choose hiding in there with God knows what inside instead of staying out here in a little rain?”

“To us this is not just ‘a little rain.' And you said yourself the buildings are probably abandoned.”

“Besides,” Emma says, “the lightning is dangerous. Can't stay near the trees, stupid to head into the flat areas of land or by the lake. Safest thing is shelter. Here, or
somewhere else
.”

A meaningful look shoots between Emma and Colonel Martin, and from his scowl, I can tell that Amy's father doesn't like whatever it is Emma is implying.

“Rank one, rank two,” Colonel Martin bellows. Emma snaps to attention and the rest of the nearby military gathers around her. “Go first, inspect the buildings. Radio back. Hurry!”

Emma races forward, followed by the rest of the military in the first two ranks. Which must not include Chris, because he stays by Amy's side.

Colonel Martin doesn't look happy, but he heads across the meadow as well, cutting a swath through the high, yellowish-green grass. Now that we're out from the trees, my people are more nervous and scared than ever. I keep looking behind me as I follow Colonel Martin, almost tripping, trying to keep tabs on everyone.

Amy sprints forward, to be beside me. I glance back but can't find the ever-present Chris tagging along. “What is this place?” Amy asks, breathless not from running, but from excitement.

“I don't know.” I hate the childish way seeing Amy with Chris makes me feel, but I can't tamp it down.

The farther in the open we travel, the faster my people go until we're all jogging across the wide meadow, tall grasses whipping against our legs. The rain makes the grains stick to our skin and clothing, and a sweet smell escapes from the broken stalks as we trample the grass in our mad dash toward the buildings.

A crackle escapes the radio at Colonel Martin's shoulder. “All clear, sir,” Emma's voice says through the radio.

Colonel Martin looks back. “We're heading to those buildings!” he shouts, waving his arm forward.

That's all my people need to hear. They quickly overtake him, running, racing as fast as they can to be out of the storm. The rain comes faster and harder, water pouring from the skies so intensely that I can barely see. Amy grabs my hand, her own slippery, pulling me beside her.

A bright flash of lightning illuminates the sky, casting Amy in light that seems to capture her in a single moment of time, not unlike when she was frozen.

All around us, everyone is running with terror. Blind panic, shouts of fear, our primal instincts have taken over.

But Amy runs through the rain, her mouth wide and grinning, her eyes sparkling, relishing every second.