Shades of Earth (4 page)

7:
AMY

As soon as the door slams shut,
I spin Elder around, looking for wounds. All I can think is,
I almost lost him
. Every other thought—excitement about the planet, anticipation for my parents' return, fear of the monsters outside—all of that is gone as my eyes and my heart focus on the blood leaking down Elder's chest. He knocks my hands aside, taking off his shirt and using it to blot out the blood on the scrapes. They don't look deep, just jagged and rough. I grab some of the disinfectant Kit had me using to help with the stitches and spray Elder down.

“How did you know to come outside and help me?” Elder asks, still breathless.

“I heard that pterodactyl-looking thing scream—it sounded so much closer than before.” I pause. “What was that thing?”

Elder shakes his head, looking at his ruined shirt. “One of Orion's frexing monsters, I guess. Did you see anything in the forest?”

I shake my head. “What was in the forest?”

“I . . . I don't know.” Elder finally meets my eyes. “Think one of those things knocked into the side of the ship when we were landing? It was big enough to throw us off course.”

“I don't know,” I say, echoing Elder. I am only starting to realize how much I just don't know. Like, for starters, what the hell was that
thing
? It looked kind of like a pterodactyl, with a pointed head and massive wings and jagged claws, but there was also something distinctly
alien
about it.

Alien. That's what everything on this planet is to us. I suppress a shudder, my hands instinctively gripping the still-warm gun.

I should have been able to hit that creature; I should have killed it. But I was too scared, afraid that I might accidentally hit Elder.

And afraid of
it.

Elder takes the gun from me. “I'll put this back in the armory,” he says. “And I think I should take a closer look at what we have there.”

I try to push the image of the beast from my mind as I head back to the cryo chamber, but I keep seeing the way it opened its mouth, lowering it toward Elder's face. . . .

Kit grabs me as soon as I re-enter the cryo room. A few people look up fearfully—they know Elder was outside, and they heard the monster's scream after he left the shuttle. They think whatever it was got him. “He's fine,” I manage. “Everything's fine.”

They are happy to believe the lie, at least for now.

“Nearly done,” Kit says, pushing the hair out of her face and leaving a smear of blood on her forehead. “Two bones that need setting, and then the nurses and I will check the women, just as a precaution. . . . ”

My stomach sinks. I'd nearly forgotten—the pregnant women.

“Anything else I can do?” I ask.

Kit gives me a watery smile. “You've already been a huge help.”

I watch as she walks toward the last group of people waiting for medical aid. My hands are bloody, my arms are tired, and I want nothing more than to curl up in bed and forget about this day. Maybe this was all a huge mistake.

“Amy?” asks a voice I know, a voice I love, a voice I never thought I'd hear again, oh God, oh God,
oh God
.

I turn around, and standing there, looking exactly as I remembered him, is my father.

“Daddy!” I scream, and launch myself at him.

And his arms, his arms, they wrap around me, they pull me tight to him, and everything is fine, everything is
wonderful
, because I finally, finally have my dad back.

I'm sobbing and laughing and choking and sputtering and crying and speaking all at the same time.

“Amy,” he says, a chuckle in his voice. “What's going on?”

I step back. My father's wearing a green surgical gown, not unlike the one that Doc tried to wrap me in when I first awoke. I can see that nearly every one of the cryo boxes is empty now that people are starting to get up, to pull the gowns off the little metal arms over the boxes to clothe themselves with. And Mom—

I run to her. I skid around the open cryo boxes and the other frozens starting to wake up.
Mom.
And though I've dreamed about seeing her with my eyes open a million times, my dreams were nothing,
nothing
compared to actually seeing her.

Mom's laughing—her voice cracks from disuse—but the music of her laughter is there, and it wraps around me just the way her arms do. “I told you that wouldn't be so bad,” she whispers in my hair.

I choke out a sob. She doesn't know. She thinks I just woke up too. She thinks I've been sleeping beside her. She doesn't know about the three months I lived on the ship, the three months I thought I'd never see her again.

Mom's hands frame my face, and I notice that they're still as cold as ice. I glance past her shoulder, toward the hallway that leads to the armory, the bridge, and outside. I want Elder to be here; I want to introduce him to my parents. I want him to understand why I needed them, how everything is better now that they're with me. But he's not here.

“Oh, baby,” Mom says, her eyes brimming with joy. “We made it! We finally made it!” She pulls me close to her again, squeezing me in a tight hug. “There's a whole new world for us to discover together,” she says into my hair.

“I missed you so much,” I whisper, the sound cracking as my voice catches.

Mom pulls back, tucking a piece of my hair behind my ear. “What do you mean?”

Suddenly, I notice the silence permeating the room. The people from the ship are watching the frozens awaken warily, and the frozens are eyeing the people from the ship with something like fear, something like caution.

My father steps closer, and this movement brings every eye to us. “Why are you dressed like that?” he asks, taking in my homespun tunic and pants.

I turn to face my mom, and I forget about everyone but the three of us. This is my world: my mother, my father, and me.

“I woke up early,” I say, staring into Mom's green eyes that everyone says are exactly the same as mine.

A little frown shadows her face.

“How early?” my father asks.

The answer fades from my lips. At first I thought I was fifty years early and that my father and I would be having this conversation when I was an old woman. Then I thought I was a lifetime early and that I would die before having this chance.

“Three months early,” I say, because until just this moment, I hadn't realized that the clock had stopped.

“Three months?” my mother gasps.

“Over a hundred days,” I answer. I lost track at the end, when I realized the days on
Godspeed
didn't matter anymore because they were ending.

“What happened?” my mother asks, reaching for my wrist.

I open my mouth, but no words fall out. She's holding my wrist in exactly the same spot that Luthor held me down.
What happened?
I was promised a world, but I awoke to a cage.

There is so much I want to tell her. I need to tell her.

But as I look into her face, I know: it doesn't matter. Not now, not in this moment. What matters right now is this: we're each of us standing here, together, alive,
together
.

Dad steps closer to us, dropping one hand on my shoulder. He opens his mouth, and I'm not sure what I expect him to say, but it's not this: “What's going on?”

And the moment we shared melts like the ice dripping down the drain in the floor.

Dad looks out at the crowd of silent watchers from
Godspeed
—the wounded, the scared. “What is going on?” he repeats, authority ringing in his voice. He's looking for a leader, and Elder's not here.

The people from
Godspeed
don't know how to react. For a moment, I see my family, my people, the way they do. Strange. Weird. They just pulled themselves from their cryo chambers—cryo chambers that the people from the ship didn't even know existed until recently—and now there's this man with pale skin like mine, staring at them, demanding information from them. If they feared me, what must they think of my father? Of the ninety-six other people from Earth who are rising from their icy graves to take over?

After a moment, Kit steps forward. She doesn't speak, though. Her eyes go to me.

Slowly, my father turns, searching my face for an answer.

Mom strokes my hair one last time until the tension in the air makes her step back. She moves to stand beside my father, and I notice the way their hands brush against each other.

“Amy? Why were you over there, with those people? What happened?” he asks, each question dropping in volume until the last one is for my ears alone.

“Come with me,” I say. This is one discussion I'd rather have in private.

Instead, my father looks around, scanning the chambers. “I'm not the one in charge,” he says. “Robertson or Kennedy—”

“They're dead,” I say.

His eyes snap down to me, and for a moment, I don't recognize him. He's never looked at me this way before. He's never looked at me like he was a colonel instead of my father.

“What's going on?” he orders.

“D-dad,” I stutter over the name. “There was . . . I mean, the ship . . . It's not like what we thought it would be. These people were born on the ship,” I say, waving my arm toward Kit and the others. I watch his face, carefully waiting for the moment when he finally notices that everyone from
Godspeed
looks the same. His eyes narrow in a calculating gaze. “You don't understand. A lot of stuff has happened. And we just got the shuttle to land. It—sort of crashed. And there are a lot of people injured, and we do have a leader, but—”

My father's eyes soften as I try to stutter through an explanation. He pulls me closer, wrapping his strength around me, and I feel safe for the first time in more than three centuries.

“I want to know more,” he tells me in a low voice. “We'll talk later.” Over the top of my head, he barks, “Bledsoe!”

A woman a few rows away stands at attention. I gasp—I know her. She's the woman Orion nearly killed, the one Elder and I saved while Theo Kennedy drowned in his cryo box. My mind goes back to the chart I made three months ago. Emma Bledsoe, thirty-four years old, a US Marine originally from South Africa.

“Sir,” Bledsoe calls back to my father.

“Operation Genesis in effect,” he says.

I don't know what Operation Genesis is, but Emma Bledsoe obviously does: she immediately begins calling out to individuals—the other military personnel who'd been frozen—and instructs them to line up in the space between those from
Godspeed
and those from Earth.

I glance over the heads of the military people and catch Kit's eyes. She's struggling to keep her nurses working on the remaining injured, but there's real fear in the way she holds her stiff body, the way she won't fully turn her back to us. Fear of my people—fear of my father.

“Dad,” I say, “there are a lot of injured people. The crash was—”

“Sir!” Bledsoe calls back, interrupting me before I have a chance to mention Elder's theory that the pterodactyl-looking things caused the crash. Her voice is loud and clear, but she has an odd accent—British, maybe, or Australian. “There are three casualties among the shipborn.” She moves to stand over the bodies of the people who didn't survive the landing.

“What happened?” My father ignores me as he moves through the crowd to inspect the bodies. “This woman looks as if she was choked.” In the crowd, I can see the dead woman's friend quietly sobbing as my father roughly tilts the woman's head to look at the marking around her throat.

I notice Lorin, the woman whose shoulder I stitched, standing to the side, staring down at one of the dead men. She shuffles nervously back as Bledsoe and my father draw closer to me, too afraid to try to move past them. Her panicked eyes meet mine, and I shoot her a sympathetic smile.

“What happened?” Dad barks again.

“We had to use tethers to secure the people during the landing,” Kit says, trying to keep the quaking out of her voice. “It slipped around his neck, and—”

“Why didn't you use the magnetic harnesses?” Dad snaps.

“Magnetic . . . harnesses?” Kit asks.

Dad stomps over to the wall—Lorin squeaks in terror and darts out of the way—and he bends down at the floor. His fingers feel along the tiled metal, and he does something—a flick of his wrist, a push of a button—and the metal panel lifts up. Reaching inside, he withdraws a handful of canvas straps with big, black buckles. “There are three thousand harnesses in storage here just so that you can secure your people to the floors and walls in the event of an emergency shuttle landing. Why didn't you use them?” His voice is angry, accusing.

“We . . . we didn't know they were there,” Kit says meekly, her eyes wide with shock.

I can't rip my gaze from the dead. What a stupid, stupid way to die. Killed just because we didn't know about the damn harnesses.

“The captain should have known about the proper procedures for emergency shuttle launch,” Dad says. He exudes frustration and anger, and even though he's wearing a silly green medical gown that opens in the back, he still carries with him more authority than I've ever seen from him before, and everyone—people from
Godspeed
and those from Earth—is listening to his every word.

“It's not like that,” I say. “You don't understand, Dad, things—”

He cuts me off with a glance, and I shut up. “This is a mess,” he growls. “Bledsoe, where are the medical personnel?”

“Here, sir,” Bledsoe says, drawing aside five people—three men and two women.

“Dr. Gupta,” Dad says, addressing one of the men. “Have your team aid with the injured,” Dad commands.

The medical professionals step forward, but I can already see this won't work. If the people from
Godspeed
worried about me with my pale skin and red hair, at least they've had three months to see I wasn't a threat. I can see these people through their eyes, and while I know it's silly, I understand why they flinch away from the Indian man, why they don't understand the woman with the Southern accent, why they rush to Kit instead of allowing the black man to wrap their wounds. I want to stay and help—but what good could I do?