Shades of Earth (28 page)

59:
AMY

All that's left is to wait.

And so we do.

Dad distributes water—a bucket to each building, with a warning that going to the latrines might be dangerous. We finish the last of the rations we had stored in the colony by noon—all the rest of the food was in the shuttle. We thought sealing the things we needed the most, like food and medicine, behind the steel doors of the shuttle would make it safer. The irony of it makes me want to vomit.

There's only Dad and me in the first building. Without Mom, the building has no chance of ever becoming a real home, so for now it's our base of operations. All the military checks in with us here, for new assignments or permission to rest after patrol.

The nervous tension in the air is stifling.

We're all waiting—for an attack we aren't even sure is coming, against an enemy we've never seen, using a weapon made of flowers.

 

And, despite the waiting, none of us are prepared when the radio at Dad's shoulder crackles to life.

“We see them,” the solider on patrol says over the radio.

Dad shoots up immediately and rushes out of the building, binoculars already in his hand. He scans the forest, but I don't need the binoculars to see the flashes of
something
emerging through the forest.

They're coming.

I squint, trying my best to see them. They're forest green from head to toe, so dark that they blend in with the trees. I don't know if they're made of dark green skin or if they're wearing something to camouflage themselves. Flashes of gold gleam around their waists—scales, like the one Elder described. The aliens are tall, but no taller than Elder, with smooth, bulbous heads and a big round eye that flashes when it catches the sunlight.

“Get inside,” Dad orders. Over the radio he barks, “Prepare to light the fuse! Get the snipers on top of the buildings. This is it!”

I go inside, just like Dad said, but as soon as I reach my window, I lift up on the sill and jump out the other side of the building, just as I did when I snuck out to be with Elder. The thought of those nights makes me pause. If he were with me now like he was with me then, I don't think my heart would be racing with so much fear.

I force myself to focus on what's happening as I sneak around the wall. I'm not going to miss this.

I stick to the shadows in the corner, between the buildings and the mountain. The aliens creep closer. A part of me feared they'd be bug-like, crawling on the ground with spindly spider legs or slithering like a snake. But they walk with two legs and carry their weapons with two arms, just like us.

If we hadn't been watching for them, we might have missed them—maybe that explains why we've never seen them before. Their skin seems to shift, turning a lighter shade of green as they wade through the tall grass of the meadow between the forest and our homes.

They stalk closer and closer. A couple dozen, maybe thirty. That's all the troops they felt they needed against nearly a thousand of us. But they know—they must surely know—that of the thousand, only a handful are armed, and of those weapons, only a few bullets remain.

And then—I only see it because I am looking for it—a flash of light. The fuse is lit.

I hold my breath.

It works.
The fuse flares brightly, and the fire catches quickly. Smoke wafts up and up, trailing through the sky, almost invisible.

This is it.

They're close enough to be seen clearly now.

They reach the smoke.

And they walk right through it.

It does
nothing
.

My eyes widen with shock, but the military scattered throughout the colony don't even hesitate. Pops of gunfire go off immediately—Dad's snipers, from the roofs of the buildings. Not a single alien falls, despite the fact that enough bullets are raining down on them to stop an army. I stare at the aliens incredulously—how is this possible? Neither the smoke nor the bullets stop them?

There's no way we can win this.

One of them lobs a glass bomb at the colony, and it shatters against the paving stones in the street, bringing down half the building I am standing beside with it. I can feel the rumbles through the stone as the mortar cracks and fails, the rocks tumbling down. If I'd still been inside, I would have been crushed.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!” Dad shouts from the street. More gunshots ring out as a bright, yellow, glowing object arcs across the sky toward the colony. Another solar bomb. It hits higher now, and there are screams as the people inside the buildings try to run away.

“Up the mountain! Farther up!” Dad shouts.

But I'm not listening to him.

I'm behind the building, and the path Chris and Elder and I used to sneak to the compound before is clear. No one's looking this way; the fight is focused on the streets and the center of the colony. I can go behind the latrines, cut down near the lake.

If I can reach the compound, maybe Elder can tell me what he's learned.

And if I can't reach Elder, maybe I can detonate the weapon that will kill the aliens.

I take a deep breath.

I have to make a run for it.

Another solar bomb goes off, this one behind me. The aliens are nearly at the colony's edge, lobbing their solar bombs as far into the buildings as they can.

I tell myself I can do this. I'm a runner. I can outrun an alien army.

And then I go.

60:
ELDER

I wake up with four tanks of oxygen
pointed at my face, blowing cool air right at me.

“Thirty-seven,” Bartie says, leaning over me.

I blink.

“Shite, Elder, your eyes are red.”

“His ocular blood vessels burst,” a familiar voice that I can't seem to place says. “Subconjunctival hemorrhages.”

My body shifts, but my shoulders roar in protest. I whimper, sinking back into the ground.

Doc leans over my body, concern on his face. He presses a med patch against my skin. I look through blurry eyes at my arm and see that three other med patches are already adhered there.

“What the frex happened?” I wheeze, my voice raspy.

“I counted to thirty, like you said,” Bartie says. “But you never commed me.”

“Then how?” I croak, unable to finish the sentence.

“I kept counting. I had my ear pressed against the hatch door. At thirty-seven, I heard a dull thud.”

“You opened it?”

“I was scared as shite, let me tell you! But I figured I could close the hatch again if I needed to, and . . . ”

I shut my eyes; the light hurts them too much.

The tanks aimed at my face sputter, then hiss into silence. I take a deep breath, imagining the last of their oxygen filling my lungs, filling my whole body.

“The effects of your little adventure should wear off in time,” Doc says. “Your heart didn't stop, and although you exhibit signs of decompression sickness, you're surprisingly well kept for someone stupid enough to jump out into space.”

I crack my eyes open, but I'm not looking at Doc. I'm looking at Bartie. “It worked?” I say.

He grins at me, and I see my old friend, the one I had when I was thirteen and neither of us thought a world existed beyond the ship. “It worked,” he says.

I struggle to sit up, my shoulders throbbing, my skin too sensitive, my joints aching. I risk opening my eyes more fully and find that I am lying at the bottom of a hole that was once the pond. The hatch in the center is flung wide open. Bartie pulls me up so I can stand, and I peer down into the darkness. The tube from the auto-shuttle is securely locked in place. “I can't believe that frexing worked,” I say, turning to Bartie.

He cringes. “Your eyes look like shite,” he says, but he's grinning too, just as excited as I am. “I can't believe you had enough chutz to do that!”

I look around the ship. It's so much bigger than I remembered it, but at the same time, so much smaller. Everything looks exactly the same, but strange somehow. It's as if I stepped into my bedroom, and even though everything is exactly where I left it, I can tell a stranger invaded my privacy.

“Let's get you to the Hospital,” Doc says. “I have some eyedrops that might help.”

“I'm really thirsty,” I say. I take a step and nearly fall over. Bartie grabs me by the elbow, holding me up, and even though I want to shake him off and tell him I can walk on my own, I'm not sure I can.

When we get to the Hospital, Doc hooks me up to a saline drip, despite my protests that I don't need it, and he shoots more medicine directly into the line. Then he hands me a small mirror so I can get a look at my face. There are bruises on my skin, and I can see little red strings of veins standing out. The whites of my eyes are completely red, as if they are filled with blood. No wonder Bartie kept mentioning them. Doc puts two thick, yellow drops of something in my eyes. It makes them burn, but he assures me it'll help.

“Dismissed,” Bartie tells Doc.

Doc looks as if he's about to protest, but Bartie's face is unforgiving. I'd almost forgotten—Bartie is in charge of determining what punishment Doc should pay for the crimes he committed on the ship just before we left.

Doc carefully takes off his stethoscope and places it neatly on the table. He adjusts the medical instruments on the small table, checks my IV, nods once to me, and goes. Before he rounds the corner, two Feeders—they used to be butchers, before Bartie's revolution—start walking on either side of Doc, escorting him . . . somewhere.

I wonder if that's Doc's life now—a prisoner, until he has the rare chance to work his medicine. Does he have an apprentice who will take over after him, making his one skill redundant?

That thought reminds me of Kit, and when I think of Kit now, all I can envision is the way she died.

I swallow back my questions about Doc and his punishments. That's not important compared to the matter at hand.

Bartie pulls up a chair closer to me. “How did you know?” he asks.

“Know?”

“That the engine's failing. That we can't survive on
Godspeed
.” Bartie states this with such sincerity that I know he's already come to terms with it, and with the black med patches.

I smirk at him. “Knew you couldn't handle the ship without me.”

Bartie tries to laugh, but this is not something he can discuss lightly.

“It's because of Doc,” Bartie says. “When he blew up the Bridge”—
killing Shelby and the others,
I think—“the engine was damaged.”

“Damaged?” I ask.

Bartie nods grimly. “So you came to save us.” There's a tone of defeat in his voice, one that I understand all too well.

“The auto-shuttle's big,” I say. “We can put five hundred in the transport boxes and the rest in the cargo hold. There won't be much room for cargo, and in what room there is, we need to pack away every single bit of food we can. All our supplies on the planet were destroyed. Whatever we can take from the ship in terms of survival will make a huge difference for us all.” I hesitate. “But you should know, the ‘monsters' Orion talked about—they're very real, and they are very good at killing us. Before I came here, I released nearly five hundred bodies to the stars.”

Bartie doesn't look at me when he says, “If it's a matter of dying here or dying there, I think I'd like to at least see the world first.”

“You didn't always think that way,” I comment dryly.

Bartie's gaze doesn't flinch. “That was before I knew the ship would fail so frexing soon.”

I explain everything to Bartie, from Orion's dying words to the latest alien attack on the colony, my strength returning to me as the meds and fluids enter my system. I start with the destruction of the shuttle and the deaths of so many of our people. We continue talking as Bartie and I walk outside, to the garden. There are oddly few people here, but Bartie tells me that most tend to stay on the City side of the ship. There are too many dark memories leaking from the hatch in the hole that used to be the pond. People don't like to be reminded of the choice they made, the friends they let go.

We stop at the Plague Eldest statue, and both of us stare at it silently for a moment.

“It all begins and ends here, huh?” I can't tell what Bartie's thinking of, but I'm remembering the way I used to view the Plague Eldest, as if he was the model of everything I should be, an ideal I could only aspire to. But then I found out I was made of the same stuff he was and that it wasn't either of our DNA that made us the leaders we had to be for our ship.

It doesn't matter now. The Plague Eldest statue is only made of concrete, not replicated DNA and broken promises. The statue's face is worn away, rivulets embedded into his cheeks as if from tears. “He knew,” I tell Bartie. “The Plague Eldest. He knew whatever it is that's down there. He
must
be the king Orion refers to with that clue, and the only thing missing from Orion's puzzle is information about who the aliens are and what they want. How to stop them.”

Bartie looks doubtful. “You got all that from a scribbled-in illustrated children's book?”

I shake my head. “You don't know how Orion played with us. It was all a game to him, always a game.”

“And this . . . whatever . . . that Orion has hidden is supposed to be some sort of way to . . . fight these ‘aliens'?” Bartie sounds skeptical—of both the clue and the threat on the planet.

I sigh, looking up at the concrete face of the Plague Eldest. The truth is, I don't know. At all. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not. I wish Orion was here to tell me himself . . . but now it's too late. “I don't like your odds of survival.” Bartie leans forward. “But I think they're better than ours.” He jerks his head toward the statue of the Plague Eldest. “So what do you think is inside?”

“No idea,” I say. “Maybe a vid recording or a book. Maybe another frexing clue that will lead us down another ‘rabbit hole,' as Amy likes to say.” I grin at him, but the smile's really for Amy, even though she can't see it. “Either way,” I say, “let's find out.”