Homecoming

Pushing hard against the force of the ship’s velocity, she turned her head to look at Luke. For a moment, Glass couldn’t hear the sounds of whimpering and crying or the crunch of metal. She couldn’t feel her mother’s last breath. She could only see the side of Luke’s face, the perfect profile and strong jaw that she’d traced in her mind night after night during those terrible months in Confinement, when she’d been sentenced to die on her eighteenth birthday.

Glass was brought back to reality by the sound of metal ripping from metal. It vibrated through her eardrums and down into her jaw, through her bones and into her gut. She ground her teeth together. She watched in helpless horror as the roof peeled off and flew away, as if it were nothing more than a scrap of fabric.

She forced herself to turn back to Luke, who’d closed his eyes but was now gripping her hand with renewed intensity.

“I love you,” she said, but her words were swallowed up by the screams all around them. Suddenly, with a bone-shaking crack, the dropship slammed into Earth, and everything went black.

In the distance, Glass heard a low, guttural moaning, a sound full of more anguish than anything she’d ever heard. She tried to open her eyes, but the slightest effort sent her head into a sickening spin. She gave up and allowed herself to sink back into the darkness. A few moments passed. Or was it a few hours? Again, she struggled against the comforting quiet, fighting her way toward consciousness. For a sweet, groggy millisecond, she had no idea where she was. All she could focus on was the barrage of strange smells. Glass hadn’t known it was possible to smell so many things at once: There was something she sort of recognized from the solar fields—her favorite spot to meet Luke—but amplified a thousand times over. There was something sweet, but not like sugar or perfume. Deeper, richer. Every breath she took sent her brain into overdrive as it struggled to identify the swirling scents. Something spicy. Metallic. Then a familiar scent jolted her brain to attention. Blood.

Glass’s eyes fluttered open. She was in a space so large she couldn’t see the walls, and the transparent, star-filled ceiling looked like it was miles away. Slowly, her awareness clicked into place, and her confusion gave way to awe. She was looking up at the sky—the real sky, on Earth—and she was alive. But her wonder lasted only a few moments before an urgent thought ripped through her brain, and panic shot through her body. Where was Luke? She snapped into alertness and pushed herself into an upright position, ignoring the nausea and pain that tried to force her back to the ground.

“Luke!” she cried out, jerking her head from side to side, praying to see his familiar outline among the mass of unfamiliar shadows. “Luke!” The growing chorus of screams and wails swallowed her cries. Why won’t someone turn on the lights? she thought groggily, before remembering that she was on the ground. The stars gave off nothing more than a dull glimmer, and the moon offered just enough light for Glass to tell that the moaning, flailing black shapes were her fellow passengers. This had to be a nightmare. This wasn’t what Earth was supposed to be like. This wasn’t a place worth dying for. She called for Luke again, but there was no response.

She needed to stand, but her body felt strangely heavy, as if invisible weights were tugging on her limbs. Gravity here felt different, harsher—or was she injured? Glass placed her hand on her shin and gasped. Her legs were wet. Was she bleeding? She glanced down, afraid of what she might find. Her pant legs were torn, and the skin underneath was badly scratched, but there were no visible wounds. She placed her hands on the floor, no, ground, and gasped. She was sitting in water—water that stretched out far in front of her across an impossibly vast distance, with only the faintest shadow of trees at its far edge. Glass blinked, waiting for her eyes to recalibrate and reveal something that made more sense, but the image didn’t change. Lake. The word slid smoothly into her mind. She was sitting on the edge, on the shore, of a lake on Earth—a fact that felt as surreal to her as the devastation surrounding her on every side. When she turned to look, she saw only horror: Bodies lying limp and broken on the ground. Wounded people crying and begging for help. The mangled, smoking shells of several dropships that had all landed within a few meters of each other, their frames cracked open and splintered. People running into the still smoldering wreckage, then clambering back out with heavy, still figures draped over their shoulders.

Who had carried her out? If it was Luke, where was he?

Glass struggled to her feet, her legs shaky beneath her. She locked her knees to prevent them from giving way and swung her arms out to regain her balance. She stood in the icy water, cold creeping up her legs. She took a deep breath and felt her head clear slightly, although her legs continued to tremble. She took a few wobbly steps forward and knocked her foot against a few rocks below the surface.

Glass looked down and inhaled sharply. There was just enough moonlight to tell that the water was tinged a deep pink. Did the pollution and radiation of the Cataclysm cause lakes to change color? Or was there an area of Earth where water was naturally pink? She’d never paid much attention in her Earth geography tutorials—a fact she was starting to regret more and more by the second. But a desperate cry from a crumpled figure on the ground nearby brought the painful answer to her mind: This wasn’t a long-lasting side effect of radiation—the water was colored with blood.

She shuddered, then walked toward the woman who had called out. She was slumped on the shore, the bottom half of her body in the rapidly reddening water. Glass stooped down and took her hand. “Don’t worry, you’re going to be fine,” she said, hoping she sounded more certain than she felt. The woman’s eyes were wide with fear and pain. “Have you seen Thomas?” she wheezed.