“Thomas?” Glass repeated, scanning the shadow landscape of bodies and wreckage. She needed to find Luke. The only thing more terrifying than being on Earth was the thought of Luke lying somewhere out there, injured and alone.
“My son, Thomas,” the woman said, tightening her grip on Glass’s hand. “We were on different dropships. My neighbor—” She cut herself off with an anguished gasp. “She promised she’d take care of him.”
“We’ll find him,” Glass said, wincing as the woman’s fingernails dug into her skin. She hoped that the first sentence she’d spoken on Earth didn’t turn out to be a lie. She thought back to the chaotic scene she’d barely escaped back on the ship: The crush of wheezing people filling the launch deck, desperate for one of the remaining seats off the dying Colony. The frantic parents who’d become separated from their children. The blue-lipped, shell-shocked kids searching for the family members they’d probably never lay eyes on again.
Glass only managed to escape when the woman cried out in pain and let her hand fall back to the water. “I’ll look for him,” Glass said shakily as she started to inch away. “We’ll find him.”
The guilt building in her stomach was almost enough to stop Glass in her tracks, but she knew she had to keep moving. There was nothing she could do to ease this woman’s suffering. She wasn’t a doctor like Wells’s girlfriend, Clarke. She wasn’t even a people person, like Wells or Luke, who both always knew the right thing to say at the right time. There was only one person on the planet she had any power to help, and she had to find him before it was too late.
“I’m sorry,” Glass whispered, turning back to face the woman, whose face was contorted in pain. “I’ll come back for you. I need to go find my—someone.”
The woman nodded through a clenched jaw and squeezed her eyes shut, tears sneaking from behind her eyelids.
Glass wrenched her gaze away and kept walking. She squinted, trying to make sense of the scene in front of her. The combination of the darkness, the dizziness, the smoke, and the shock of being on Earth seemed to make everything a blur. The dropships had landed on the edge of a lake, leaving piles of smoldering wreckage everywhere she looked. In the distance, she could just make out the faint outline of trees, but she was too distraught to give them more than a fleeting glance. What good were trees or even flowers if Luke wasn’t there to see any of it with her?
Her eyes darted from one dazed and battered survivor to another. An old man sat on a large piece of metal torn from the dropship, his head in his hands. A young boy with a bloody face stood alone, just a few meters away from a tangle of sizzling, sparking wires. Oblivious to the danger, he stood staring blankly up at the sky, as if searching for a way to get back home.
All around lay the broken bodies of the dead. People with the ghosts of heart-wrenching good-byes still on their lips, people who’d never even gotten a glimpse of the blue sky they’d sacrificed everything to see. They would’ve been better off staying behind, taking their last breaths surrounded by their friends and families instead of being left here, all alone.
Still a little unsteady on her feet, Glass staggered toward the nearest figures on the ground, praying with all her might that none of the lifeless faces had Luke’s strong chin, narrow nose, or curly blond hair. She sighed with bittersweet relief as she looked down at the first person. Not Luke. With equal parts dread and hope, she moved to the next body. And the next. She held her breath as she rolled people onto their backs or pushed heavy chunks of wreckage off them. With each bloody, battered stranger, she exhaled and allowed herself to believe that Luke might still be alive.
“Are you okay?”
Startled, Glass jerked her head to the side to follow the voice. A man with a large gash above his left eye was looking at her quizzically.
“Yes, I’m fine,” she said automatically.
“You sure? Shock can do crazy things to the body.”
“I’m okay. I’m just looking…” She trailed off, unable to shape the mass of panic and hope in her chest into words.
The man nodded. “Good. I already checked this area, but if you find any survivors I missed, just shout. We’re gathering the injured over there.” He pointed a finger into the darkness where, in the distance, Glass could just make out the shapes of bent figures hovering over still forms on the ground.
“There’s a woman, over by the water. I think she’s hurt.”
“Okay, we’ll go get her.”
He signaled to someone Glass couldn’t see, then broke into a lurching jog. She felt a strange urge to call out, to tell him that it was better to look for the missing Thomas first. Glass felt sure that the woman would rather bleed out in the water than face a lifetime on Earth without the only person who made her life worth living. But the man was already gone.
Glass took a deep breath and willed herself to keep moving, but her feet no longer seemed connected to her brain. If Luke were unharmed, wouldn’t he have found her by now? The fact that she hadn’t heard his deep voice calling her name through the din meant that, at best, he was lying somewhere, too hurt to move. And at worst…
Glass tried to resist the grim thoughts, but it was like attempting to shove a shadow. Nothing could keep the darkness out of her mind. It would be unimaginably cruel to lose Luke mere hours after their reunion. She couldn’t go through it again, not after what happened to her mother. No. Choking back a sob, she rose onto the balls of her feet and looked around. There was more light now. Some of the survivors had used the burning pieces of dropship to create makeshift torches, but the jagged, flashing light was hardly comforting. Everywhere she looked, Glass saw glimpses of mangled bodies and panicked faces emerging from the shadows.