Shades of Earth

I wander along the walls, my fingers trailing across the dusty yellow stones of the building. The room is the same size as one would be on Earth, the doors and windows perfectly proportioned for humans. Steps lead up to a second story. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” I say.

Mom doesn’t need to ask what I’m talking about. “It is.” Her voice drops an octave. “Your father’s worried.”

We both stop by the window and look to him. He’s talking with Emma in the doorway in hushed tones. They both look angry and tired. As if he can feel our gaze on him, Dad turns around and offers us a weak smile, a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.

I realize now that Dad has a trapped look about him. The same look Elder had, after Eldest died. Haunted.

Dad turns back to Emma and continues talking.

I trace the outline of the stone wall with my finger. Now that I’m right in front of it, I can tell that the buildings are actually made of large, handmade slabs of brick the same color as the soil. There was intention in the creation of these buildings, but they are empty now and so long-abandoned that there’s nothing but echoes of life clinging to the stark stone.

My hand trails to the window, my fingers dipping into a depression in the stone windowsill. It’s perfectly square, each line straight and carefully carved in the stone.

“We don’t know what that’s for,” Mom says, looking at the depression in the sill, “but there’s a square in every window in every building.”

Dr. Watase steps forward. “Whatever built these buildings obviously had sentience,” she says. “The popular theory among the scientists is that the original residents of these buildings had some sort of idol that they put here. Perhaps their gods are linked to the suns; the windows all face the light.”

Emma leaves, and Dad watches her go. I step around Dr. Watase and head straight to him, wrapping my arms around him like I used to do when I believed he could solve any problem. The hardness in his face softens. “I’m glad you’re okay, Amy,” he says. He drops a kiss on the top of my head.

“Of course I’m okay.” I shoot him as big a smile as I can muster.

He hugs me tighter. “This . . . none of this was what I expected it to be.”

“Don’t forget, Dad,” I say gently. “This was my choice. I was the one who decided to come on the mission.”

He opens his mouth, but I already know what he’s going to say: that it wasn’t supposed to be a choice at all, and I shouldn’t have come.

I don’t give him the chance.

“I’m here now,” I say. “And I’m happy. I’m with you and Mom.”

He squeezes me one more time, then lets me go.

“What were you talking with Emma about?” I ask.

“We have a couple problems we’re working on.”

“Tell me.”

He looks down at me, and I know he’s seeing me only as his daughter, his child. “Tell me,” I say again. “Maybe I can help.”

To his credit, he holds back his skeptical look. “Well, first of all, we’re having trouble with the probe. We haven’t been able to communicate with Earth.”

My heart stops. “You mean you weren’t able to communicate with Earth again, right? You communicated with them just after we landed, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Dad says, and then, almost as if he’s talking to himself: “Yes, of course.” After a moment he adds, “But the shuttle’s communication system is completely broken now, and we couldn’t get the one on the probe to work.”

“What’s wrong with it?” I bite my lip, waiting for Dad’s answer.

“We were able to establish a communication link—but we’re not hearing anything from the other end.” The look he gives me doesn’t bring me any comfort.

“Is something wrong?” I ask, leaning forward, already guessing the answer.

Dad shrugs. “I think we just need to work on it more. It is old, Amy.” He looks away from me. “But that’s only one of our problems.”

“What are our other problems?”

“One of the shipborns is missing—and Dr. Gupta. We think the shipborn wandered off and Dr. Gupta went after her, but . . . ”

“When did they go missing?”

“Sometime in the storm.” Dad’s eyes are distant. I know he’s concerned, but his concern doesn’t have the same acidic taste of the dread rising up in my belly.

They’ve been gone for nearly a whole day.

“What shipborn?” I ask. Dad said “her”—so it’s not Elder that’s missing, but maybe Kit. . . .

“Laura? Lauren?” Dad shakes his head.

“Lorin?” I ask quietly.

“That’s the one.”

Lorin had been wearing a Phydus patch, and I’d been guiding her before the storm, before I let her go. If she wandered off in the chaos of lightning and thunder, it’s my fault.

He looks down and notices my face. “Amy, don’t worry,” he says, squeezing my arm. “It was rainy and dark last night, but Juliana is a good tracker; she’ll find them now that the suns are up.”

The radio at Dad’s shoulder crackles to life. He steps away from me, pressing the button to confirm that he’s ready to receive a message. Emma’s voice comes out over the radio. “—Found them, sir,” she says, her voice fuzzy.

“Gupta and the shipborn woman?”

“Not Gupta,” Emma says. “But the shipborn and Juliana.”

“Good. Send them back to the ruins.”

“Sir, I can’t.”

“What?” Dad asks.

“Sir, they’re dead. Both of them.”

20: ELDER

The first thing I feel when I see Amy running up the steps to the buildings on the second level, her red hair swishing behind her, is relief.

She’s alive. She’s awake, and she’s fine, and she’s alive.

The second thing I feel is fear.

The look on her face tells me that something is very, very wrong. “What is it?” I ask.

“Dad just left with Mom and some of the scientists,” she says, breathless. “He told me not to leave . . . told me not to tell you. . . . ”

“Tell me what?” My insides are churning.

“They found Lorin.”

“And?” I ask, already dreading the answer. Kit and I spent the better part of yesterday compiling a detailed list of every single person from the shuttle. Losing Lorin in the crowd ate away at both of us; we can’t let that happen again. “Isn’t that a good thing?”

“She’s dead.”

My eyes widen with shock, then anger. Dead? “How?” I demand.

Amy shakes her head. “She’s dead, and so is Juliana Robertson, who’d been sent to find her and Dr. Gupta. I don’t know how. Dr. Gupta’s still missing. I just heard—”

She heard about the deaths, and even though her father forbade it, the first thing she did was tell me about them.

“Where?” I ask.

Amy shakes her head. “I don’t know. Near the lake, I think.”

“I have to go.”

She grabs me by the elbow. “You can’t. Dad would be furious—”

“So?” My mind is racing. The dangers of this planet are so much greater than I originally thought. The reptilian bird that tried to eat my face, marred footprints in the forest of something nearby, watching us, the flowers that nearly drowned Amy, and now two more are dead. . . .

There’s so much we don’t understand. It’s our ignorance that will kill us on this planet.

Our ignorance . . .

But someone knew. There’s one person here who knew what perils this world held all along. And his knowledge might save us now.

I’m reminded of Orion’s last words on the floppies he left for Amy. His voice trembled and cracked with fear. Is the ship so bad that you have to face the monsters below? Is it worth the risk of your life—of everyone’s lives?

My eyes meet Amy’s.

He knew.

“Orion,” I say. He can tell us. We won’t let him speak in riddles and codes, we’ll force him to tell us everything he knows. If he doesn’t . . .

Amy’s face drains of color. “Orion,” she whispers. Her eyes focus on me. “Elder, Orion. We didn’t—we forgot . . . his timer.”

Frex. Between the shuttle locking us out and being forced into the ruins . . . no one has reset his timer.

Amy and I both take off at a run, crashing through the trees and not even bothering to look up to see if there are any more of the bird-creatures waiting to attack. For a brief moment, I worry that we won’t be able to find the way back to the shuttle, but moving nearly fifteen hundred people yesterday left more than enough trail for us to follow back. Locating a place to settle seemed to take forever because there were so many of us and we didn’t know where we were going—we only knew that the probe indicated water. But there are just two of us now and returning to the shuttle takes far less time than I expected.

Amy bounds up the ramp and tries the door. “Still locked,” she growls.

I slam into the seat in front of the control panel. There has to be something I can do. I swipe my hand across the onboard controls, setting the shuttle’s computer to do a full scan of all operations.

“Why weren’t you there?” Amy asks as I lean back, staring at the control panel in frustration, waiting for the results.

“There?” I ask. The sensors seem to be reading fine now—but then why is the shuttle still in lockdown?

“When I woke up.”

My fingers freeze over the shuttle’s controls. Do I tell her that I spent the night outside the building her parents kept her in, propped under the window so I could hear if she woke up? Do I tell her that when the suns rose, the first thing I did—before checking on my people, before re-checking everything with Kit—was stand on my tiptoes so I could look at her face in the morning light? That I barely slept, racked with guilt that it was I who nearly killed her . . . again?

“I should have been,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

Amy sniffs. I glance up at her. She’s looking not at me, but at the locked door. “Let’s get this open,” she says, the closest she’ll come to accepting my apology.

I drop underneath the control panel, looking for the small box labeled FUSES AND SENSORS. The wires connecting the air pressure sensors are covered in black tape. They must have frayed or something long ago and then been hastily repaired—no wonder they malfunctioned. I’m surprised to find the tape still tacky; that repair must have been made gens ago.

But either way, they seem fine now. And if the sensors are operational—who the frex knows why they cut out in the first place—then I should be able to override the lockdown procedure.

The military authorization code request flashes across the computer screen as I crawl out from under the control panel. Shite. I don’t know Colonel Martin’s ten-digit secret code. I try to bypass the request. There must be some way—after all, Orion himself figured out the way to break open every door on Godspeed, including the ones on this shuttle.