Shades of Earth

And she’s dead now.

It’s not fair. I am perfectly aware that this thought is childish, of no more use than a tantrum, but I can’t help it. It isn’t fair.

“Look at the way these wounds were made,” Amy’s mother says as she bends over the body.

“It’s almost like she was shot with an exploding bullet,” Amy says.

Amy meets my eyes, and I can tell we’re thinking the same thing. There might not be any weapons like that in the armory, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something in the compound Amy and I discovered. Or in the hands of whatever kind of alien is out there.

Amy’s mother silently starts setting up for an autopsy. Colonel Martin and his men leave, but I stay. I want to see this. I want to know what killed Kit.

Chris stays too—he’s Amy’s guard, after all. But I don’t like the way he looks at Amy, like she belongs to him, and I can’t help but smirk when he starts to turn a little green as he watches the autopsy.

Amy’s mother gathers as much information from the outside of Kit’s body as she can. Cotton swabs and fingernail scrapings. She labels and bags everything carefully, handing it all to Amy, who takes it without a word.

I stare over the body at Amy, who meets my eyes. Neither of us speaks, but her look is filled with sympathy—and anger. Kit shouldn’t have died. Not like this.

Kit’s eyes keep popping open, even though Dr. Martin’s closed them twice now. Her mouth gapes as if she’s screaming when Amy’s mother peels her skin away, looking deep into the wound.

I try to blur my eyes, to stop myself from identifying the different shapes and colors of organs and bones and veins and flesh and fat and all those things that are not meant to be seen, that should be hidden, always, behind skin and life. I could easily fit my head in the hole in Kit’s chest—there’s nothing there now but scorched flesh and blackened blood.

Dr. Martin angles a light into the wound, then takes a pair of tweezers from Amy. She bags something that I can’t see from where I am, then hands it to Amy. “See what you can discover about this,” she says.

Amy takes the small bag over to the worktable, and I follow her. It’s a cowardly move, but I don’t think I can face Kit’s lifelessness anymore today.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Shards of something,” she says. She uses tweezers to pick up a long piece of what looks like glass from the bag. Narrow and clear, with razor-sharp edges. It’s as thin as a needle, and Amy grips it as gently as possible. Too gently—the glass slips out of the tweezers, clattering to the metal table. I suck in a gasp of air, waiting for the glass to shatter.

But it doesn’t.

Amy picks it back up with the tweezers, squeezing it so hard her hands shake from the pressure. The glass doesn’t break.

She sets it on the table and picks up a screwdriver. Lodging the tip of the flat-head screwdriver against the center of the glass shard, she pushes down with one hand . . . two hands . . . all her weight.

The glass still doesn’t break.

Amy finally puts the shard on a specimen slide and pushes it under the microscope. After looking at it a moment, she steps aside so I can see. It looks like normal glass but with thin lines of gold spreading out like sunbeams, almost invisible even with the microscope’s amplification. It reminds me of . . . something . . .

“We definitely don’t have any weapons that leave a wound like that, that leave behind glass,” Amy says.

“Whatever else is on this planet has better weapons; that’s what you’re saying.” We speak in low tones so neither Chris nor Amy’s mother can hear.

Amy nods silently, worry all over her face.

I start pacing, a habit I’ve picked up from Amy. We’re facing an enemy that’s smarter and faster than us, that has better weapons and no problem using them. Not just the exploding bullets that killed Kit, but probably also some way of controlling the pteros.

If they’re so smart, they must have a reason for killing who they’re killing. They could have taken me and Amy last night, but they went for Kit.

Why?

They took Dr. Gupta—a medical doctor, not a scientist. They took Juliana Robertson, a military person. And Lorin. Poor, simple Lorin, who was drugged up on Phydus at the time.

I stop.

Kit’s bloody, muddy clothes are heaped in a pile in the corner. I race over to them, moving so suddenly that Amy’s mother squeaks in surprise. She watches me as if I’m loons as I rifle through the pockets in Kit’s oversized white lab coat. Both pockets are filled with med patches of all different colors—lavender for pain, yellow for anxiety, blue for digestion.

But there’s not a single green patch.

I know Kit had dozens of Phydus patches. I saw them yesterday. She was still giving them out; she kept them with her. I may not have approved, but I know she didn’t just throw away all the Phydus after my feeble objections.

But there’s not a single one here.

Lorin was on Phydus. Dr. Gupta was talking to Kit about Phydus when they were walking through the forest to go to the ruins. Maybe the aliens—the more I think about it, it has to be aliens that we’re up against—saw Lorin in her drugged state and took her—and Dr. Gupta, who was with her and might have been able to tell them about what was happening. Juliana Robertson . . . she’d been sent to find Dr. Gupta and Lorin.

What if she found them? What if that’s why she was killed?

But they couldn’t have told the aliens much about the drug that controlled Lorin.

Kit could, though. She knew exactly what happened when someone put on a pale green med patch.

I might be on a whole new planet, but I still can’t escape Phydus.

35: AMY

I’m exhausted by the time I leave the lab with Mom. And we’re no closer to figuring out what killed Kit—or, rather, who killed Kit.

The only thing we’re clear on is that something—someone—is targeting us.

It was bad enough when we feared the planet. But the planet is an amorphous thing. Fearing it is like fearing nature. It did not want to kill us, it just did, much like a wild animal at hunt.

But to know that there’s something specific, sentient, and malicious that’s murdering us? Elder’s theory about aliens is sounding more and more accurate.

It makes me very glad to have Chris as my personal guard now.

I don’t think I’m hungry, but when we get back to the building, I find that I’m starving. I finish my ration of food much too quickly—probably for the best, given its bland taste and too-chewy texture. Even so, I’d like to ask for more, but I resist the impulse. We need to make this food last. We have yet to find anything edible on the planet, and it’s too soon to tell if our crops will grow.

When I finally slink into my room, I’m ready to pass out. I pull my sleeping bag out from the corner where I shoved it when Emma came to see me this morning, prepared to collapse, when I feel a hard object inside the bag.

The glass cube Emma gave me.

It’s glowing.

I’m so surprised I drop the bag and the cube along with it. It clatters onto the ground, and my heart stops; I’m sure the thing is about to shatter. But it doesn’t. It thuds heavily against the stone floor without even a crack.

Just like the glass from the weapon that killed Kit. It wouldn’t break either.

“Amy?” my father calls. “What was that?”

“Just dropped my . . . ” My mind searches for an answer. “Flashlight,” I finish lamely. That thud was way louder than a flashlight, but Dad buys it.

I pick up the glass cube again, staring into it. The glittery gold swirls glow brightly, casting light all around. It’s as bright as a fluorescent bulb but still cool to the touch.

“Don’t waste batteries,” Dad calls from behind the tent walls he’s erected to create a bedroom for himself and Mom.

I drop the cube back into my sleeping bag. The room is engulfed in darkness again.

“Good night, sweetheart,” Mom calls sleepily.

“Night,” I mutter, staring at the sleeping bag and the faint square glowing through the nylon.

My first instinct is to track Emma down. But I’m not sure which building she’s in, and I don’t want to call attention to the cube. She made it seem like this was a big secret, a clue to this world.

I remember the glass shards we found in the wound on Kit’s chest. If this glass cube can light up my room, there has to be some sort of energy in it. If it exploded . . .

I stare at the floor where I dropped the cube, horrified. If it had broken, would my legs have been blown off the same way Kit’s chest was blown open?

I have to tell Elder.

Before I sneak out, I make sure the .38 strapped to my waist is loaded and ready. Then I twist my sleeping bag as if it were a sack and drop it outside, grateful that the lining muffles the sound. I put both hands on the windowsill to raise myself up. My knees skim across the square depression in the stone, making me almost curse in pain.

I slink through the shadows. Elder and I have been butting heads recently, pulled in different directions by our own worries and the people closest to us. But my first instinct is to turn to him. When it comes down to it, he’s the one I trust. It’s barely nightfall now, but no one wants to risk going out after curfew, not after Kit’s death. Chris patrols the lower level of buildings, and I’m so preoccupied that I nearly step right in front of him. I barely have time to duck behind the corner of a building, holding my breath. He doesn’t have a flashlight, but he walks with assurance down the path. I count to ten before slipping back around the corner and up the stairs to Elder’s building.

Elder’s inside and awake, pacing his room. He looks up and grins. “I was just trying to figure out how I could get your attention,” he says.

“Shh,” I say, looking to the door. The near miss with Chris has me on edge. “Let’s go upstairs.”

Each of the dusty buildings is roughly the same design—a large room on the ground level and smaller rooms above, connected by a stone staircase. Dad has used our upstairs to store supplies, and when I helped him move our belongings in, I noticed that the back room, the room against the side of the hill, doesn’t have a window. It’s not much for privacy, but it’s the best we can do.

“What’s going on?” Elder asks as he follows me upstairs.

I go into the windowless room and set the sleeping bag on the floor. Then I reach inside and pull out the glass cube. “Emma gave me this,” I say.

Elder stares at it in wonder. He turns it over in my hand, and the shadows dance chaotically along the walls. “I saw this before. Emma and . . . ” He looks up at me. “Emma and your dad had this, the first night we landed.”

“She gave it to me. But look—it’s like the glass we found in Kit’s wound,” I say. The light makes dark shadows that illuminate Elder’s face, giving him a creepy, unreadable look.

Elder covers the cube with one hand, and the light shines through his skin, making it appear red. “How does it work?” he asks.

I think about the way the sand under the shuttle glowed slightly the first night we landed. Glass is melted sand—the rockets on the shuttle burned their way into the earth. Then they glowed at night, much like this cube.