Shades of Earth

“It’s us or you,” Chris says, his voice high.

“Only because that’s what you’ve decided.”

“Colonel Martin has made it clear, time and time again, that if he can, he will use the weapon. It will always be a threat he can control. And when the FRX gets here—because they are coming, Colonel Martin made sure of that—they will kill anyone else they can find. This is about survival. This is our home, and you are the trespassers.” He says the words as if they are weapons, each syllable another stab, each pause a blow.

“Don’t—” Amy says, squeaking in terror for the first time. “Please, don’t.”

And I know: she’s begging for her life.

I flip on the intercom. “WAIT!” I bellow.

65: AMY

Chris looks from me to the intercom and back to me. He’d forgotten about the communication link; he didn’t realize I’d kept it going.

He grips the gun in his hand.

“If you kill Amy,” Elder says through the intercom, his voice filled with passion and rage, “I will kill you. I will take the shuttle straight to the space station, and I’ll set off the biological bomb, and you and all your people will die.”

Chris does not lower the gun.

“But if you let her live,” Elder says, “I will land this shuttle. We’ve found more than just the video from the Plague Eldest. We also found the formula for the Inhibitor medicine we developed to counteract the effects of Phydus.”

“A . . . a cure?” Chris says. The end of the rifle dips as he starts to lower the gun. “You’ll be able to fix my people, the other hybrids?”

The door to the communication room bangs open, and my father races inside. “You bastard!” he shouts, slamming into Chris and knocking him to the floor. The rifle skitters away. Chris shakes Dad off and lunges for it.

“Amy? Amy! What’s happening?” Elder says anxiously over the intercom.

I rip my .38 out and aim it at the floor, near the rifle, my finger already pulling the trigger. The bullet embeds itself in the ground, and Chris stops. He turns around to see me, my finger on the trigger, my gun aimed at his chest. Dad gets up and grabs the rifle.

“We’ve got Chris,” I tell Elder.

“You’re okay?”

“I’m fine.”

Dad sits down at the communication bay. “Just so you know,” Dad tells Chris over his shoulder, “I never really trusted you.”

I don’t know how true that is—I think Dad did trust Chris, rather a lot. Not at first—Chris didn’t have a gun that first day. But later, Dad wanted to trust him. It’s the only reason I can see why Chris has been able to deceive him for so long. That, or Dad’s planning something. I watch them both carefully, waiting for the moment when Dad will strike.

“You were working with the FRX,” Chris says. “I knew better than to ever put my faith in you.”

“Yeah, well, now we’re going to have the FRX kill you all, so there’s some comfort in that. For me, anyway.” There’s a smirk of triumph on Dad’s face as his fingers punch the numbers and letters on the screen to enable the remote detonation of the bomb on the space station.

“Wait!” Chris says. He makes a move to reach for Dad, but I adjust my position, making sure he remembers me and my .38. “Just—I want to show you who you’ll be killing first. We have video feed from security cams—you can access them from here.”

Dad’s gaze flicks to me. There are black gunpowder marks on his hands and face, and I notice a bloodstain on his left shoulder. He must have barely escaped the fighting at the colony. And for him to leave the colony to come here, the fighting had to have been bad. Setting off the bomb must be his last chance.

“How’s the colony?” I ask softly.

“Mostly prisoners,” he says.

“Prisoners,” Chris says. “Prisoners. We tried not to kill—”

“You didn’t try that hard,” Dad says. “Not in this battle and not before, not with Emma or Dr. Gupta or the shipborns or the five hundred people in the auto-shuttle including my wife, you sick bastard.”

Dad looks so—I can’t even describe it, the rage on his face, the fury in his eyes. I think he would kill Chris right now, with his bare hands, if I weren’t here.

Chris’s body sags in defeat. “Just—just look at the security feed of the city, where the other hybrids live,” he says. “Please.”

I nod to Dad. I want to see.

Dad scrolls through the menus on the control panel, finding the security feed. After a moment, the screen comes to life.

The city the hybrids live in must be in the valley of the mountain range I spotted well beyond the colony and the lake—that’s why we never noticed it before. I can see tall, jagged mountains rising in the background.

There’s no sound on the video. But I think even if there was, there would be little to hear. The people on the streets move robotically, emotionless. They stare straight ahead as they walk. The screen shifts from camera to camera, showing a street, a packaging factory, people pushing wheelbarrows full of yellow sand, a glassmaking factory. The people in the factory are hand-blowing glass sculptures. They move methodically, with perfect rhythm, as they make dozens of identical glass figurines—flowers of some kind. If I had just seen the glass flowers by themselves, without knowing how they were made, I would call them works of art. They are perfectly balanced, delicate and lovely, with a string of liquid gold inside that I know won’t fade—it will make the flowers glow from within, lit petals that almost look alive. But having seen them made with such emotionless exactitude, the flowers now look creepy and false.

“They’re all like that,” Chris says after we stare at the screen. “Thousands of people, born to be slaves, so used to rote repetition that if something goes wrong, they don’t know what to do and so they end up injuring themselves or . . . ” Chris stands up, glancing at the screen with the glassblowers, “dying. Sometimes, they stick their hands in the fire or touch the molten glass without gloves. They only know how to work, and if their tongs go missing, they work with their bare hands. They don’t know any better because the FRX has ensured they’ll never rebel, they’ll never think for themselves.”

I have seen this before. On Godspeed. I’d hated it there, but I hate it more here.

“Every few years, representatives from the FRX come and check up on us, make sure that everyone’s still working, still controlled. If they see any children like me—born without the control of Phydus—they just kill them. I watched them kill my little sister. They shot her in the head, and they left her on the street, and everyone on Phydus just stepped over her body until it rotted away.”

I swallow dryly.

“This is what I wanted you to see,” Chris says to back of Dad’s head. “I wanted you to know what organization you’re supporting.”

Dad swipes his hand across the screen, making it go dark.

“At least they’re alive,” he says bitterly. “Unlike my Maria. You’ve killed too many of my people for me to have any sympathy for yours.”

Dad’s hands move quickly, tapping codes onto the screen and swiping across new menus.

“What are you doing?” Chris says urgently. He steps forward. I wiggle my gun at him, making him freeze. “What are you doing?” he asks again, fear in his voice.

“I’m arming the bomb,” Dad says matter-of-factly.

“You’re committing genocide!”

“I’m protecting my people,” Dad says. “What’s left of them after you tried to kill them all.”

Something on the screen beeps, and Dad starts pressing more buttons.

There’s a bang on the door, and I turn, startled. Chris takes that moment to knock aside my arm, making me drop the .38. We both dive for it. Dad lunges for Chris—and that’s what saves his life. A second later, the glass window over the communication bay shatters and three men in camouflage suits—I can’t believe I’d thought they were green scaly aliens—jump through it. They step over the control panel, and I hear Elder call out my name in a desperate cry as the red flashing light that shows his communication link with us cuts out.

I wonder if that was the last time I’ll hear Elder’s voice, if this is the point when I die.

One of the men rips Dad off Chris, and Chris stands—with my .38 in his hand, pointed at me. The men are all tall—taller even than Elder—but much stockier, with muscles that look like carved stone under their skintight shirts. But Dad doesn’t cower before them, and neither do I.

“This ends now,” one of the men in camo says. He points his own gun at Dad, a weapon that is slim and light, with disks inside it instead of bullets. He wears more ammo around his waist—rows of thin, flat glass circles that glow golden. I gasp. This is a weapon that uses more of that exploding glass, and the disks . . . they’re the exact size and shape of the scale Elder found in the tunnel. But it wasn’t a scale. It was part of a weapon. And it won’t just kill Dad—it’ll blow him apart.

The man who spoke dips his head at Dad in a mock show of civility. “I am in charge of the rogue hybrids.” I notice his crystal-blue eyes, his oval irises identical to Chris’s. Now that I see them on a stranger, I’m even more shaken that I never let myself recognize just how unusual they were.

The two other men with him stand on either side of the communication bay, their own guns out.

“I am the leader of the people you’ve tried to kill,” Dad says.

The man barks in laughter. “You have courage, I’ll give you that. It is your misfortune that you landed your shuttle now. A few decades earlier, and there wouldn’t have been as many of us. A few decades later, and the revolution would be over. We could have been friends then. But now? Now you’re aligned with the FRX, and we can’t have that.” He sneers at Dad. “You’re going to do two things for us,” he says.

“I would rather die than do anything for you,” Dad growls.

The rogue leader looks at Chris. Chris steps forward until the round end of the barrel of my .38 is pressed against my temple. I can feel the cool metal circle digging into my skull; I can smell the remains of gun oil and powder.

“What do you want me to do?” Dad says.

“We’ll start with your surrender. You’re going to call the FRX from this compound, and you’re going to issue your surrender to me and my people on your behalf and on the behalf of the FRX.”

“They’ll come anyway,” Dad says.

“The only weapon that could do us any harm is the biological bomb. We’ve been stockpiling solar bombs for decades. Not to mention all the human hostages we’ll have to negotiate with. Without the biological weapon, they don’t stand a chance against us.”

My stomach drops. Outside the window, the world is calm and peaceful. I imagine it exploding, torn apart by bombs and warfare.