Shades of Earth (Across the Universe #3)

Shades of Earth (Across the Universe #3) Page 29

“What’s day-pah . . . um?” I can’t pronounce the word.

“Dépaysement. It’s like . . . homesick?” Emma shakes her head, her dark curls bouncing against her cheeks. “That’s not the word for it. It means . . . the way you feel when you know you’re not home.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. I don’t mean that I don’t understand the word—I don’t understand why she’s telling me this. Any of this.

“I learned long ago that home is a word that applies to people, not places. That’s why I didn’t mind signing up for this mission. Didn’t matter to me where I was—it mattered who I was with.”

Emma cocks her head—I hear it too. Mom and Chris are returning. “I’m giving you this,” she says, looking down at the glass cube in my hands, “because you—you and that Elder boy—you two don’t care about any military mission. You don’t care about what the FRX may want. You care about making this world home.”

“What do you care about?” I ask, searching her eyes.

“Doesn’t matter,” Emma says sadly. “I’m military. I have to obey the orders. You don’t.”

She glances behind her quickly. “Go,” she says. “Hide it.”

The urgency in her voice makes me spin around and dash to the tiny corner of privacy I have in my “room” made of tents and throw the glass cube into my sleeping bag, out of sight.

“Amy?” Mom calls.

I step back out. Emma’s gone.

“Ready?” Mom asks.

I’m sweating by the time we reach Mom’s lab in the shuttle—I’d love another thunderstorm to cool everything off. But then I remember the search parties and Kit, and pray that it doesn’t rain.

Dr. Gupta’s body is no longer in Mom’s lab, and I’m somewhat grateful for that. There were too many . . . pieces. Like Juliana Robertson. I swallow drily, trying to forget the ripping, crunching sound the ptero made as it ate Dr. Gupta.

Somehow, my mind drifts to Lorin. She was found dead too, but she must not have been killed by a ptero. The horror of Dr. Gupta and Juliana’s deaths has made everyone forget that it is Lorin’s immaculate, seemingly untouched body that is by far the creepier corpse.

“The geologists need to run more tests before they can use my help,” Mom says, already turning to the worktable in the lab. She holds out a vial of some viscous liquid. It’s dark crimson, almost black.

“What is this?” I ask.

“Ptero blood.”

I glance behind me. Dr. Gupta’s body might be gone, but the ptero is still there, draped over the metal tables. Mom’s dissected it already, weighing the organs and filling the entire lab with its foul odor, but she’s not quite done with it yet.

I try not to gag at the smell of the ptero’s stinking blood. When I cover my nose with the back of my hand, Chris shoots me a sympathetic glance.

“I want you to run the immunoassay on this,” Mom tells me. “We’ve been analyzing the victims—let’s look at the monsters instead.”

“But we know what killed the ptero,” I say. My bullets.

Mom just silently hands me the sample and we work together to test the ptero blood.

When it’s all finished, Mom reads the report on the computer aloud. “Negative for everything,” she says. “Except gen mod material.”

I gape at her. When I talked to Elder about the pteros before, I hadn’t really believed it was possible that they’d been genetically engineered by the first colony. Gen mod material was invented on Earth—Sol-Earth. It shouldn’t be here at all, and certainly not in a native alien creature. But it shouldn’t have been in Dr. Gupta’s blood either.

“Is it possible that this gen mod material is from . . . ” Chris trails off, looking uncomfortable. “Could it be from, er, Dr. Gupta?”

Mom shakes her head. “Too soon—the creature was killed before it had a chance to digest Dr. Gupta.”

She should know. She did the dissection. She found the pieces of him in the ptero’s stomach.

“But how, then?” I ask. “How could a ptero possibly have gen mod material in its bloodstream? Could it have come from the planet?”

Mom stares intently at the sample of ptero blood. “It should be impossible. I talked to Frank, the geologist. He says there are minerals in the soil he’s never seen before. We’re talking about whole new elements to the periodic table! Which means this planet? It shouldn’t have anything that directly came from our planet, especially gen mod material, which was artificially created.”

I don’t need to wait for her to finish the tests. I already know the answer—the ptero has gen mod material in its bloodstream because humans have been here before. And they did something. Something similar to what we’re doing to the horse and dog fetuses. Except they took it too far, and the creatures they made were monsters. Maybe the same monsters that killed them all, leaving behind nothing but the stone ruins.

As I watch my mother set up the rest of her equipment, I’m 100 percent certain that she has no idea what Dad knows about the compound past the lake. She still thinks we’re the first people here. I open my mouth, determined to tell her the truth Dad’s kept hidden, but no words come out. I have to hope that her tests can prove something, something that will save us.

There’s a determined set to her jaw, an impassioned focus in the way she works now. It reminds me of Emma and what she told me this morning. It seems as if everyone knows there’s something wrong with this world . . . we just can’t quite figure out what it is.

After several hours, the lab door zips open. Chris jumps up, startled—he’d fallen asleep while Mom and I worked. Elder steps inside.

He looks a little lost as he scans the room. “Colonel Martin said I needed to come here?” he asks loudly. His eyes see mine, and his mouth curves in relief, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. He looks tired—tired of fighting Dad, tired of peeling back the layers of this planet and finding only half-truths and danger.

“Kit?” I ask immediately.

Elder shakes his head. “Still missing. You wanted me?” There’s a question in his voice.

Mom stands up. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I’d asked Bob—Colonel Martin—to send you here before we found out that your doctor was missing. I’m surprised he still asked you to come; I didn’t mean for it to interrupt the search party.”

“It’s okay,” Elder says heavily. “We had to break for lunch.”

“In that case,” Mom says, standing. “This will only take a moment.”

She motions for Elder to follow her back to where the tubes of fetuses are stored. Elder shoots me an inquiring look, and I realize that Mom has summoned him because I avoided telling the scientists about them earlier.

“We’re beginning the incubation process,” Mom says, showing Elder the tube, “and we weren’t sure what animals these are. Do you know?”

“Yes,” Elder says. His voice is polite but wary.

“Oh, good, I hoped so,” Mom says. “So what do we have here?” She stops in front of the cylinder filled with golden goopy liquid and little beans of cloned humans. Cloned Elders. Copies of the first Eldest, all exactly the same right down to their DNA, but none of them are my Elder.

“They’re—” Elder’s voice catches in his throat. “They’re human fetuses. Cloned.”

Mom steps back, surprised. “Human fetuses? The FRX didn’t say anything about preserving cloned human fetuses. . . . ”

“They’re not from the FRX,” Elder says, quickly regaining his composure. “They were made by people aboard Godspeed.”

By the Plague Eldest. He made hundreds of copies of himself, all for the purpose of ensuring that he, in some form or other, would be eternal dictator of a never-changing Godspeed.

“What’s their . . . ” Mom pauses, searching for the right words. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be insensitive or ignorant, but what’s their purpose?”

Elder stares at the golden liquid. Their purpose? To make more of him. Replacements. Eldest threatened to do just that—kill Elder and start again with a new fetus plucked from the sticky liquid. That’s what he did do to Orion. . . .

“No purpose,” Elder says in a hollow voice.

“Can I—feel free to tell me no, but can I dispose of them then? We could use the room.”

Elder nods, his eyes still not leaving the cylinder. What must it feel like to see all the potential yous? I imagine Mom pulling one of the tiny beans out and putting it in an incubator next to the horse and dog fetuses. Nine months later, a little baby Elder pops out. He has Elder’s eyes and Elder’s face . . . but Elder’s soul? No.

“Okay, then,” Mom says. She turns to the cylinder, flipping up a small lid on a hidden control panel, pushes a button, and soon a soft whirring sound wraps around us. “Should only take a moment.”

She steps back. A drain at the bottom of the cylinder opens up, and the chunky liquid filled with a hundred potential Elders disappears down a tube that hides their disposal under the floor.

In minutes, the cylinder is empty.

“Thank you,” Mom says, heading back to her analysis of the ptero blood.

A crackle of radio noise cuts through the awkward tension my mother doesn’t realize she’s created. Our attention zooms in on Chris, who’s standing straight, listening to the radio at his shoulder. We can’t hear what’s being said, but his eyes shoot to Elder.

And I know.

Kit’s been found.

34: ELDER

They bring her body straight to the shuttle, so I am glad, at least, that I was already here waiting for her to arrive.

Her hair is matted with dirt and twigs and leaves. A large streak of dark brown mud is smeared on the left side of her face and down the formerly white lab coat. She’d been so happy with the coat—a gift from Dr. Gupta—that it had made me hopeful that the Earthborns and my people could really work together. It’s ruined now, along with who knows what else. Over her chest is a red-and-black wound, a hole exploded in the flesh where her heart should be.

This was no accident.

This was not an attack from a beast, the vicious mauling of a monster.

A weapon killed Kit, a weapon wielded by a murderer.

“Who killed her?” I ask, rounding on Colonel Martin.

He raises both his hands. “We have no idea.”

“This wound is nothing like anything one of my people could do!” I shout, pointing at the gaping hole in Kit’s chest. “One of your military—in the armory—”

“Elder,” Colonel Martin says solemnly, “we don’t have any weapon that can make a wound like that.”

I turn to Amy, who nods silently in confirmation.

The people carrying Kit’s body lay her flat on a metal table, near the remains of the ptero Amy shot. My eyes are burning so much that I can barely see. Kit was kind, and good, and all she ever wanted to do was help other people. She was just like me: forced to take responsibility before she was ready, determined to do good in the footsteps of a predecessor who’d abused his power.