Shades of Earth (Across the Universe #3)

Shades of Earth (Across the Universe #3) Page 5

A horrific, bestial cry ringing across the sky.

I spin around, looking up at the direction of the sound.

And I see the monster Orion warned us of.

The bird-thing lands only a few meters in front of me, but it’s so heavy that I can feel the thump of its body reverberating on the sandy ground. The creature towers over me, its long, pointed head tilted to the sky before peering down and opening its hard beak, exposing saw-like teeth. Green leathery skin that’s so dark it’s nearly black gives way to scaly claws and membrane-like wings. It’s a horrible monster that seems cobbled together from creatures on Sol-Earth—a dinosaur head atop a lizard’s body with raptor claws and bat-like wings.

My first instinct is to jab my finger into my wi-com and get help, but of course that doesn’t work.

The thing stretches out its wings—each twice as long as I am tall and adorned with two-fingered hooked claws on top of the sharply angled joints. The claws spread apart and grasp at the air in my direction. The beast’s feet grip the sandy soil as it leans forward, opens its mouth, and emits a piercing, ringing scream at me, a high-pitched shriek that feels as if it is vibrating my bones. Even though the creature is far enough away that I couldn’t reach it, I can feel its hot breath on my skin, see its sliver of a black tongue raised as it screeches at me.

I fumble for the gun, the grenades, anything.

The creature launches up, pushing off from the ground and slamming into me with its hard, boney head. I crash to the ground, the monster on top of me, its body so heavy that I can’t catch my breath.

It bends its long, snake-like neck toward me, its jaw opening, the black, saw-edged teeth foaming slightly as it nears my face.

A shot cracks out.

The beast whips up its head, startled. A bullet whizzes past, nicking it in the back. Its claws clench, and my skin rips along with the cloth of my shirt.

Another gunshot and the bird-like thing launches up, pushing against my rib cage as it leaps to the trees. I gasp for breath as it claws its way up one of the trees and takes off, flapping its voluminous wings as one final gunshot echoes after it.

“Get inside!” Amy shouts from the bridge of the shuttle. “Hurry!”

I scramble up. Blood drips from my chest, and my shirt is ruined, but the wounds are nothing compared to what could have happened. Amy grabs my arm as I reach the top of the ramp and jerks me into the shuttle.

7: AMY

As soon as the door slams shut, I spin Elder around, looking for wounds. All I can think is, I almost lost him. Every other thought—excitement about the planet, anticipation for my parents’ return, fear of the monsters outside—all of that is gone as my eyes and my heart focus on the blood leaking down Elder’s chest. He knocks my hands aside, taking off his shirt and using it to blot out the blood on the scrapes. They don’t look deep, just jagged and rough. I grab some of the disinfectant Kit had me using to help with the stitches and spray Elder down.

“How did you know to come outside and help me?” Elder asks, still breathless.

“I heard that pterodactyl-looking thing scream—it sounded so much closer than before.” I pause. “What was that thing?”

Elder shakes his head, looking at his ruined shirt. “One of Orion’s frexing monsters, I guess. Did you see anything in the forest?”

I shake my head. “What was in the forest?”

“I . . . I don’t know.” Elder finally meets my eyes. “Think one of those things knocked into the side of the ship when we were landing? It was big enough to throw us off course.”

“I don’t know,” I say, echoing Elder. I am only starting to realize how much I just don’t know. Like, for starters, what the hell was that thing? It looked kind of like a pterodactyl, with a pointed head and massive wings and jagged claws, but there was also something distinctly alien about it.

Alien. That’s what everything on this planet is to us. I suppress a shudder, my hands instinctively gripping the still-warm gun.

I should have been able to hit that creature; I should have killed it. But I was too scared, afraid that I might accidentally hit Elder.

And afraid of it.

Elder takes the gun from me. “I’ll put this back in the armory,” he says. “And I think I should take a closer look at what we have there.”

I try to push the image of the beast from my mind as I head back to the cryo chamber, but I keep seeing the way it opened its mouth, lowering it toward Elder’s face. . . .

Kit grabs me as soon as I re-enter the cryo room. A few people look up fearfully—they know Elder was outside, and they heard the monster’s scream after he left the shuttle. They think whatever it was got him. “He’s fine,” I manage. “Everything’s fine.”

They are happy to believe the lie, at least for now.

“Nearly done,” Kit says, pushing the hair out of her face and leaving a smear of blood on her forehead. “Two bones that need setting, and then the nurses and I will check the women, just as a precaution. . . . ”

My stomach sinks. I’d nearly forgotten—the pregnant women.

“Anything else I can do?” I ask.

Kit gives me a watery smile. “You’ve already been a huge help.”

I watch as she walks toward the last group of people waiting for medical aid. My hands are bloody, my arms are tired, and I want nothing more than to curl up in bed and forget about this day. Maybe this was all a huge mistake.

“Amy?” asks a voice I know, a voice I love, a voice I never thought I’d hear again, oh God, oh God, oh God.

I turn around, and standing there, looking exactly as I remembered him, is my father.

“Daddy!” I scream, and launch myself at him.

And his arms, his arms, they wrap around me, they pull me tight to him, and everything is fine, everything is wonderful, because I finally, finally have my dad back.

I’m sobbing and laughing and choking and sputtering and crying and speaking all at the same time.

“Amy,” he says, a chuckle in his voice. “What’s going on?”

I step back. My father’s wearing a green surgical gown, not unlike the one that Doc tried to wrap me in when I first awoke. I can see that nearly every one of the cryo boxes is empty now that people are starting to get up, to pull the gowns off the little metal arms over the boxes to clothe themselves with. And Mom—

I run to her. I skid around the open cryo boxes and the other frozens starting to wake up. Mom. And though I’ve dreamed about seeing her with my eyes open a million times, my dreams were nothing, nothing compared to actually seeing her.

Mom’s laughing—her voice cracks from disuse—but the music of her laughter is there, and it wraps around me just the way her arms do. “I told you that wouldn’t be so bad,” she whispers in my hair.

I choke out a sob. She doesn’t know. She thinks I just woke up too. She thinks I’ve been sleeping beside her. She doesn’t know about the three months I lived on the ship, the three months I thought I’d never see her again.

Mom’s hands frame my face, and I notice that they’re still as cold as ice. I glance past her shoulder, toward the hallway that leads to the armory, the bridge, and outside. I want Elder to be here; I want to introduce him to my parents. I want him to understand why I needed them, how everything is better now that they’re with me. But he’s not here.

“Oh, baby,” Mom says, her eyes brimming with joy. “We made it! We finally made it!” She pulls me close to her again, squeezing me in a tight hug. “There’s a whole new world for us to discover together,” she says into my hair.

“I missed you so much,” I whisper, the sound cracking as my voice catches.

Mom pulls back, tucking a piece of my hair behind my ear. “What do you mean?”

Suddenly, I notice the silence permeating the room. The people from the ship are watching the frozens awaken warily, and the frozens are eyeing the people from the ship with something like fear, something like caution.

My father steps closer, and this movement brings every eye to us. “Why are you dressed like that?” he asks, taking in my homespun tunic and pants.

I turn to face my mom, and I forget about everyone but the three of us. This is my world: my mother, my father, and me.

“I woke up early,” I say, staring into Mom’s green eyes that everyone says are exactly the same as mine.

A little frown shadows her face.

“How early?” my father asks.

The answer fades from my lips. At first I thought I was fifty years early and that my father and I would be having this conversation when I was an old woman. Then I thought I was a lifetime early and that I would die before having this chance.

“Three months early,” I say, because until just this moment, I hadn’t realized that the clock had stopped.

“Three months?” my mother gasps.

“Over a hundred days,” I answer. I lost track at the end, when I realized the days on Godspeed didn’t matter anymore because they were ending.

“What happened?” my mother asks, reaching for my wrist.

I open my mouth, but no words fall out. She’s holding my wrist in exactly the same spot that Luthor held me down. What happened? I was promised a world, but I awoke to a cage.

There is so much I want to tell her. I need to tell her.

But as I look into her face, I know: it doesn’t matter. Not now, not in this moment. What matters right now is this: we’re each of us standing here, together, alive, together.

Dad steps closer to us, dropping one hand on my shoulder. He opens his mouth, and I’m not sure what I expect him to say, but it’s not this: “What’s going on?”

And the moment we shared melts like the ice dripping down the drain in the floor.

Dad looks out at the crowd of silent watchers from Godspeed—the wounded, the scared. “What is going on?” he repeats, authority ringing in his voice. He’s looking for a leader, and Elder’s not here.

The people from Godspeed don’t know how to react. For a moment, I see my family, my people, the way they do. Strange. Weird. They just pulled themselves from their cryo chambers—cryo chambers that the people from the ship didn’t even know existed until recently—and now there’s this man with pale skin like mine, staring at them, demanding information from them. If they feared me, what must they think of my father? Of the ninety-six other people from Earth who are rising from their icy graves to take over?

After a moment, Kit steps forward. She doesn’t speak, though. Her eyes go to me.

Slowly, my father turns, searching my face for an answer.

Mom strokes my hair one last time until the tension in the air makes her step back. She moves to stand beside my father, and I notice the way their hands brush against each other.

“Amy? Why were you over there, with those people? What happened?” he asks, each question dropping in volume until the last one is for my ears alone.

“Come with me,” I say. This is one discussion I’d rather have in private.

Instead, my father looks around, scanning the chambers. “I’m not the one in charge,” he says. “Robertson or Kennedy—”