Shades of Earth (19 page)

33:
AMY

As Elder starts sending groups off
in search of Kit, Dad grabs my arm. “You're not going,” he says.

I stare at him, too shocked by the order to protest.

“You can help in other ways. I'm not letting you go off with them.”

“I can help,” I say angrily. “Kit's my friend.”

Dad looks at me as if he doesn't believe his daughter could truly be friends with a shipborn. It's the same look he gives me when he sees me with Elder.

My hands curl into fists. “Dad!” I growl. “You can't just let Kit be lost because she's not one of
your
people.”

“That has nothing to do with it.” His voice is filled with emotion I don't understand—it sounds almost like regret, but that doesn't make any sense. He leans in closer to me. “I've already seen you wounded once, Amy. When Elder brought you to me, after you were knocked out by that purple flower. I'm not going to see you get hurt again.” He hugs me tight, squeezing the air from me. “Go to the lab with your mother. Chris will stay with you two.” Dad glances up at Mom as she approaches. “Got to protect my girls.”

I look behind me. The search parties have already begun to disperse. With a sigh, I follow Mom back up to the building we're sharing as she gets ready for a day at the lab. I wonder briefly if Dad's going to the compound Elder and I discovered last night, if there's something there that will help find Kit. I hope so. I don't care that Dad's kept it secret, not if it helps to find Kit and bring her safely back to us.

“Okay,” Mom says. “Let me just check with the geologists and see the results of the tests they ran last night. Amy?” she adds. “Want to come with me?”

I shake my head.

“I'll go with you, Dr. Martin,” Chris says, standing up. I'm glad he's here to protect Mom, but it feels weird that our guard is just a few years older than me.

Almost as soon as they're gone, Emma steps into the building. “Alone?” she asks in her lilting accent. I nod.

Emma crosses the room in three long strides and presses something into my hands. A glass cube, about the size of my palm. “I want you to have this,” she tells me. “Hide it.”

“Why—?” I ask, peering at it. While the cube looks as if it's made of glass, it's filled with bright flecks of gold. It glitters in the sunlight, creating an entrancing swirl of sparkles.

“I've been watching you and that Elder.” Emma glances at the door. “I know you lot are not going to just blindly accept what someone says is truth. And I figure maybe that's what's needed more than anything right now.”

“Is this about . . . ” I hesitate, not sure if I
do
want to know the truth. “Is this about Dad?”

“Your dad's a good soldier,” Emma says. “He's following the mission guidelines.”

My fingers curl around the glass cube. What does
this
have to do with the mission guidelines?

“I have been to many countries,” Emma says, changing topics abruptly. “And now to a whole new world. But I have never felt
dépaysement
.”

“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.

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.