Shades of Earth (Across the Universe 3)

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—”

“They’re dead,” I say.

His eyes snap down to me, and for a moment, I don’t recognize him. He’s never looked at me this way before. He’s never looked at me like he was a colonel instead of my father.

“What’s going on?” he orders.

“D-dad,” I stutter over the name. “There was . . . I mean, the ship . . . It’s not like what we thought it would be. These people were born on the ship,” I say, waving my arm toward Kit and the others. I watch his face, carefully waiting for the moment when he finally notices that everyone from Godspeed looks the same. His eyes narrow in a calculating gaze. “You don’t understand. A lot of stuff has happened. And we just got the shuttle to land. It—sort of crashed. And there are a lot of people injured, and we do have a leader, but—”

My father’s eyes soften as I try to stutter through an explanation. He pulls me closer, wrapping his strength around me, and I feel safe for the first time in more than three centuries.

“I want to know more,” he tells me in a low voice. “We’ll talk later. ” Over the top of my head, he barks, “Bledsoe!”

A woman a few rows away stands at attention. I gasp—I know her. She’s the woman Orion nearly killed, the one Elder and I saved while Theo Kennedy drowned in his cryo box. My mind goes back to the chart I made three months ago. Emma Bledsoe, thirty-four years old, a US Marine originally from South Africa.

“Sir,” Bledsoe calls back to my father.