Shades of Earth (Across the Universe 3)

It’s hard for me to think of Orion as Amy does: a psychopath murderer. Because if I hadn’t had Amy, I might have been Orion. What choice would I have had? I’d have become like him . . . or like Eldest.

And no matter what’s happened, I can’t help but believe that Orion and his tactics were preferable to Eldest and his lies.

The military authorization request blinks at me, waiting for a code I don’t have. I cast one last, longing look at the world beyond the window, the never-ending sky, and then turn my back to it. I can already hear fear and pain rising up in the voices of my people, and the next step belongs to the frozens in the cryo room, not me.

When I reach the cryo room, Amy stands in front of her parents’ cryo chambers, leaning over my people strapped to the row. As they pull aside the tether that anchored them to the cryo chambers for safety, Amy pushes past them, her eyes bouncing over the informational readout with such single-minded focus that she doesn’t notice the way my people are fumbling, struggling to stand after being bound to the chambers.

I’m surrounded by chaos. Kit, our doctor, has a group of people dashing about, unlatching the tethers we used to strap people to stable objects. It is immediately apparent that the tethers were not a good idea. My stomach twists as Kit shoves a man’s shoulder back in joint, and nearly everyone has the same sort of shocked, horrified expressions that I’ve only ever seen on disaster relief videos from tragedies on Sol-Earth.

A woman near me starts screaming, the sound ricocheting around the metal walls of the cryo chamber, piercing every ear with its horror.

Kit’s group of helpers rush forward, disentangling her and the woman beside her from the tether, but it’s obvious that it’s too late—a deep red mark wraps around her neck. The tether that was supposed to save her life slipped and choked her instead.

I step toward the woman. Her screams have stopped, replaced with sobs.

Amy gasps, an almost inaudible sound, but I whip around to find out what’s wrong.

She shoots me a satisfied smile of triumph, and it is only then that I notice the little doors in front of the cryo chambers have all snapped open.

“Frex, do you have to do this now?” I ask, striding toward her.

“Yes,” she says fiercely.

“All of them?” I ask. I could almost understand her need to awaken her parents, but we don’t need to add nearly a hundred frozen people to the cacophony of voices around us.

There are dozens injured and at least one—no, two—no, more than that—dead. We don’t have time to worry about the frexing frozens, not now, not after we just crash-landed.

I start to tell Amy this, but then she says, “They can help. ” I think she believes this, but I don’t think she thought of it until I questioned her.

Kit rushes over to me. There’s a cut on her head leaking blood down the side of her face, but it doesn’t look too bad. “Is everything okay?” she asks, worry making her brow crease.

I look around me. Everyone seems to have a glazed look in their eyes—shock, I realize. It’s clear that while the tethers did keep people from bouncing around during the crash-landing, they also cut into people’s skin or slipped around their necks or jerked them around so violently that they got whiplash.

“Yeah,” I growl. “Everything’s brilly. ”

“No, I mean the landing—is it—the planet—” Kit doesn’t know how to say what she’s really asking.

One half of my lips curve up, and for a moment, I don’t see the metal walls wrapped around the despair of my people as they try to recover from the crash. I see only the sky. “Yeah,” I tell her. “That part really is brilly. ”

She breathes a sigh of relief, and I know what she was really worried about was: is all of this worth all of that? And I wonder—has it been? My mind flashes to Shelby, the Shipper who taught me how to land. Without her, we really would have crashed. Whatever the cause of us being knocked off course, the only reason we weren’t killed is because of the training she gave me.

And because of the choices I made, she’s dead anyway.

The rows of cryo chambers hiss to life. With a clattering crash, the chambers shoot out, dropping support legs onto the floor. Thin robotic arms slide over the top of the cryo box, lifting away the glass lids and sucking them back into the chambers.

A mechanical hum fills the room, drowning out the sounds of pain and fear coming from the passengers. The metal arms shoot back over the cryo chambers, this time with sharp needles sticking out from one side. The arms slam straight down, driving the needles into the ice. I can see tiny streams of bubbles—jets of hot air?—bubbling through the frozen cryoliquid. Already, water drips down, pooling on the ground below. A slope so slight I’ve never noticed it before draws the water under the chambers.

Amy’s eyes are glued to cryo chambers 41 and 40—her parents.

We don’t need this. The frozens will cause nothing but trouble now. We need to help the injured.

And . . . and I need her. I need Amy. With me, not staring at some frozen boxes. Even now, I can feel the way every person except Amy is looking to me, waiting for me to be everything they need me to be. And I’m not sure if I can stand without her by my side.

“What can I do?” I ask anyway, turning away from Amy toward Kit.

Kit leads me to the far wall, where she has formed a sort of triage, setting up the nurses who can aid with the minor cuts and bruises, but there are still dozens of people with much more urgent needs. The tethers were too narrow; they cut into people’s flesh, and even I, with my inexperienced eyes, can see that they’ll need stitches. More than one person has a dislocated shoulder, like the man Kit helped earlier, and there are so many people sitting against the wall that I’m not sure if it’s because they’ve hurt themselves and can’t stand or if it’s something else, something less serious, or more.

I meet Kit’s eyes. She’s desperate. Until a few days ago, she was only an apprentice—Doc is the one who should be here, the one who could efficiently solve everyone’s problems. But Doc was a problem by himself.