“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.