Elder’s inside and awake, pacing his room. He looks up and grins. “I was just trying to figure out how I could get your attention,” he says.
“Shh,” I say, looking to the door. The near miss with Chris has me on edge. “Let’s go upstairs. ”
Each of the dusty buildings is roughly the same design—a large room on the ground level and smaller rooms above, connected by a stone staircase. Dad has used our upstairs to store supplies, and when I helped him move our belongings in, I noticed that the back room, the room against the side of the hill, doesn’t have a window. It’s not much for privacy, but it’s the best we can do.
“What’s going on?” Elder asks as he follows me upstairs.
I go into the windowless room and set the sleeping bag on the floor. Then I reach inside and pull out the glass cube. “Emma gave me this,” I say.
Elder stares at it in wonder. He turns it over in my hand, and the shadows dance chaotically along the walls. “I saw this before. Emma and . . . ” He looks up at me. “Emma and your dad had this, the first night we landed. ”
“She gave it to me. But look—it’s like the glass we found in Kit’s wound,” I say. The light makes dark shadows that illuminate Elder’s face, giving him a creepy, unreadable look.
Elder covers the cube with one hand, and the light shines through his skin, making it appear red. “How does it work?” he asks.
I think about the way the sand under the shuttle glowed slightly the first night we landed. Glass is melted sand—the rockets on the shuttle burned their way into the earth. Then they glowed at night, much like this cube.
“Solar power?” I suggest tentatively. “The suns’ light gets trapped inside the glass?”
“Maybe. ” Elder turns the cube over in his hand as if expecting to find an on/off switch.
“Those square depressions in the windowsills,” I say, rubbing my knee where I scraped it against the windowsill as I was escaping. “The ones we thought were meant for idols or something? They’re the exact size of the cube. ”
Elder runs his hands over the smooth surface. “Put the cube in the window in the morning so it charges with light all day and glows all night. Genius. ” He looks up at me. “Remember the square light in the ceiling of the communication building at the compound?”
“You think it was something like this?”
Elder nods. “I bet the top is exposed on the roof so it can charge. Maybe all the electricity—the computers, the communication bay—runs on solar energy. ”
Already, the light in the cube is starting to fade. It had barely been charged in the sunlight at all before I stuffed it in my sleeping bag this morning.
“The one piece of information that’s been consistent since we’ve landed,” Elder says, “is that the FRX found valuable resources here on Centauri-Earth. It’s the first thing anyone ever talks about with this mission, even your dad. What if this is the valuable resource?”
I nod. “It makes sense,” I say. “Solar energy is free. Enough of these would light up a city. ”
“And if it breaks . . . ” Elder tips his hand over but doesn’t drop the cube. “Boom. ”
He’s thinking the same thing as me: this is what killed Kit. Whoever made the cube can also make bullets. The cube didn’t break when it hit the stone floor, but if they found a way to make the bullets break on contact . . . well, that would explain why it looked as if Kit’s chest exploded.
“I think there’s something else,” Elder says.
He explains to me his theory that the one thing linking the victims together is Phydus.
“But I don’t know how we can prove that this is about the drug,” he says. The glass cube is barely glowing now, making the room filled with more shadows than light.
I think about the emptiness in Dr. Gupta’s eyes as the ptero ate him. The way Lorin died without a mark on her. The samples of their blood in the lab in the shuttle.
And then it hits me.
“I know how to prove it. ”
36: ELDER
I take the glass cube with us as Amy leads me to the shuttle, keeping it covered until we’re in the forest. Amy has her gun, but I’d like to be able to see if an enemy is approaching us—ptero or alien.
As we trudge through the forest, I can’t help but think about how comfortable Amy’s sleeping bag looked, how nice it would be if it—and she—stayed in my building tonight rather than returned to her parents. These thoughts soon evaporate, though. The forest feels more dangerous now. When Amy and I snuck out to the compound last night, we did so with the belief that the deadliest things on this planet were the monsters in the sky. But now we know something else is out there, and the knowledge makes the shadows feel ominous, deadly.
There’s a soft glow under the shuttle as we approach, and I know Amy is right: glass on this planet somehow traps solar energy. I think bitterly about the lead-cooled fast reactor in the engine room of Godspeed, the flashing red light that means it’s in meltdown. If there was some way to make the energy in the glass on this planet fuel the ship . . .