Page 100 of Shades of Earth (Across the Universe 3)

55: AMY

Dad keeps us close to the trees as he escorts us back to the colony. Part of me wants to fight him on this point, stay in the communication room. What if Elder needs us? He’s farther away from me now than he’s ever been before—the least I could do is keep the communication link open. But Dad leaves one of his military guards there and the rest of us return to the ruins.

I wish we could take the quick way, straight through the meadow and up to the buildings. But it feels so exposed going that way, and while the trees are dark and dangerous, they give us the illusion of safety. I keep my eyes cast down. Every shadow reminds me of Elder, each warm breeze that brushes against my skin makes me wish I could fly up to him.

A light spritzing of rain starts to fall.

“Be careful of the flowers,” Dad whispers to me. I’d almost forgotten about the purple string flowers. I watch them out of the corner of my eye. As soon as water touches the delicate petals, the flowers unwind in an elegant twirl, blossoming into a beautiful, nearly transparent bloom. So beautiful . . . but I remember the way they made my mind go numb, the way I couldn’t move my body. One of the flowers hangs low, nearly at the level of my face. I grab it and crush it in my hand, the purple petals sticking to my skin.

We creep back to the ruins. Everything is silent. The air is pregnant with expectation, as if the silence is just an indicator of something worse to come.

Dad doesn’t speak to me again until we’re in the building, safe from the pteros and the aliens who must control them somehow through the gen mod material. Chris follows us inside. Dad starts to object but then gives up, collapsing into the same chair he sat in just this morning, dunking a cracker-biscuit in his “coffee” as if everything was normal.

And I guess that in a way, everything was. We still had Mom.

And I still had Elder.

My eyes burn. I look away. I cannot let myself crack.

“We’ll have to go into hiding,” Dad says heavily.

I look up at him.

“If we’re waiting to detonate the weapon, we’ll have to go into hiding. Only for a few days, a week maybe. Until the aid from Earth comes. ”

“What’s wrong with the buildings?” I ask.

Dad shakes his head. “The aliens know we’re here. They can attack us anytime. The only weapons we have are the ones my men carried with them—and once the ammo runs out, there will be nothing left. ” Once he lets his words sink in, Dad adds, “Got any ideas?” I look up—but Dad’s asking Chris, not me.

Chris shakes his head. I look down at my hand, stained purple from the flower I crushed earlier. “The flowers,” I say.

They both turn to me.

“The purple string flowers,” I repeat, excitement growing in my voice. “Dad, what if we made a weapon using those? They knocked me out immediately! We could use them to make the aliens pass out if they get near the colony. ”

“How?” Dad asks, clearly frustrated with me. “Even if we got the flowers, they only bloom when wet. And even if we made them bloom, how could we force the aliens to sniff them?”

I pick the petals stuck to my hand off my skin, setting them in a little pile on my knee. “We could grind them up,” I say, thinking aloud. “Throw the dust in their faces. ”

“While they shoot at us with exploding bullets,” Dad says.

“We could hang them nearby, keep them wet with the water pipe from the lake. . . . ”

“And they’ll see them and hold their breath,” Dad shoots back. “Or just attack us from a distance. We don’t have time for this, Amy. We have to come up with a real plan. ”

“You could smoke them,” Chris says.

For a moment, I have an image of rolling the string flowers into cigarette paper and lighting them up.

“I mean, we can use the smoke as our weapon,” Chris says. “Not that we would literally smoke the flowers, but that we could blow the smoke on the aliens. They’d be forced to breathe at least some of the air, and hopefully the properties of the flower would still exist—perhaps even be stronger—in a smoke form. ”

“But you can’t control smoke,” Dad protests. “It can just as easily knock us out as the aliens. And we still don’t know if the creatures—whatever they are—are affected by the neurotoxins in the flower. ”

But he’s thinking about this plan, I can tell. He jumps from the chair and starts pacing. He pauses when he notices me watching, then looks straight into my eyes—the same jade green as Mom’s—and says, “Your mother would like this plan. ”

“It could work,” I say, hopeful.

Dad’s voice is filled with doubt. “Your mother would know how to test the flowers and smoke, figure out the effects of it on the aliens. If she were here . . . ”