Page 105 of Shades of Earth (Across the Universe 3)

No air in me.

59: AMY

All that’s left is to wait.

And so we do.

Dad distributes water—a bucket to each building, with a warning that going to the latrines might be dangerous. We finish the last of the rations we had stored in the colony by noon—all the rest of the food was in the shuttle. We thought sealing the things we needed the most, like food and medicine, behind the steel doors of the shuttle would make it safer. The irony of it makes me want to vomit.

There’s only Dad and me in the first building. Without Mom, the building has no chance of ever becoming a real home, so for now it’s our base of operations. All the military checks in with us here, for new assignments or permission to rest after patrol.

The nervous tension in the air is stifling.

We’re all waiting—for an attack we aren’t even sure is coming, against an enemy we’ve never seen, using a weapon made of flowers.

And, despite the waiting, none of us are prepared when the radio at Dad’s shoulder crackles to life.

“We see them,” the solider on patrol says over the radio.

Dad shoots up immediately and rushes out of the building, binoculars already in his hand. He scans the forest, but I don’t need the binoculars to see the flashes of something emerging through the forest.

They’re coming.

I squint, trying my best to see them. They’re forest green from head to toe, so dark that they blend in with the trees. I don’t know if they’re made of dark green skin or if they’re wearing something to camouflage themselves. Flashes of gold gleam around their waists—scales, like the one Elder described. The aliens are tall, but no taller than Elder, with smooth, bulbous heads and a big round eye that flashes when it catches the sunlight.

“Get inside,” Dad orders. Over the radio he barks, “Prepare to light the fuse! Get the snipers on top of the buildings. This is it!”

I go inside, just like Dad said, but as soon as I reach my window, I lift up on the sill and jump out the other side of the building, just as I did when I snuck out to be with Elder. The thought of those nights makes me pause. If he were with me now like he was with me then, I don’t think my heart would be racing with so much fear.

I force myself to focus on what’s happening as I sneak around the wall. I’m not going to miss this.

I stick to the shadows in the corner, between the buildings and the mountain. The aliens creep closer. A part of me feared they’d be bug-like, crawling on the ground with spindly spider legs or slithering like a snake. But they walk with two legs and carry their weapons with two arms, just like us.

If we hadn’t been watching for them, we might have missed them—maybe that explains why we’ve never seen them before. Their skin seems to shift, turning a lighter shade of green as they wade through the tall grass of the meadow between the forest and our homes.

They stalk closer and closer. A couple dozen, maybe thirty. That’s all the troops they felt they needed against nearly a thousand of us. But they know—they must surely know—that of the thousand, only a handful are armed, and of those weapons, only a few bullets remain.

And then—I only see it because I am looking for it—a flash of light. The fuse is lit.

I hold my breath.

It works. The fuse flares brightly, and the fire catches quickly. Smoke wafts up and up, trailing through the sky, almost invisible.

This is it.

They’re close enough to be seen clearly now.

They reach the smoke.

And they walk right through it.

It does nothing.

My eyes widen with shock, but the military scattered throughout the colony don’t even hesitate. Pops of gunfire go off immediately—Dad’s snipers, from the roofs of the buildings. Not a single alien falls, despite the fact that enough bullets are raining down on them to stop an army. I stare at the aliens incredulously—how is this possible? Neither the smoke nor the bullets stop them?

There’s no way we can win this.

One of them lobs a glass bomb at the colony, and it shatters against the paving stones in the street, bringing down half the building I am standing beside with it. I can feel the rumbles through the stone as the mortar cracks and fails, the rocks tumbling down. If I’d still been inside, I would have been crushed.