Page 4 of Shades of Earth (Across the Universe 3)

“Eighty kilometers above surface,” the computer says. “Active deceleration initiated. ”

Several of the lights blink out, and the shuttle seems to drop—or maybe it’s just that gravity kicks back in, slamming us into our chairs fully. Amy screams, a short burst of sound that is nothing but vocalized terror.

Something—a rocket failing? a computer malfunction?—knocks the shuttle off course again. I can see features of the planet’s surface now: mountains and lakes and cliffs.

And we’re going to crash into them.

3: AMY

I’ve heard that when you’re in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you’re hyper-aware of what’s happening around you.

As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me.

Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren’t bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder’s cursing, my pounding heartbeat.

I feel nothing—not the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb.

Scent and taste disappear.

The only thing about my body that works is my eyes, and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land—a continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home.

My eyes drink up the image of the planet—and my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I’ve never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent—it dips and curves in ways I don’t recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect.

And it’s not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home, but it will never be the home I left behind.

“Frex, frex, frex!” Elder shouts, pulling so hard against the steering wheel that the veins on his neck pop out.

I swallow dryly—this is no time to be sentimental. “What should we do?” I shout back over the sound of beepings and alarms from the control panel.

“I don’t know; I don’t frexing know!”

A yellowish-brown cliff looms high, seemingly parallel to the shuttle, and it isn’t until we pass over it that I realize we aren’t going to crash into it.

“Ground impact in T minus five minutes, shuttle off course from initial landing sequence,” the computer says in a perfectly bland voice, and I wish it was a person so I could punch it.

“Are we going to crash?” I gasp, ripping my gaze from the image through the honeycombed glass window to face Elder.

Elder’s pale and his face is tight. He shakes his head, and I know he doesn’t mean, “No, we’re not going to crash. ” He means, “I don’t know, we might. ”

My eyes dart to a circular screen on the control panel—it shows a horizon line that dips and spins chaotically.

A lit button near me flashes, and I read the words engraved onto it: STABILIZER. That sounds good? I don’t know—but Elder’s straining to keep the ship steady, and it can’t hurt, and I don’t know if I should, but—I push it.

The horizon dips all the way down, then all the way up, jerking me around like some sort of sick combination of a roller coaster and the whirling teacup ride at Disney World. Indicator lights show us tiny rockets that are bursting at the bottom of the ship, making us even out until the entire shuttle steadies and slows.

“What the—” Elder starts, but he’s cut off when the rockets sputter, and we drop straight out of the sky.

I scream as we plummet toward the earth.

Elder slams his fist against one set of controls, then another. We’re dropping so quickly that the image outside the windows blurs and all I can see is murky colors smeared together.

The horizon dips again as Elder’s button-pushing works—and then fails—and we’re crashing down, down. Rockets flare, casting red-yellow streams of fire around us—

“Ground sensors feedback: suitable landing site,” the computer says over the sound of the alarms. “Initiate landing rockets, yes or no?”

The green Y and the red N light up again.

“Push it!” I shout as Elder slams his fist against the Y.