Page 7 of Shades of Earth (Across the Universe 3)

In Kit’s hands, I can see square, pale green patches. Phydus.

“No,” I say, the word a command. Phydus was a part of Godspeed; it drugged us into submission for centuries. It has no p

lace here; it has no place in any world without walls or lies.

Kit opens her mouth to protest, but she must see something of Eldest in the way I stand now, because she silently puts the Phydus patches back in her pocket.

“Amy,” I bark over my shoulder.

“In a minute,” she calls back, breathless, her eyes still on her frozen parents.

“Amy,” I order.

She looks up at me, hurt in her eyes.

“We need help. ”

“In a minute,” she says again.

“Now. ”

I can tell from the venomous look she shoots me that she can see something of Eldest in me now too.

But she leaves the cryo chambers and approaches us. Her sullen attitude changes as she notices the injured around us, seemingly for the first time. “What can I do to help?” she asks, her voice sincere.

Behind her, the cryo chambers drip as the ice melts.

5: AMY

Kit makes me watch as she gives a man stitches over a gash in his leg. “What’s your name?” I ask, trying to distract both the man and myself from the amount of blood pumping past his knee.

“Heller,” he grunts. He’s in the middle-aged generation of people from Godspeed, but while most of the others who are forty are starting to show the frailty of age, Heller looks as if his bones are made of steel and his skin is leather. He looks down at his wound in disdain, as if mad that his body should betray him with any weakness.

“What happened, Heller?” I don’t want to watch the way Kit pulls the surgical thread tight through his flesh, oddly pale with spots of red blood. My eyes dart to the melting cryo boxes, and I force myself to pay attention to the injured man before me. I’ve let myself be distracted too much already.

“Frex if I know,” he growls. “I was sitting there, all trussed up, and a sheet of metal slid over my leg, sliced it right open. ”

“The door to one of the rabbit hatches broke,” Kit says, tugging the surgical thread tight. “It got several of the others too. ”

“What happened to the rabbits?”

Kit jerks her head to the wall near the gen lab. A dozen bright red-and-white splotches dot the gray metal wall. I swallow back the bile rising in my throat.

“Did you see that?” Kit asks me, tying a knot around the stitch. “See how I did it?”

“Just like sewing cloth,” I say. Not that I’ve sewed much in my life, but I had to learn how to hem my pants on the ship.

“Exactly like it. ” She hands me the needle and surgical thread. “Now go do the next person’s. ”

“You want me to stitch someone?”

Kit nods.

“What about that foam stuff?” I ask, thinking of the last time I was here, the time Doc shot me, and how Kit squirted foam into my wound and sealed it up better than stitches or any bandage could.

“We don’t have much. We should save it for emergencies. ”

“This is an emergency!”