Page 92 of Shades of Earth (Across the Universe 3)

A knocking sound diverts my attention. Bang! Bang! Bang! People in the transport boxes beat against the plastic sealing them inside.

Horror washes over me.

The transport boxes jump on their tracks as the people inside shake and pound at the plastic, trying to get out.

My face whips around to Mom. Her mouth is hanging open oddly, as if she no longer has control of her facial muscles. Her eyes are staring straight ahead. Empty.

“Something’s wrong!” I scream, running forward. “There’s something wrong with the air!”

Dad’s cursing, trying to make the controls work, but that little red light just keeps flashing, and the gas—the gas that I fear is not oxygen at all—is whooshing inside the sealed transport boxes.

I hurtle myself against Mom’s transport box with all my might. The plastic bends but doesn’t break, doesn’t unseal. “Open the boxes!” I scream. “Open them all! It’s poison!”

“I can’t! I can’t!” Dad shouts, pounding against the control and cursing.

I use all my strength to pull against the box door. My fingernails break off, but I don’t care. I can’t get it open, my mom’s inside, and she might already be—

A loud hiss erupts from the boxes, and all five hundred open at the same time.

“Mom!” I scream as a wave of the gas that had been inside the transport box washes over me. I collapse, dimly aware of my senses deadening. Dad rushes to me, picks my head up from the ground. Elder’s on my other side.

“Amy? Amy?” Dad asks, shouting in my face, but the gas has made me frozen.

I can’t move.

Everything seems so

slow.

I’ve felt this before.

Like living underwater.

The sky is so blue.

Daddy. Daddy yells at me.

I wonder why.

There’s Mommy.

She’s quiet.

Still.

50: ELDER

Screams and shouts erupt around us as people rush to the transport boxes, trying to save the people strapped down.

But it’s too late.

They’re all already dead.

I don’t need a sample of the gas to know that it was a high concentration of Phydus that killed them—and since the lab in the original shuttle is gone, we couldn’t test a sample anyway. But Amy’s reaction tells me all I need to know. I kneel beside her. In my head, I know there’s nothing to do but wait for the effects to wear off. But my whole body is shaking with fear. She could have been inside one of the transport boxes. She could have been . . . I taste bile and swallow it down. I can’t break down because of what might have been.

Colonel Martin checks Amy’s mother’s vital signs before collapsing at her feet, but it’s as I feared. She’s gone. Her mouth and eyes are open, as if she were screaming, but it’s too late. She’s dead, the same way Eldest died and Lorin—an overdose of Phydus.

Any doubt that the aliens on this planet have access to Phydus and know what it does evaporates.