Brightly Burning(90)
“And if he hadn’t shown up?” a woman sitting next to Jon asked. I realized with a start that it was the security guard, Meredith.
“You’d probably be praying harder,” Jon joked.
And then, suddenly, I was pushed back in my seat by the gentle pressure of acceleration. My stomach did a little flip, and I had to shove down my grief and confusion, for there was only speed and pressure and the exhilarating terror of reentry. We moved faster, harder. We broke atmosphere, and the moment was reduced to nothing but heat, pressure, panic. The extreme forces of gravity pressed my body down and back simultaneously, while the friction produced as we hit drag and slowed boiled the air. I sucked in gulps of hot, soupy air and kept my eyes closed; I didn’t want to know if we encountered an issue, see the ship burn too bright, break apart. The darkness behind my eyelids provided my only solace, as the angry roar in my ears, the insistent weight of gravity, provided none.
Someone was screaming. Someone else crying. I heard Jon spit a curse, and just like that, I was laughing. It was, frankly, rather hilarious that we were hurtling to Earth with nothing but a thin layer of metal and faith in some heat-shielding between us and certain death. Anyway, the laughing kept me from full-scale panic.
Suddenly we jerked backwards, then slowed. The parachute had deployed. The worst of it was over. All around me, I heard sighs of relief, and the screaming finally stopped. I cracked open one eye, then the other, and didn’t perceive anything on fire or ripped open. We seemed to coast forever; I tried counting the seconds, but the numbers crept too high, into more minutes than I wished to mark.
The ground came quickly and hard, our harnesses holding us fast as we bounced once, twice, the whole ship shuddering as it dragged to a stop. Then we were pitched into darkness. The heavy breathing of those around me, coupled with the thudding of my own heart, played a soundtrack to the dark. The song lasted only about a minute. As the lights flickered back on, the low glow of emergency lights hummed in rhythm as we snapped out of our harnesses.
We waited for the captain to check in on comms, but no such update came.
“I’m going to go check on Sergei,” a familiar voice said, one row over. Xiao! I felt a flare of happiness, but tamped it down quickly. Now it was imperative to assess, and act. Reunion could come later. My grief would wait too.
“Jon, can you go with her? I’ll get everyone out.” I gave Jon an assuring nod. I could handle myself now.
We parted ways accordingly, a hundred weary souls following along behind me like ducklings. The Ingram’s emergency lights were red, casting everything in a sanguine tone, and as I keyed in the open-airlock command on the tab-screen console, it looked as if my hand was bathed in blood. Peering through the glass of the outer bay window, I watched the airlock doors open to reveal something I had never seen before: natural light. We’d gone from night up above to day down below.
We walked gingerly through the hold, careful not to trip over the few boxes that had come untethered during the flight, and I tasted cold. I stood on the precipice of the open hold door and the outside, closing my eyes, breathing in deeply. I tried to put my finger on it, but it was indescribable. I didn’t yet have the vocabulary for this place.
There was a six-to eight-foot drop down to the ground—?another foreign concept—?but luckily one of the taller boys alighted first, then caught me when I jumped. The ground was solid but not too hard. There was a springiness to it; I crouched down and touched my fingers to it. The soil was damp. Not frozen. Several of the fieldworkers were making similar investigations, already getting to work in determining whether we could farm.
Despite the thinness of my clothes, I was not too chilled: the moisture-wicking fabric insulated my arms and legs; only my ears and nose were in want of something to cover them. And yet, the discomfort was only enough that I felt mild annoyance. A surge of joy provided momentary warmth: it was not too cold. This was survivable.
I walked away from the shadow of the Ingram, and the human ducklings who seemed to cling fast to my steps, until it no longer loomed large behind me. I ran my fingers through tall stalks of grass, doing a turn to survey my surroundings. On our right was a copse of trees, scraggly and thin, and all around was the unruly grass, alternately green with patches gold and brown. In the distance, mountains. I stood in awe of them, more magnificent than anything I’d ever imagined, let alone rendered with my stylus: towering like gods cloaked in purple and white.
“Stella!” Jon’s voice rang through the field, and I whipped around to see him jogging toward me. “He’s alive,” he panted as he came to a stop, catching his breath.
“Who, Hugo? You found him?” Frantically I peered in the direction Jon had come from, back to the ship, expecting him to appear any moment.
“No, George,” Jon corrected. “Lori connected with the Stalwart as soon as we landed. My uncle messaged right away.”
“Really?” Everything slowed down, my senses blurring, grief turning to happiness in an instant. “He’s going to be okay?”
“My uncle says it’s not pretty, but they were able to stop the bleeding. He’s in surgery now.”
I pulled Jon into a hug, crying happy tears into his shoulder. I heard him sniffle a few times too, the big old softy.
“Can you believe this place?” he asked as we pulled apart. Then he glanced down at me, brow furrowing. “You’re covered in blood.”