With a burst of strength, my arms and legs pushed through the snow, swiping back and forth. The snow was powdery, not too wet or heavy, and I could soon tell by the feel that I’d made a perfect snow angel. My cheeks ached, and I realized I was smiling.
My flare of energy began to fade. My legs came to a quivering stop, my arms resting in the hollow of the angel’s wings. I gazed upward, the pink of the sky so bitingly clear it didn’t even look real.
Except...
Wait.
The sky wasn’t all clear.
Shit. Storm clouds?
I tipped my chin further up, driving my hood harder into the snow as I craned my neck back to better see. The sky over the valley beyond the hill looked... wrong. Darkening, as if with clouds. But it wasn’t clouds. Was it? No, it looked like...
Stone.
Anxious energy spiking into my limbs, I clambered onto my hands and knees and then stood. It was impossible. It made no fucking sense! But somehow, my instinct seemed right.
The sky was turning to stone. Right in front of me.
A dark grey, opaque oval hovered, somehow immune to gravity despite its rocky appearance.
Before I could even try to figure out what the fuck was happening, a thunderous boom so loud it made my skull ache crashed through the air. My breath caught in a stuttering gasp as the cause for the boom became clear.
The stone had cracked. A deep, dizzyingly dark chasm had opened up.
And something was coming out.
CHAPTER FIVE Torrance
Fuck. Fuck!
This couldn’t be real. And yet, it had to be. We’d gotten off way too easy on this alien planet so far. No alien hostiles, no weird viruses, no natural disasters the likes of which we’d never seen on Earth. Something had to give. Something had to eventually come and bite us in our arrogant, ignorant human asses.
And clearly, ass-biting time had come.
Gunfire cut through the air, the sound of it shocking me into movement. Just as something – a figure? – hauled itself fully out of the crack and dove through the sky, I spun and started running. As much as I could, anyway, with the snow clogging every step I took.
I didn’t get far. A catastrophic surge exploded through the ground, earthquake-like in its intensity. Like a goddamn meteor had just made contact. I couldn’t even cry out before I was flung forward, throttling through the air until I collided face-first with the ground. Thank God it’s winter. Without the deep, pillowy snow to cushion my landing, I definitely would have broken something. Probably my neck. As it was, I was mostly alright, aside from the fact that the wind had been knocked out of me. Having my face pressed into the snow didn’t help, and I fought to right myself. For one queasy heartbeat, I felt like I was in quicksand. Sinking and flailing.
I managed to get myself back to my feet. Disoriented, I looked all around, my head twisting this way and that. A cacophony of sound from the valley beyond the hill washed over me in violent and indecipherable waves. More gunfire? Explosions. And...
Engines revving up.
I didn’t have time to make sense of it all before I was forced into movement yet again. A riot of snow was pummeling down the hill towards me, a small avalanche spurred on by whatever force had thrown me down. My heart in my throat, I just barely managed to haul myself behind a tree when the snow hit, obliterating as a tsunami. I slammed my back against the tree, clutching at it through my gloves, as ferocious white sprayed in furious opaque sheets on either side. The tree trembled, and my eyes fell closed as I silently begged the huge crystal cone not to topple over onto me.
It felt like I was stuck there forever. Like the tidal wave of snow would never stop. Thankfully, it finally did slow, though. The snow on the hill hadn’t been terribly deep, but the hill was so huge, that it was still a massive volume coming at me. By the time I opened my eyes, the snow on either side of the tree had created drifts higher than my head. The avalanche had slowed but was still moving enough that I couldn’t safely leave.
But it turned out I couldn’t safely stay, either. The snow at the tops of the drifts on either side began to cave in, falling down around me. I blinked, and I was buried up to my waist.
Pure, animal fear gripped me.
I’m going to be buried alive.
I couldn’t even do anything to stop it. I tried to dig myself out, but more snow collapsed inward on me. Only a small crystal overhang on the tree above my head kept my upper body clear as everything fell inwards, walls of impenetrable white all around me. And still, the snow moved outside, adding to the walls, the weight, until I was completely encased.
Entombed.
Terror froze me more powerfully than the cold. I couldn’t move. Could barely breathe, and I doubted I’d even be able to do that for long, considering how fast the carbon dioxide would build up in my small bubble beneath the snow.
What do I do? Fuck! Think, Torrance!
What did I know about surviving an avalanche? Was I supposed to spit? I’d heard that, once. But then I remembered something about the spit helping you tell which way was up and which was down, which I already knew considering I was still standing upright. So that was fucking useless.
My hands were trapped against my sides, and I agonized over whether I should try to pull them free or not. Too much movement could make the snow above and ahead of me crash inwards into my bubble of air. But if I didn’t move, I’d die here.
I love you, Dad. But I’m not ready to join you just yet.
Slowly, carefully, I wiggled my fingers, trying to see what I was working with. Pain lanced up my injured wrist, but I ignored it. Man, I was stuck. Like, really, really stuck.
Panic threatened to overwhelm me. My heart beat so hard in my ears I barely caught the sound of voices. I held my breath, my eyes opening as wide as possible behind my goggles as if that would somehow help me hear better. I quickly decided that it wasn’t helping, and I closed them, focusing everything I had on the sound out beyond the snow.
Everything was muffled in here, but the voices were closer than the explosions and engine sounds beyond, and the people seemed to be shouting. I caught half-words and snippets screamed by a voice I knew well.
Min-Ji.
“Rance still ow air!”
Thank God. They must have been clear of the avalanche where they’d been working further along the hill. I should have stayed with them!
Then came another voice I knew. A voice I hated.