The hum became a piercing wail, punctuated by a sickening crush. Clarke opened her eyes and saw that the windows had cracked and were no longer full of gray.
They were full of flames.
Bits of white-hot metal began raining down on them. Clarke raised her arms to protect her head, but she could still feel the debris scorching her neck.
The dropship shook even harder, and with a roar, part of the ceiling tore off. There was a deafening crash followed by a thud that sent ripples of pain through every bone in her body.
As suddenly as it began, it was all over.
The cabin was dark and silent. Smoke billowed out of a hole where the control panel had been, and the air grew thick with the smell of melting metal, sweat, and blood.
Clarke winced as she wiggled her fingers and toes. It hurt, but nothing seemed to be broken. She unhooked her harness and rose shakily to her feet, holding on to the scorched seat for balance.
Most people were still strapped in, but a few were slumped over the sides or sprawled on the floor. Clarke squinted as she scanned the rows for Thalia, her heart speeding up each time her eyes landed on another empty seat. A terrifying realization cut through the confusion in Clarke’s mind. Some of the passengers had been thrown outside during the crash.
Clarke limped forward, gritting her teeth at the pain that shot up her leg. She reached the door and pulled as hard as she could. She took a deep breath and slipped through the opening.
For a moment, she was aware of only colors, not shapes. Stripes of blue, green, and brown so vibrant her brain couldn’t process them. A gust of wind passed over her, making her skin tingle and flooding her nose with scents Clarke couldn’t begin to identify. At first, all she could see were the trees. There were hundreds of themhitreds of, as if every tree on the planet had come to welcome them back to Earth. Their enormous branches were lifted in celebration toward the sky, which was a joyful blue. The ground stretched out in all directions—ten times farther than the longest deck on the ship. The amount of space was almost inconceivable, and Clarke suddenly felt light-headed, as if she were about to float away.
She became vaguely aware of voices behind her and turned to see a few of the others emerge from the dropship. “It’s beautiful,” a dark-skinned girl whispered as she reached down to run her trembling hand along the shiny green blades of grass.
A short, stocky boy took a few shaky steps forward. The gravitational pull on the Colony was meant to mimic Earth’s, but faced with the real thing it was clear they hadn’t gotten it quite right. “Everything’s fine,” the boy said, his voice a mixture of relief and confusion. “We could’ve come back ages ago.”
“You don’t know that,” the girl replied. “Just because we can breathe now, doesn’t mean the air isn’t toxic.” She twisted around to face him and held her wrist up, gesturing with her bracelet. “The Council didn’t give us these as jewelry. They want to see what happens to us.”
A smaller girl hovering next to the dropship whimpered as she pulled her jacket up over her mouth.
“You can breathe normally,” Clarke told her, looking around to see if Thalia had emerged yet. She wished she had something more reassuring to say, but there was no way to tell how much radiation was still in the atmosphere. All they could do was wait and hope. “We’ll be back soon,” her father said as he slipped his long arms into a suit jacket Clarke had never seen before. He walked over to the couch where she was curled up with her tablet and ruffled her hair. “Don’t stay out too late. They’ve been strict about curfew lately. Some trouble on Walden, I think.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Clarke said, gesturing toward her bare feet and the surgical pants she wore to sleep. For the most famous scientist in the Colony, her father’s deductive reasoning left something to be desired. Although he spent so much time wrapped up in his research, it was unlikely he’d even know that scrubs weren’t currently considered high fashion among sixteen-year-old girls.
“Either way, it’d be best if you stayed out of the lab,” he said with calculated carelessness, as if the thought had only just crossed his mind. In fact, he’d said this about five times a day since they’d moved into their new flat. The Council had approved their request for a customized private laboratory, as her parents’ new project required them to monitor experiments throughout the night.
“I promise,” Clarke told them with exaggerated patience.
“It’s just that it’s dangerous to get near the radioactive materials,” her mother called out from where she stood in front of the mirror, fixing her hair. “Especially without the proper equipment.”
Clarke repeated her promise until they left and she was finally able to return to her tablet, though she couldn’t help wondering idly what Glass and her friends would say if they knew that Clarke was spending Friday night working on an essay. Clarke was normally indifferent toward her Earth Literatures tutorial, but this assignment had piquew ent haded her interest. Instead of another predictable paper on the changing view of nature in pre-Cataclysmic poetry, their tutor had asked them to compare and contrast the vampire crazes in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.
Yet while the reading was interesting, she must have dozed off at some point, because when she sat up, the circadian lights had dimmed and the living space was a jumble of unfamiliar shadows. She stood up and was about to head to her bedroom when a strange sound pierced the silence. Clarke froze. It almost sounded like screaming. She forced herself to take a deep breath. She should have known better than to read about vampires before bed.
Clarke turned around and started walking down the hallway, but then another sound rang out—a shriek that sent shivers down her spine.
Stop it, Clarke scolded herself. She’d never make it as a doctor if she let her mind play tricks on her. She was just unsettled by the unfamiliar darkness in the new flat. In the morning, everything would be back to normal. Clarke waved her palm across the sensor on her bedroom door and was about to step inside when she heard it again—an anguished moan.
Her heart thumping, Clarke spun around and walked down the long hallway that led to the lab. Instead of a retinal scanner, there was a keypad. Clarke brushed her fingers over the panel, briefly wondering if she’d be able to guess the password, then crouched down and pressed her ear to the door.
The door vibrated as another sound buzzed through Clarke’s ear. Her breath caught in her throat. That’s impossible. But when the sound came again, it was even clearer.
It wasn’t just a scream of anguish. It was a word.
“Please.”
Clarke’s fingers flew over the keypad as she entered the first thing that came to her head: Pangea. It was the code her mother used for her protected files. The screen beeped and an error message appeared. Next she entered Elysium, the name of the mythical underground city where, according to bedtime stories parents told their children, humans took refuge after the Cataclysm. Another error. Clarke tore through her memory, searching for words she’d filed away. Her fingers hovered above the keypad. Lucy. The name of the oldest hominid remains Earthborn archaeologists ever discovered. There was a series of low beeps, and the door slid open.
The lab was much bigger than she’d imagined, larger than their entire flat, and filled with rows of narrow beds like in the hospital.