For a moment, I believed we might make it, we might survive this ordeal, but then a light in the pod started flashing yellow, and we slammed against something hard and the gel ripped around me. I crashed into someone soft, then into the wall, and then I finally passed out.
two
. . .
Emily
“She’s got a pulse.”
“Oh thank God. Emily, can you hear me?”
Something tapped my forehead, and I shook my head, trying to brush it off, but the tapping followed. I lifted my arm to knock it away. Bennet knew waking me up wouldn’t get him breakfast any sooner.
“Come on, Emily, no sleeping through the fun.”
Tap. Tap. Tap.
“Ground control to Major Emily. Wake up, sleeping beauty.”
I tried to inhale but choked instead, and someone forced me onto my side as I vomited up what felt like Jell-O.
I groaned and tried to roll over, but instead of being twisted up in blankets, it felt like fighting through mud. My head pounded worse than a hangover, and I just wanted the lights to turn off.
The voice came back with whispered intensity. “Listen here, Emily, you don’t get to die on me. You have to help me figure out how to keep these women alive out here because I refuse to be the leader of this nightmare.”
Slowly, so slowly, I cracked one eye open. Pink. A pink tracksuit and determined eyes filled my vision. Everything came back to me in a rush, and I carefully closed my eyes.
“Count me out, fearless leader. I think I choose death,” I said.
“Oh no, you don’t. Come on. Sit up.”
“Ouch.” I felt bruised all over, but that didn’t stop Jen from putting an arm under me and forcing me into a sitting position. The girl was strong, or at least very determined.
“Anything broken?” she asked.
“I don’t know, everything is spinning.”
“You’ll be okay.” She patted my shoulder and moved away.
Wincing, I forced myself to look at where we had landed. It was all dark and light blobs of purple and blue. I rubbed my eyes but almost gagged at the thick goo covering every part of me.
“Here, use this,” someone, Harper maybe, said and handed me a bundle of leafy fronds.
I carefully used them to remove as much goo from my face as I could before they were hopelessly coated. I blinked again, and this time the world was a little clearer. We were in a forest. Tall, dark trunks surrounded us, rising impossibly far into the air, with a dense canopy sheltering us from the sky. But everything seemed a little off. Could the goo be affecting my vision? The bark of the trees seemed deep indigo, and the canopy was definitely a purply blue. The trees were thick and all-encompassing, but the crash path of our pod left a clear trail of broken branches, destroyed trunks, and scarred earth, revealing a pastel purple sky.
Right. Alien world.
The escape pod we crashed in was behind me, cracked open like an egg, the goo and us women splattered out across the forest floor. Everyone seemed reasonably okay, if not disoriented and bruised. Jen and Cassy bent over Willow, whose face was screwed up in pain.
“This is going to hurt, okay?” Cassy said. Willow nodded, and then with a quick motion Cassy and Jen tugged hard on Willow’s leg. Willow let out a deep, guttural scream that ended in a shuddering inhale.
“I think it’s straight now. Just rest, okay?” Cassy said.
Jen turned from Willow and wiped the grimace off her face as she observed the others. We made eye contact and I offered her a small smile. She nodded and straightened her face smoothing back into that determined look I was learning to expect from her.
“Okay, ladies. Water, food, and shelter. Those are our priorities, but water above all else. We won’t last long out here unless we find it.” She glanced around. “Let’s use the pod’s crash trail as our north point.” She pointed 90-degrees clockwise. “That makes that east, south, and west. Anyone who can walk, pair up and we’ll scout for water, okay? Break branches or leave torn ferns in your path so you can find your way back. Harper, you’re with me. We’ll head east. Who’s going north?”
There was a long silence. Jen met my eyes with something that looked like pleading.