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“What do you make of it?” Jade asked.
“Honestly, I’ve been trying really hard not to look down,” Ella admitted. “Or up. Or side to side.”
“I don’t like it,” Jade said, her mouth forming a straight line.
Ella opened her own mouth to ask her why, but never got to voice the question.
Without warning, they began to drop out of the sky, the sudden descent putting Ella’s heart in her throat, and stifling any thought of conversation.
Her eyes moved to the top of the craft, where the two pilots, of a race she had never seen before, were yelling and gesticulating with their short tentacles.
They didn’t, or maybe just wouldn’t, speak Universal, so whether they were screaming in excitement or panic, or this was just the natural pitch and delivery of their language, Ella didn’t know.
Meanwhile, it felt like she was being turned inside-out as they plummeted toward the ground.
She closed her eyes and pictured her littlest sister, Taria. Taria’s dark hair and large blue eyes made her like a tiny copy of Ella. She envisioned Taria with a full plate of warm food in front of her, a smile on her sweet face, the pink back in her thin cheeks.
Whatever happens to me, it’s worth it.
The agency had already begrudgingly sent half of her first month’s stipend back home to Terra-13 for her. The woman in Accounting didn’t like it, but the contract didn’t technically state that Ella had to use all of that money for herself and her new baby.
And how could she put the well-being of a baby she had never met in front of the little sister she had dropped out of school to raise?
I would have sent for her, for all of them, she thought to herself as she hurtled toward certain death.
The sound of the crash and the impact jarred her senses to the point that she couldn’t even scream. They bumped along for a moment or two, then the whole contraption came to a rest.
In the ensuing silence, she became aware of the pilots’ voices. They sounded no more or less agitated than before.
She opened her eyes and saw that the glass was all intact.
Was that how this thing was supposed to land?
It is time to de-board, a voice in her chip announced.
“No decontamination protocol,” Jade said. “I don’t like it.”
“What would that mean?” Kinsley asked. “Why would there be a decontamination protocol?”
“It would mean that there was something on this moon worth protecting,” Jade said flatly.
The pouches released all at once, dropping them to the floor as Jade’s foreboding words still echoed in the air.
One of the glassy panels opened with a hiss, letting in a blast of frigid air. A ramp extended out onto the moon, and the pilots gestured emphatically for them to leave.
Normally, Jade was the bravest of the three, but since Ella was closest to the ramp, she ventured down first.
The pilots screamed at her again, using their tentacles to indicate something hanging on the wall.
Three pairs of fur-lined boots and three fur cloaks hung from magnetic hooks.
She slipped out of her shoes and pulled on the boots, then the cloak.
An oubliette opened beside her, and she gladly dropped her old shoes in. Why the agency had dressed a trio of women headed to a frontier moon in low-cut lavender gowns and velvet slippers, she would never understand. At least the boots and cloak would keep them warm.
Already, the cold outside was sinking into her bones, making her forget she had just been flushed and overheated. She wondered if she would ever take the fur lined boots off again
“Cute,” Kinsley said, breaking the tension as she approached the ramp. “You look like one of the snow people in the book about Old Earth.”
